A Study on the Effects of Non-profit Organizations' Service Quality on the Sponsor Loyalty
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Kim Jun-Whai 
Published: June 2018

In a non-profit organization, it is very important to keep the relationship with supporters for organization activities to be carried out efficiently. Financial supports and sponsor volunteer services in a non-profit organization are considered to be provided by the loyalty made by keeping the continual relationship with supporter organizations. But in spite of this importance, non-profit organizations in Korea don't manage supporters systematically at all, and don't have interests in and don't study the service quality which can strengthen the sponsor loyalty. This research is about the sponsor loyalty to non-profit organizations, and aims at finding out what relationship the service quality of an organization has with its performances and sponsor loyalty. In order to increase the service quality of non-profit organizations, service evaluations and measurements are needed, and the tools to measure such a quality level efficiently are needed. In this context, the measuring tools of the quality level and the measurement itself are meaningful.
In the perspective of business management, there are cases where measuring tools such as SERVQUAL and SERVPERF as the evaluating and weighing measures of customer-care services were empirically proven. But in studies of non-profit organizations, there were researches about local residents' needs or management evaluations about institutions, yet there wasn't any study on the measurement or evaluation of service itself. In addition, there was no example where ‘services' were measured as weighing measures such as SERVQUAL and SERVPERF.
Therefore, the purposes of this research are to clarify the deciding element of provided service quality, focusing on non-profit organizations, and to find out which one of service quality elements has influences on organization performances and sponsor loyalty, and which influence the organization performances have on the sponsor loyalty and support-continuing intention. The result got by examining 348 supporters for non-profit organizations shows that service quality elements(tangibles, reliability, assurance and empathy) have some influences on organization performances and sponsor loyalty. The researches until now showed that the service quality has influence on organization productivity and customers' loyalty in only profit-making companies, but this research shows that the serviced quality has influence on organization productivity and sponsor loyalty even in non-profit organizations.
Accordingly, in order to strengthen the sponsor loyalty and support-continuing intention, non-profit organizations also need to try to have interests in the service quality and to improve it. But as service-receivers and supporters are different, there are problems such as on whom the services are mainly provided, and whom the services satisfy, and so the supporters-centered service quality improvement may cause indifference to the service-receivers or may decrease its importance in non-profit organizations. For that reason, the service quality for supporters and the service quality for service-receivers should be examined in different dimensions. The limit of this research is that, as the study on the service quality of non-profit organizations was carried out focusing on supporters, any service quality research on the service-receivers from non-profit organizations wasn't performed. Therefore later studies need to research focusing on service-receivers, and to examine the relationship among supporters, service quality, performances, and support-continuing intention based on these results.
<Table 2> is the results of proving 5 assumptions, which shows that four major elements of service quality have influences on organization productivity, sponsor loyalty, and support-continuing intension.