Good News—We Know Even More About Nonprofit Collaboration: A Systematic Review of Communicative Nonprofit Collaboration Literature

ABSTRACT Inter‐organizational collaboration is a well‐established subject in the nonprofit research literature, with hundreds of journal articles, scholarly texts, and academic conference proceedings published since 2000. Consequently, a handful of prominent review articles have helped synthesize this literature, including Gazley and Gou's award‐winning article in this journal. However, their study only reviewed articles up to 2015, affording an opportunity for subsequent review work to expand our understanding of nonprofit collaboration. We take the caveats and qualifications of Gazley and Gou's review as points of departure for our work. Specifically, we identify communication scholarship on nonprofit collaboration as a notable line of nonprofit collaboration research that to date has largely been overlooked by nonprofit scholars but now has reached a level of critical mass and impact. We aim to accomplish four goals in this review article: (1) familiarize nonprofit scholars with the distinct aspects of communication scholarship, (2) provide the most comprehensive review to date of communication nonprofit collaboration research, (3) address some of the limitations of Gazley and Guo's review and advance their work by demonstrating how communication scholarship responds to some of the things called for in their article—specifically their calls for more research on collaboration processes, design, and practitioner guidance, and (4) explain what communication scholarship contributes to our understanding of nonprofit collaboration, thereby substantiating our claim of good news—that we know even more about nonprofit collaboration to inform our current and future endeavors in research and practice.