Nonprofit Fiscal Sponsorship: How Capacity Shapes Coordination and Cooperation

Fiscal sponsorship is a growing mode of nonprofit program delivery, yet theory treats it as a uniform interorganizational relationship. Drawing on Castañer and Oliveira’s distinction between coordination and cooperation, we argue that sponsorship models occupy different positions on a coordination–cooperation continuum, and these positions demand different capacities. We assemble a novel dataset linking the Fiscal Sponsor Directory to 2022 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 990 filings and estimate count and logistic regression models. Results show that organizational maturity predicts consolidation into fewer models without a contraction of services, while revenue scale predicts deeper service provision without a wider model portfolio. Arts sponsors are less likely to operate the Direct Project model, indicating that field membership rather than capacity distinguishes cooperators. Conventional capacity slack- and diversification-based measures do not predict continuum position. Overall, fiscal sponsorship supports multiple stable organizational forms, and funders and policymakers should consider sponsor capacity relative to the model(s) they operate.