Brad Fulton is an expert on the social, political, and economic impact of foundations and community-based organizations. He founded and directs The Philanthropy Lab, which is analyzing data on 200,000 foundations, 1 million nonprofits, and 10 million grants to construct a foundation-grantee network of the entire U.S. nonprofit sector. This first-of-its-kind, longitudinal network dataset spanning the past 10 years is helping researchers, practitioners, and policymakers track the sources and distribution of philanthropic funding and assess its impact.
Fulton co-directs the Observing Civic Engagement (OCE) Lab—a multi-city research program that applies systematic social observation (an innovative data collection technique) to organizational settings. This method gathers detailed information about organizations’ internal dynamics at a relatively large scale by using multiple trained observers and carefully constructed protocols to collect rich, comparable data from several observable settings. The OCE Lab has trained 62 research assistants and observed over 2,000 convenings.
Fulton also directs the National Study of Community Organizing—a multi-level study that examines the causes and consequences of racial, socioeconomic, and religious diversity within grassroots advocacy organizations, and he co-directs the National Study of Congregations’ Economic Practices—a multimethod study that analyzes how religious congregations receive, manage, and spend their financial resources.
Fulton has extensive experience designing and implementing large-scale studies, and his collaborators for applied research projects include the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Federal Reserve Bank, Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement, and Appalachia Funders Network.
To fund his research projects, Fulton has raised $8.6 million in external funding from funders, including the National Science Foundation, AmeriCorps, Lilly Endowment, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, Kellogg Foundation, Mott Foundation, and Hearst Foundation.
To advance these research projects, Fulton has built and developed multiple research teams totaling 132 research assistants (4 Postdocs, 20 PhD students, 66 MA students, and 42 undergraduates).
Among Fulton’s publications are the award-winning book A Shared Future (UChicago Press), a chapter in the Nonprofit Sector Research Handbook, and articles published in journals including the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Problems, NVSQ, Nonprofit Management & Leadership, and Voluntas. Fulton’s research has received 18 international awards from academic associations spanning six disciplines and is regularly covered by media outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Chronicle of Philanthropy.
Fulton is also the producer and host of three podcasts: Diversity and Inequality, Nonprofit Management & Leadership, and Statistics Made Simple. His episodes have been streamed over 250,000 times by people from 147 different countries. Fulton’s statistics podcast consistently ranks in the top 100 among all social science podcasts and is the highest-ranked statistics podcast in the world.
Fulton earned degrees from U.C. Berkeley, University of Chicago, and Duke University, and he joined O’Neill as an assistant professor in 2015. Fulton has served as an editorial board member for the American Journal of Sociology, Sociology of Religion, and Social Service Review. He has also served as a fellow with the Aspen Institute, an academic research partner for GivingTuesday, and an academic ambassador for Tableau.
