Development of the Third Sector: Social Activity Management

Social activity is a catalyst for the development of civil society, the nonprofit sector (the third sector), and the commercial sector, as well as the basis for the development of a legislative, economic initiative. In the modern society, the civic activity is accumulated in the third sector, and has a wide variety of forms, while for the traditional society, such tools as political parties and trade unions were sufficient. Social tasks solved within the third sector set the vector and dynamics of citizens’ activity and make it constructive. The social activity of the population depends on the impact of two groups of factors: objective (the population’s income level, the level of unemployment, the state of the infrastructure and regulatory framework, etc.) and subjective (the level of the population’s trust in socially-oriented nonprofit organizations, attitude of the local population to the activities of public organizations, etc.). In order to obtain empirical knowledge about forms of social activity in the Russian Federation (through the example of the Volgograd Region), tools for assessing the population’s awareness of modern types of social participation have been developed, and the readiness of actors for charitable and volunteer activity has been measured. The research tools have been tested through the example of the Volgograd Region of the Russian Federation. According to the research results, problem zones have been identified, technologies of social activity development have been structured, which has made it possible to identify the vector of social activity in the Volgograd Region of the Russian Federation and conclude that objective conditions do not allow increasing the efficiency of socially-oriented nonprofit organizations.