To truly succeed, a nonprofit needs to be financially stable, with a passionate volunteer base, and committed and strong leadership – among other things.
Nonprofit Management Techniques that Ensure Success
Improving the management of non-profit organizations (eliminating the inconsistency of the management system with the new conditions) should imply the achievement of a level of management that:
- would be the most acceptable in the conditions of modern market relations characterized by increased instability and uncertainty of the external environment, tougher competition, increased integration processes, the complication of information flows, and the inability to predict long-term trends with a sufficient degree of accuracy;
- comply with the latest scientific advice as closely as possible;
- would contribute to the comprehensive achievement of the statutory intangible goals of non-profit organizations that are intangible in nature.
The modern management concept unambiguously indicates that scientific strategic management (strategic market management) corresponds most fully to these requirements since it is this type of management “by objectives” that is based on a modern marketing (market) approach to management and, at the same time, on an integrated application of the achievements of the general theory of management and non-profit management.
At the same time, strategic management is understood as a set of not only strategic management decisions that determine the long-term development of the organization but also specific actions that ensure quick response of the organization to changes in the external environment, which may entail the need for strategic maneuver and adjustments to the general direction of development.
In other words, nonprofit management strategies in practice should be management consisting of two complementary subsystems: analysis and selection of the strategic position of the organization and operational management in real-time. Unlike strategic planning, strategic management is an efficiently oriented system that includes the process of developing, implementing a strategy, as well as evaluating and monitoring it.
Strategic Management of Nonprofit Organization
In addition, strategic management also means that the nature of management should be proactive and not reactive, meaning not just responding to events in the external environment and adapting to these changes, but also actively influencing environmental factors to create a more favorable situation for the organization. It should be especially noted that the management mechanism of a non-profit organization in modern conditions is determined by its constituent documents.
The need to use strategic management in the process of improving the management of the activities of non-profit organizations, in addition to the current general trend of transition to strategic management inherent in all organizations in the world, also takes into account the specific feature of non-profit organizations themselves: their greater (compared to commercial organizations) dependence on the external environment, so the goals of the statutory activities and sources of additional benefits for NPOs (attracting volunteers, receiving grants, charitable assistance, etc.) are in most cases external in nature.
At the same time, the strategic management of non-profit organizations differs significantly from the strategic management of commercial organizations, since the purpose of non-profit organizations (mission and other goals) is rigidly fixed in the constituent documents of the non-profit organization and does not change freely, as is the case with business organizations.
Consequently, strategic management for non-profit organizations, in contrast to the classical version of strategic management, begins not with the formation of the mission and other goals of the organization (since they are actually set in an already operating organization), but with external analysis. The sequence and content of the remaining stages of strategic management (internal analysis, strategy development, its implementation, assessment, and control) are not subject to change.