Advancing Nonprofit Management

"Advancing Nonprofit Management: Innovations, Challenges and Best Practices" is a Reprint of a Special Issue in Administrative Sciences. It includes an introduction looking broadly at the field and eight articles examining specific innovations. Nonprofits operate in diverse environments, sometimes with clear boundaries and accountabilities and other times in ways that blur with other institutions' goals, actions, and outcomes. Over the past decade, many nonprofits have implemented new practices, processes, and structures that raise questions about how management innovations emerge, diffuse, and shape performance. The Reprint helps answer these questions by featuring nonprofit organizations (NGOs) that play a central, sometimes collaborative, role in tackling social issues, shaping priorities, delivering services, and addressing needs.

The Reprint highlights planned and unplanned innovations ranging from radical to incremental. The authors explore management-level and worker-led innovations, such as how nonprofits mobilize human, financial, technological, and other resources to fulfill their mission. They examine the positive and negative consequences of processes and outcomes of innovation, considering strategic decisions, sustainability, collaboration, and ethics. The Reprint provides insights and recommendations relevant to scholars, practitioners, funders, and policymakers concerned with nonprofit organization practices and effectiveness.