Abstract
The strategies that non-profit organizations choose for volunteer engagement and financial sustainability are of the utmost importance for successful work. The main purpose of this study was to investigate feasible strategies for volunteer engagement and financial sustainability. Interviews were conducted to obtain data on the experience of volunteer managers in dealing with volunteers and financial matters together. Qualitative data analysis methods were used to code and analyze the data. Significant themes emerged from the data gathered through interviews that highlighted the strategies for volunteer engagement and financial sustainability chosen by the managers of non-profit organizations. From the manager’s perspective, the following strategies were considered important for engaging volunteers at non-profit organizations (NPOs): ‘building the skill sets of volunteers’, ‘fulfilling ulterior motives’, and ‘administering a culture of administrative support’. Moreover, ‘local fundraising preference’, ‘transparency’, and ‘building trust’ were regarded as successful strategies for maintaining financial sustainability. The findings of this study showed that, to function smoothly, non-profit organizations need to follow certain strategies to be cautious about volunteers as well as finance. The findings provide fruitful implications for practitioners and policy makers, and these are discussed in the paper. Furthermore, the limitations addressed in the study suggest a future direction for research in terms of study design and more focus on study informants.
Highlights
The survival of non-profit organizations has been identified as an important prerequisite for measuring their success in terms of the realization of their mission (Sun et al 2019).The determinants of non-profit success have long been a focus of the literature on strategic management.One stream of research comprehends the success and failure of NPOs as a dependent variable, whose financial and non-financial determinants can be identified through case study methods or statistical techniques (Grunert and Hildebrandt 2004; Mellahi and Wilkinson 2004).Economies 2020, 8, 101; doi:10.3390/economies8040101 www.mdpi.com/journal/economies
The seeking of fundraising from volunteers is prone to a spillover cost that may result in a reduction of their time with NPOs (Yeomans and Al-Ubaydli 2018), hampering the spirit of volunteerism
Findings are presented in two major sections—strategies for volunteer engagement and practices for financial sustainability—with eight strategies for volunteer engagement and four strategies for financial sustainability emerging from the interviews during data analysis
Summary
The survival of non-profit organizations (hereafter: NPOs) has been identified as an important prerequisite for measuring their success in terms of the realization of their mission (Sun et al 2019).The determinants of non-profit success have long been a focus of the literature on strategic management.One stream of research comprehends the success and failure of NPOs as a dependent variable, whose financial (i.e., liquidity, fundraising cost, working capital etc.) and non-financial determinants (i.e., number of volunteers) can be identified through case study methods or statistical techniques (Grunert and Hildebrandt 2004; Mellahi and Wilkinson 2004).Economies 2020, 8, 101; doi:10.3390/economies8040101 www.mdpi.com/journal/economies. The survival of non-profit organizations (hereafter: NPOs) has been identified as an important prerequisite for measuring their success in terms of the realization of their mission (Sun et al 2019). One stream of research comprehends the success and failure of NPOs as a dependent variable, whose financial (i.e., liquidity, fundraising cost, working capital etc.) and non-financial determinants (i.e., number of volunteers) can be identified through case study methods or statistical techniques (Grunert and Hildebrandt 2004; Mellahi and Wilkinson 2004). Due to competition for sources of public funding, NPOs are challenged to devise workable strategies for fundraising such as the development of professionalization as well as the forming of strategic alliances through business/non-profit partnerships (Sanzo-Pérez et al 2017). The seeking of fundraising from volunteers is prone to a spillover cost that may result in a reduction of their time with NPOs (Yeomans and Al-Ubaydli 2018), hampering the spirit of volunteerism
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