Advancing Nonprofit Management: Innovations, Challenges and Best Practices

Dear Colleagues,

Nonprofit organizations play influential roles in addressing societal issues, debating priorities and approaches, providing services to communities, and filling gaps ignored or even created by themselves or other sectors. They may operate relatively independently with clear accountabilities or in an environment where their work is blurred and their contributions are indistinct from others.

To what extent and effect have nonprofit organizations implemented new practices, processes and structures that are significantly different from what we witnessed ten or less years ago? What are these management innovations and the opportunities they present for the organizations adopting them and for others influenced by their use? Are these innovations limited to nonprofit subsectors, geographic regions, or other real or invented boundaries? What explains their emergence and proliferation? How do we consider what should be touted as best practice for the sector and as worthy innovation that should be institutionalized within certain parts of the sector?

This Special Issue aims to address the aforementioned questions and invites manuscripts that will motivate readers to reimagine nonprofit management by informing them of the new developments in this sector and the challenges and possibilities of these innovations in advancing nonprofit sectors’ missions and visions.

In this Special Issue, we will collate research focusing on innovations only at the management level; in other words, the means and resources, such as human, financial, technological or others, used to carry out a particular task/work. Management innovations may shape decisions at the strategic level, creating or enabling pivots to new ways of fulfilling existing missions or adjusting missions to new realities. We wish to highlight the potential negative as well as positive consequences of innovations.

We will accept submissions of empirical manuscripts, qualitative and/or quantitative, with a theoretical base that uses critical approaches and a wide array of methodologies and settings. However, we will consider papers that are purely conceptual in examining any innovations that is changing nonprofit management.

Here are a few examples of possible topics for this Special Issue:

• Drivers of innovation;
• Use of artificial intelligence and other technological tools;
• Investments in and use of large datasets and algorithmic decision-making;
• Impact assessment and other evaluation practices;
• Innovative resource sourcing (philanthropic and other);
• Risk mitigation management;
• Communication management advancements;
• Transparency and security management;
• Shared service models;
• New types of collaborative approaches;
• Innovation creation, diffusion, and lifecycle of innovations;
• Entrepreneurship in the nonprofit sector;
• Identification and creation of meaningful work;
• Recruitment and retention of nonprofit workers, paid and non-paid;
• Sustainability-oriented innovation (SOI);
• Scalability of innovations;
• Laboratories for innovation.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400–600 words. Please send these to the Special Issue Editors Prof. Dr. Mary Tschirhart ([email protected]), Dr. Khaldoun AbouAssi ([email protected]), and copy Administrative Sciences Editorial Office ([email protected]). The Guest Editors will review the abstracts to ensure that they are within the scope of this Special Issue.

Abstract Submission Deadline: 15 January 2024

Prof. Dr. Mary Tschirhart
Dr. Khaldoun AbouAssi
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Administrative Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• nonprofit management
• innovation
• opportunities
• challenges
• change management
• stakeholders
• ethics