Non-profit Organization Management

A Nonprofit Organization (NPO) is a social organization that does not take profit -making as its own purpose but for public good, reciprocal help and service providing.As far as organizational purposes are concerned, what a NPO values is the maximum of public good; what it produces is public goods or quasi-public goods; as far as running mechanism is concerned, NPOs is a self-regulating system that takes reciprocal help as the center, and it has the organizational characteristics of nonprofit, non-government, voluntaries and public good.The above -mentioned characteristics make the management principles and managing methods of NPOs different from those of enterprises' and governments'.Lester M. Salamon, a Professor at The Johns Hopkins University and Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, once advocated that we should get rid of three "legends" about NPOs. The first legend is that NPOs have a perfect ethcis. In fact, with the growing of size and complexity, NPOs could possibly beome bureaucratic, slow in reacting and behavoir and stererotyped. The second legend is about voluntaries which regard NPOs as an organization that do not need the help from the government. In fact, in developed countries, most funds of NPOs come from the government and they have a cooperative relationship with the government. Furthermore, the trend of specialization of NPOs makes voluntaries fail in recent years. The third legend thinks the occrence of NPOs is a new phenominon. This legend takes that most of NPOs all over the world are new organizations. While most NPOs have a long history in a lot of places.So to some extent, studies on the management of NPOs have a great significance for NPOs to realize purposes, accomplish missions and to strengthen...