Peter Drucker, Managing the Non-Profit Organization

Preface

Today, we know that the non-profit institutions are central to American society and are indeed its most distinguishing feature.

...the ability of government to perform social tasks is very limited indeed...the non-profits exemplify and fulfill the fundamental American commitment to responsible citizenship in the community.

...it is central to quality of life in America, central to citizenship, and indeed carries values of American society and of the American tradition.

...non-profit is not just non-governmental. It is that they do something very different from either business or government.

Its product is the changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents.

...non-profit institutions themselves know that they need management all the more because they do not have a conventional "bottom line"...they need management so that they can concentrate on
— their mission;
— on the very different role that the board plays
— on the need to attract volunteers, to develop them, and manage them for performance;
— on relationships with a diversity of constituencies;
— on fund-raising and fund development;
— and on the problem of individual burnout, which is so acute in non-profits precisely because the individual commitment to them tends to be so intense.

...the non-profit institution has been the resounding success in the last forty years...it is the "growth industry" of America...America's "Civil Society"...

...non-profits face very big and different challenges:
1) to convert donors into contributors; giving is necessary above all so that the non-profits can discharge the one mission they all have in common: to satisfy the need of the American people for self-realization, for living out our ideals, our beliefs, our best opinion of ourselves.

2)to give community and common purpose: non-profits are the American community... they increasingly give the individual the ability to perform and to achieve.