The PNP Institute's focus on nonprofit management is primarily on the areas of resource management in NPOs and issues of nonprofit governance.

Resource management in NPOs

Nonprofit organizations can only provide their mission-oriented services if they succeed in mobilizing sufficient resources. They have a diverse set of financial resources at their disposal, including self-generated income (especially service revenues, membership fees and sponsorship money), public funding and donations. In addition, monetary assets, e.g., volunteer work or the rich range of in-kind donations, play a major role. The mobilization of resources in turn requires the use of resources and consequently triggers transaction costs. Against this background, the Institute’s activities focus in particular on the consequences of:

• that the boundaries between the various sources of resources are becoming increasingly blurred,
• that the competition between non-profit organisations in mobilising resources is increasing,  
• that the motives and forms of volunteering and voluntary work are fundamentally changing,
• public funding stagnates or is being withdrawn (in real terms) and
• that NPOs, in order to compensate for them, often have to expand their commercial activities and integrate for-profit cells into their structures.

Nonprofit governance

Increased social pressure for legitimacy and increasingly critical resource providers are contributing to the fact that questions of accountability, transparency, auditing and certification, performance measurement and reporting are gaining in importance. However, due to the institutional specificities of NPOs, the approaches and tools developed for commercial economy organizations cannot be transferred to NPOs without reflection; in many cases tailor-made concepts are needed that take their special characteristics into account. In view of the increasingly intersectoral provision of tasks in the sense of the model of the guarantee state and public governance, the focus of Nonprofit Management also illuminates the cooperative relationships between NPOs and politics as well as administrations within the framework of public service networks.