The New Nonprofit Model: Organizational Sustainability Through Leadership & Mission

In the nonprofit world, every organization needs one thing in order to survive: a strong nonprofit leadership team. The sector is becoming more and more competitive by the day—just look at the numbers. We push out this statistic a lot, and that’s because we want to educate the sector on what they’re up against. There are over 1.5 million nonprofits in the U.S., according to the National Center of Charitable Statistics, so it’s dire that every nonprofit that truly wants to achieve its mission for the sustainable future think long and hard about its leadership team and what it should look like because without a leadership team to lead the nonprofit in the right direction, the organization will be at risk of crumbling.

Earlier this year, NonProfit PRO released its “2018 Leadership Impact Study,” which looked into the key challenges facing nonprofit leadership teams today and how they can overcome them. In the study, we found that one of the biggest challenges that leadership teams face is resources. Nearly 62 percent of study respondents said that their nonprofit’s top challenge was having a lack of resources, which can be a combination of many things (money, time, staff, etc.); but we believe that the way nonprofits can help improve outcomes and create a sustainable nonprofit business model is to invest money in things that deliver big impact: staff and technology.

A strong leadership will bring to the table innovative ideas and passion, and technology will bring efficiency and time-saving benefits. In this cover story, we wanted to explore how nonprofits can leverage their leadership team to deliver exponential results and how technology can play a role in the nonprofit ecosystem. To answer these questions, we wanted to sit down with a top-tier nonprofit that has proven to be titan in our industry—and has the leadership team to back it up.

NonProfit PRO had an exclusive interview with Shanna Hocking, the associate VP of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), a children’s health institution that was founded in 1855 by Francis West Lewis, MD. CHOP is a multi-billion dollar organization that oversees over 15,000 employees, so an organization that manages such a high-level number of employees and proceeds to increase their revenue over the years knows a thing—or two—about effective leadership.