Funding a Non-profit Community Book Festival in a Major United States Essay

Funding a Non-profit Community Book Festival in a Major United States City - Essay Example The festival also aims to showcase writers and their works to fulfill part of their organizational mission. To achieve so, it is essential for managers to investigate into and conceptualize the determinants for nonprofits improved performance which are their strategy styles and organizational structure (e.g. boards, constitutions and volunteers) in their respective prevailing environment (e.g. economical recent recession, public confidence, state/ county laws). Based upon perceptions of the environment (e.g., economy recent conditions, state legislation and public confidence) and organizational attributes (e.g., values and capabilities), managers of nonprofit organizations strategize to improve the performance of their organization by interpreting and framing the environment, developing and implementing programs and services, and creating processes and structures to monitor and control resources for successful deliverance of organizational goals. Improved performance is associated with organizations that systematically adhere to such takings (Ketchen et al., 1997; Miles, Snow, Mathews, Miles, & Coleman, 1997). This means organizational structure has been linked to performance improvements (Harris & Ruefli, 2000; Kushner & Poole, 1996). Conceptual understanding of strategy in nonprofit organizations is becoming more sophisticated to better reflect the unique character of nonprofit organizations (e.g., Backman, Grossman, & Rangan, 2000). To illustrate so, nonprofits need to consider these factors: multiple stakeholders in resource development, the potential for collaborations, and the mixed influences of market forces that can lead to challenges in the process to develop and define product and service strategies. Strategy encompasses interpreting environmental conditions and designing systems to foster success. According to Miles and Snow (1978), the effectiveness of organizational adaptation hinges on the dominant coalition's perceptions of environmental conditions and the decisions it makes concerning how well the organization will cope with these conditions. Based on this definition, successful strategy is of tantamount contingency on appropriate interpretation of environmental conditions and organizational response to those conditions. Furthermore, the lack of uniformed consideration of strategic factors has lead to confusion and contradictory results associated with strategy and its impact on performance (Stone et al., 1999). Miles and Snow (1978) broke down the process of understanding strategy into how organizations interpret and respond to three problems: entrepreneurial, engineering, and administrative. The entrepreneurial problem addresses how the organization defines its "product or service and target market" (Miles & Snow, 1978, p. 21). For nonprofit organizations, this could include how broadly they conceptualize their community responsibility, which influences what services they provide; who they partner with; and who they serve. The engineering problem is developing an operational solution to delivering the services of the organization. This includes selection of a service delivery method (i.e., technology; Hasenfeld, 1983) and alignment of information and communication linkages necessary for effective