Strategy & organizational sustainability in intermediary nonprofit organizations: Understanding the revenue diversification strategic actions of managerial leadership in the Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs)

The growing role of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) as intermediaries in the delivery of public good and services has made "strategy" in the sector increasingly important. However, research on strategic activity in the nonprofit sector has lacked a coherent conceptual framework by focusing narrowly on specific organizations or sub-sectors with little applicability across the broad range of institutions involved. Consequently, empirical strategy studies have failed to inform the construction of a practical nonprofit strategy theory that links NPOs strategic action to overall organizational sustainability. This dissertation investigated the preferences of revenue strategic actions of managerial leadership in the Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs) intermediary NPOs, with the objective of developing a Strategic Action Model that empirically links revenue diversification strategies to organizational sustainability.;Asking what are the revenue diversification strategic action preferences of SBDC managerial leadership and how do these strategic actions impact organizational sustainability in SBDCs, given their managerial characteristics; eight revenue strategy categories were identified from resource-based view nonprofit empirical studies; these yielded twenty-nine revenue strategic actions used to investigate revenue diversification in the SBDC context. SAS 9.1 multivariate techniques were used to analyze data gathered through a web-based survey.;Research findings indicated that SBDC managerial leadership preferred revenue strategic actions associated with program income generation, government grants, revenue retrenchment, market service mix, and private donor fundraising strategies. Private individual fundraising, commercial income generation, and endowment earnings strategies were not preferred. SBDC managerial leadership pursued diversification approaches consistent with strategic action penetration rather than scale diversification. Findings also indicted that managerial ability, control, technology capability and utilization increased revenue strategic action success positively impacting organizational sustainability. Managerial autonomy and organization structure had no impact.;Study conclusions show that revenue diversification strategies with both high penetration diversification and strategic action success were value-adding instrumental strategies contributing cash inflow into the SBDCs thus impacting organizational sustainability, whereas functional strategies lacked strategic action success but served to support internal income maintenance or revenue reallocation activities.