Managing and Volunteering In the Non-Profit Sector
This MIT Sloan School of Management course, published through MIT OpenCourseWare, surveys the management challenges facing non-profit organizations. It is built for people who interact with non-profits in many roles rather than for aspiring executive directors: board members, volunteers, fundraisers, and occasional staff. Topics include governance structures, board dynamics, fundraising strategy, volunteer management, and the particular financial and organizational pressures that distinguish non-profits from businesses. The course materials, published free under a Creative Commons license, include a syllabus, readings, and assignments drawn from real non-profit case studies, letting students work through the tradeoffs a board or executive team actually faces. There is no video lecture series; the course is text-based, following MIT's standard OCW format of posted materials rather than a recorded classroom. It works best as a broad orientation to the sector's management questions rather than a deep operational manual, and it carries no certificate.