Sustainability management in non-governmental organisations: development of a maturity model

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) address social and/or ecological challenges often through their direct work, which is called the demand-side of NGOs. In this paper, the focus lies on the supply-side, the sustainability management in NGOs. The research goal is to evaluate the sustainability management in NGOs with the help of a maturity model. For the development of such a maturity model, a mixed-method approach is used in a sequential mixed design, consisting of a systematic literature review, qualitative expert interviews, qualitative content analyses, quantitative questionnaire, and descriptive statistical data analysis. Seven dimensions of sustainability management in NGOs could be identified: concept of sustainability management, management (systemic capability), financial sustainability, public relations, stakeholder management, top-down strategy, and bottom-up personal initiative. With the help of a developed and partly evaluated model, the maturity level of the sustainability management of 35 German NGOs are analysed, and results are presented.