This article is intellectually derived from a published material in the Stanford Social Innovation Review by the authors Zac Hill and Ben Marshall, and has been restructured and edited to fit the context of the nonprofit sector in Saudi Arabia, while preserving the full literary rights of the source and the authors.

The article begins with a critically important leadership question: When does management alone cease to be sufficient, and it becomes necessary for nonprofit leaders to think with a more flexible and innovative mindset capable of redesigning talent, programs, and impact-making methods?

Today, nonprofits face escalating pressures, from rising demands, fluctuating financial resources, and declining public trust to troubling levels, and this gap may widen even more in environments that are supposed to be in greater need of support.

From years of experience working with nonprofits in establishment, leadership, consulting, and utilization, we often see these organizations facing such challenges by clinging even more to rigid and stable working methods, starting from promoting transparent hiring and documentation, to launching new strategic plans and implementing precise performance measurement processes.

This mix of behaviors represents what we call the “institutional model” in work, which is often beneficial. However, it also leaves untapped value on the table.

A New Management Model for Maximizing Impact

From here, we propose an alternative, the “creative model” for social impact, where we compare the two approaches and clarify the benefits of learning from other fields, then identify three opportunities where we believe nonprofits can particularly benefit from this perspective.

What do we mean by the institutional model and other models?

At the core of nonprofit work is the creation of social value, achieved through attracting employees and volunteers to deliver products or services to beneficiaries, utilizing financial and in-kind support as effectively and efficiently as possible. This approach combines activities within an organized entity, transforming outputs into institutional work, which we refer to as the “institutional model.”

By operating this way, nonprofits share many characteristics and often have professional roles similar to those in the for-profit sector, including managers overseeing culture and processes, and a board of directors responsible for governance, which is usually not based on a fixed expiration date. There is also a direct relationship between the size of the organization and its ability to produce value.

The institutional model is also the predominant pattern in the private sector. It is, as some writers describe, like the water we swim in, familiar and understood to the degree that we forget it is, in essence, a choice and not an inevitable fate. However, it is not a given that this model is always the best way to achieve socially valuable outcomes.

There are other models for achieving beneficial work. In the democratic model, individuals are elected or appointed instead of being hired in the conventional way, and they work to produce policies that guide the behavior of other public, private, or civil entities. This model is primarily funded by public money and constrained by mandates and public regulations.

In contrast, for example, the legal model, where experts are chosen to represent, interpret, or influence the legal environment in ways that constrain the actions of others or redistribute resources among them. There is also the social movement model, where broad groups mobilize, often in an unstructured or informal manner, to highlight a specific issue.

What distinguishes these models is not only the sectors they belong to or the daily activities they engage in but that the very goal, even when it is about creating social value, goes through different organizational structures, various strategic tools, different capital flows, and varying constraints as well.

Awareness of these diverse options encourages nonprofit leaders to seek ways to create value outside the institutional model.

What is the creative model?

Artists, community organizations, and design and production companies have each successfully mobilized billions of dollars towards creative projects. These entities, like nonprofits, do not measure their success solely by economic return; they either distinguish themselves or add other criteria. However, the way they achieve their success is different, as they tend to follow what can be described as a “creative model.”

If the institutional model seeks to create social value through effective management of the organization, the creative model seeks to do so through effective management of the creative process itself. It offers different ways to organize talent and connect it to the resulting value, relying heavily on outstanding contributors who are attracted through professional reputation and work on specific outputs tied to time and a clear project.

These outputs are evaluated by different metrics.

Here, people often assess the quality of work through developing taste and professional judgment more than relying on formal or rigid performance indicators. Ultimately, the work remains governed by the creator's vision or creative signature. Therefore, work within a creative model is usually more flexible, closely linked to outputs, and more subjective to the distinctions made by experts.

What can nonprofits learn from the creative sector?

There is nothing necessarily wrong with the institutional model. It is a tried-and-true model, supported by decades of management theories, and it sends an important message to the world: that nonprofits are serious entities, which holds weight when the goal is to rebuild public trust.

However, this model also poses challenges; it diminishes the inherent differences between the profit-seeking organization, whose pursuit of profit generates the resources necessary for its sustainability, and the nonprofit organization, which does not have this self-sufficient source but focuses primarily on impact.

Moreover, in the context of the original American article, this model has not always succeeded in convincing the public due to the special status of the nonprofit sector in regulatory and tax frameworks. Conversely, when aligning the idea with the Saudi context, it can be said that the problem here is not in the regulations themselves and that the institutional form alone is not always sufficient to convince society that the entity is achieving an impact that justifies its uniqueness and mission.

The institutional model also imposes a degree of rigidity in hiring, management, and evaluation beyond what is necessary in all cases. More importantly, when adopted unexamined or out of habit, it may obscure opportunities for nonprofits to learn from other working methods.

Given the sizeable operational, financial, and social challenges facing this sector, it does not seem wise to leave this learning untapped; thus, we advocate for a step back, not for retreat but for review, to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the current method, and to understand that it is not simply a matter of differing procedures; it extends to differences in the models that organize talent, workflows, and strategies.

It is true that producing a play, organizing an event, or designing a game is not the same as educating youth, supporting families, or addressing a public health issue, but many mechanisms are transferable and beneficial.

Below are three opportunities where we see the creative model has the highest potential for making an impact: adopting a more flexible talent model, planning within more defined time frames, and enhancing measurement with expert insight and professional evaluation. These examples may serve as useful starting points for nonprofit leaders looking to address the complexities of reality with every available tool.

Opportunity One: A More Flexible Talent Model

The “Future of Work” has indeed arrived; hybrid working and remote work may settle at much higher levels than before the pandemic, and the presence of freelancers in the American labor market has increased significantly, and the most important idea here.

Locally, the labor market in many countries, including Saudi Arabia, is also shifting towards greater flexibility, specialization, and project-based contracting across several fields.

However, many nonprofits still rely primarily on a model centered around permanent workers, calling on volunteers to regain some of the flexibility that non-volunteers do not always offer in terms of accountability, professional skill, or wide-ranging expertise that specialized contractors may offer.

In creative industries, contracting is not a secondary option, but a fundamental part of how they operate.

This model has many advantages as it allows for greater flexibility and enables new talents to be quickly onboarded, forming teams as needed without long-term commitments. This flexibility can, in itself, be a draw for talent, especially when faced with limited financial compensation in some nonprofits.

Furthermore, the short duration of contracts and the lower need for deep cultural integration in each case help capitalize on remote work and attract a broader range of talents.

Indeed, contracting high-quality contributors for a limited time may relieve administrative burdens from their supervisors, leading to more productive use of the entire team’s time.

For senior leaders, this model may give them more time to stay close to fieldwork or the core activity of the organization even as it grows. An example of this is from Playworks, where senior managers continue to regularly lead training programs based on the idea that promotion should not mean detachment from the core work.

However, this direction does not come without trade-offs for potential contractors, as there is always a balance between flexibility and income opportunities on one side and stability and organizational support on the other. Therefore, nonprofits should not repeat the worst aspects of the gig economy by creating highly precarious jobs in the long run but should not make job retention a higher goal than achieving impact itself.

Additionally, the more flexible talent model reflects on other matters, such as organizational culture, the breadth or narrowness of job descriptions, recruitment speed, and the degree of rigidity in the management hierarchy. Thus, nonprofits that wish to shift in this direction should first ensure that they create the right conditions.

The first of these conditions is that time is indeed scarce; every nonprofit organization knows the difficulty of maintaining learning and development amid daily emergencies, and the time for support, guidance, and management is limited, and the issue is not always solved by simply adding layers of new middle management.

In such a case, overseeing an experienced freelancer is often less energy-consuming than building a new employee from scratch.

The second condition is that the organization must be financially limited, as freelancers provide a shorter commitment than permanent hiring, or that the abundance of resources is only temporary, allowing the recruitment of a freelancer even at a relatively higher cost, knowing that funding cessation will not create significant operational or systemic friction at the end of the project.

This is especially beneficial in funding environments characterized by annual fluctuations or irregular grants, and it may open the door for talented specialists to contribute to important nonprofit work without being required to commit permanently.

The third condition is that the nature of the work itself requires a different type of management, such as in seasonal, highly specialized, or fluctuating timing and demands situations.

The article gives examples of organizations working with this logic, such as environmental research entities hiring seasonal researchers, or international humanitarian organizations using varied-duration contractual models based on the nature of the task, including for specialists with refined skills like surgeons, and the idea that can be aligned locally is that some nonprofit work does not necessarily require permanent structural expansion but rather high expertise within a short time window.

However, the success of this model requires a minimum of organizational readiness, and some studies referenced in the article indicate that freelancers working with nonprofits may be more critical of how they are treated or their level of access to information compared to their counterparts in the private sector.

Therefore, attention must be given to the fit of competence to the assignment and to clarify expectations from the outset, as the contractor, even if not managed in the traditional way, still needs clear output definitions and appropriate feedback, along with sufficient context to help them succeed.

Opportunity Two: Working within More Defined Time Frames

Shifting the talent model sometimes relates to changing the time horizon within which work is managed within the organization.

The nature of the institutional model causes many organizations, both nonprofit and for-profit, to operate on a continuous timeline. As a result, they provide a semi-static package of services or products permanently, aiming not only for success in terms of impact or income but also for continuing that success for as long as possible.

In contrast, creative industries tend to operate within distinct time frames or project-based formats, typically focusing on launching a specific product or piece of work. When we measure their success, we do not ask how long the organization has been around; rather, we look more at the specific work they have delivered.

This logic, which presents output over open-ended continuity, seems very suitable for nonprofits as well, because their existence by nature is linked to achieving social value, and working within defined time frames reduces the likelihood that the desire for organizational survival overshadows the actual need to solve the problem while enhancing the sense of urgency and accountability.

It also pushes toward higher efficiency, as it increases the use of qualitative expertise while reducing overall financial obligations. Moreover, having clearer endpoints or milestones helps the organization to tell its story more convincingly to stakeholders, including the public.

This approach is preferable when the work is urgent or time-constrained, as in some environmental issues, response campaigns, or programs linked to declared objectives and deadlines. It also suits situations where the organization faces an event that requires it to act, such as public commitments, regulatory deadlines, or clear national or sectoral obligations. The article mentions the Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 as a pressing and motivating timeframe for action.

It can also be beneficial if there is a turning point after which the effort becomes less productive regarding the issue itself; this may be due to the nature of the issue, the phase the target group is in, or a narrow timeframe concerning opportunity or possible alliances.

It may also relate to workforce considerations, such as if the required talents are only available for a short time, or the organization needs to rally a dense cohort of allies over a limited time to create social or professional momentum, a matter that cannot be overlooked but is not always sustainable over the long term.

Implementing this method practically might mean using different hiring mechanisms, as in the first opportunity, or dividing work into shorter batches than is customary in strategic planning, which often extends over years.

Useful practices here include transitioning from sequential work laden with extensive preparations to a more agile approach, where content or programs or services are broken into components that can be developed, tested, improved, and launched more rapidly.

This approach borrows some of its spirit from startup environments, but in reality, it does not pertain to technology as much as it does to moving away from rigid linear project management and building feedback from actual application within the design process itself instead of attempting to predict all variables right from the start.

Examples of nonprofits that have significantly altered their current version from their original form at launch include Khan Academy, which began a series on YouTube, DonorsChoose, which started within a limited professional niche before expanding, and YouthBuild, which transformed from a local housing program to a wide national network, with the underlying message that the organization does not betray its mission when evolving its form, but may in fact be more faithful to it when it allows practice to reshape means.

This output-centered mindset gives space for experimentation and innovation, shortens feedback cycles, and lowers the cost of failure, allowing organizations to produce better results. It allows them to test bold pathways without jeopardizing their entire mission. While this requires cultural changes, it sometimes pushes toward confronting the idea of planning for the obsolescence of the current form if it becomes unnecessary and opens the door for real impact, which is the essence of nonprofits.

Opportunity Three: Enhancing Measurement with Insight and Expertise

The stakes in the nonprofit sector are high not only because the work is important; rather, because evaluating that work is inherently complex. Therefore, nonprofits face external and internal pressures to measure their inputs and outputs as rigorously as possible, with three-quarters of executives in this sector deeming impact measurement a top priority.

At the stricter end of this spectrum, there are controlled experiments measuring the strength and statistical causality of interventions, although these tools themselves have boundaries and issues; even beyond this strict level, nonprofits utilize varied measurement systems through different phases of the theory of change from annual planning cycles to monitor implementation and results.

Some sectors within the creative industries do something similar, as in experimental film screenings. They help uncover issues, direct reviews, and strengthen the creative or financial argument for the work. However, these screenings, if poorly selected or overly relied upon, may also be used to pull work toward contentious directions or undermine the original vision of its creator.

Thus, the key to benefiting from them is “good discernment,” the ability to treat them as useful data while retaining ultimately informed professional judgment to determine quality and direction. This, in our view, is something nonprofit executives should sometimes practice as well.

The main benefit of that is that it alleviates the pressure to overly optimize pathways that may be easier to measure yet less effective. This is expressed in a form similar to: hitting the numerical target while missing the true meaning.

In education, for example, it can be tempting to focus on test scores, discipline, and attendance, while there are more difficult yet very important dimensions to measure, such as meaning, creative thinking, behavioral learning, and feelings of fulfillment or accomplishment.

It is true that those easily measurable outputs are important, but making them the centerpiece of improvement may lead to feedback loops that are counterproductive. However, when we add to direct measurement the capacity for professional discernment, we give the decision-maker space to guide proposals away from symptoms toward roots.

This approach also proves more beneficial in the opposite case, that is, when the organization lacks sufficient data or historical comparisons because it operates in a new or emerging field, or when existing data is hard to access or weak in reliability, as happens in some complex developmental or field works. It is tied to a type of challenges that are difficult even to accurately define in their early stages. These murky problems resemble what some researchers have termed “adaptive challenges,” or those entering volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments.

However, we do not advocate for arbitrary decisions, nor for relying solely on job rank, nor for detaching from beneficiary needs; on the contrary, it emphasizes that good decision-making should be based on a deep understanding of those needs; this means that senior leaders must remain genuinely connected to the communities they serve.

It is, rather, meant that the needs of beneficiaries are not always known or measurable, and in these cases, nonprofits have the opportunity to build structures that allow experienced and talented individuals to exercise their professional judgment and be rewarded for it.

This requires management mechanisms capable of discovering insight and credibility, lifting those who possess them, and rewarding them when those qualities are genuinely valuable, yet it remains a more suitable approach when rapid expansion or wide replication is not an immediate priority in the short term, as it relies more heavily on a limited group of highly engaged and experienced individuals.

There are other opportunities to adopt the creative model, including the very method of funding. It is noted that the funding practices of nonprofits have not changed as swiftly or boldly as those in the for-profit sector, even though more than 75% of nonprofits have seen increased demand, while nearly half lack adequate financial resources to expand their response.

Taking inspiration from creative industries, there are ideas that transcend merely increasing earned income or reducing tax burdens, such as dedicated local funding models or targeted support ratios, aligning this idea with the Saudi context. The most important meaning is not to transfer the American formula verbatim but to think of creative or organizational funding tools that support developmental, cultural, or community priorities with more sustainable and clear mechanisms.

We also emphasize the importance of having a supportive donor sector that accepts funding for projects designed with a “mission-focused” logic, that is, entities created from the outset to achieve their mission by any legitimate means possible, not merely to sustain the institution for its own sake.

The idea here is not only to be preoccupied with mechanical details but to understand how nonprofits can mobilize people, structural frameworks, capital, and other resources in new ways to help achieve results they are still struggling with.

Implementation

According to the “Consonance Model,” an organization's performance depends on the alignment of its structure, people, tasks, processes, and culture. Therefore, it will not be possible to maximize the benefits of the previous opportunities simply by attempting to change individual behaviors alone.

Thus, the authors invite founders, executives, and board members in organizations operating under some of the mentioned circumstances to reflect on the organization’s design itself, talent assumptions, budgeting distribution, and incentives necessary to support this change and make it a formal part of operations.

The good news is that many of these practices are not entirely foreign to everyday human experience, as developing professional taste, starting from a specific launch date and then building backward, or attracting talented individuals who suddenly find they have time available for a short period, are all things many leaders have experienced in various contexts, albeit outside the nonprofit sector.

We then suggest five practical steps that can enhance chances of success:

First, build a clear understanding of the trade-offs involved in changing the way the organization operates. These trade-offs include direct costs, such as coordination costs, alongside broader considerations related to donor expectations, compliance, staff morale, or upper management's conviction.

Second, assess the cultural and structural readiness to adopt a new model in a specific problem or context, whether formally or informally, and whether relying on a trusted outside expert or internally within the organization, while clarifying cases where this approach is not expected to be beneficial.

Third, identify preliminary experiments to practically test creative mechanisms, which might be as simple as trying a different format for meetings or broader in terms of forming teams or operational units closer to project contributors than traditional hierarchical logic.

Small projects or limited initiatives give the organization an opportunity to test this approach without fully engaging in or entirely rejecting it.

Fourth, to borrow wisely and faithfully rather than copy blindly or chase management trends.

The creative model offers useful alternatives but requires conscious adaptation to each organization’s context, mission, and constraints. Collaborating with leaders from creative industries may help uncover personal and organizational blind spots and understand where the institution has adopted institutional methods out of habit rather than efficiency.

Fifth, create an environment where participants in design and execution feel that safe failure is possible. Creative industries tolerate risk and iteration to a greater degree than nonprofits operating in environments requiring high levels of accountability and stewardship, and without a publicly declared space for experimentation with the occasional possibility of stumbling, organizations are likely to revert to the institutional approaches they are accustomed to whenever pressure rises.

The perhaps greatest challenge facing nonprofits eager to adopt a more creative model is primarily a mental one, as learning a new way of learning itself is not easy, especially when there is an entrenched method of operation that seems to embody the very meaning of the phrase “let’s get to work.” We are not calling for a complete upheaval or dismantling everything in place.

However, we affirm that there are opportunities, at least for some organizations.

At times, by adding these new tools and angles to their practical toolbox, the creative model achieves its best outcomes when it pushes us to revisit assumptions we treat as intuitive.

Even if they may not serve us effectively, the question might be as simple as: Am I doing this because this is how institutions are generally run, or because this is the best way to produce the best possible outcome?

In hopes that this proposal grants nonprofit leaders some intellectual permission to acknowledge the limitations of the model they are currently operating under and then think differently in terms of structure, thereby improving spending efficiency, enhancing public trust and community engagement, and delivering much-needed services more effectively.

This article is adapted and translated from the ssir.org website, preserving the literary rights of the original source.