Interplay Between Diverse Sustainability Factors and Nonprofit Organizational Performance: A Bibliometric Approach

The United Nations’ 2030 Global Agenda outlines 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) covering poverty, health, education, human rights, and sustainability. Attaining SDGs by 2030 necessitates significant contributions from nonprofits. Most nonprofits face sustainability challenges and have no clue how to deal with this issue. Researchers have provided valuable insights and global perspectives in the last two decades. However, most existing research focuses only on financial and governance factors as leading causes of nonprofit sustainability. Following these research findings, nonprofits limit their efforts and resources only to these two sustainability factors and fail to identify other sustainability factors and their potential contributions to sustainability in an integrated way; thus, most nonprofits fail to achieve nonprofit sustainability. Ignoring other sustainability factors highlights a research gap. In addition, nonprofits must learn how sustainability factors, performance, and sustainability behave and interplay to achieve sustainability. Instead of following a piecemeal approach, this study aims to identify diverse and dominant sustainability areas, e.g., governance, financial management, partnerships, capacity planning, Information Technology (IT), and data-driven decisions through a literature review and bibliometric analysis using the Scopus database. In addition, this paper explains the relationship between sustainability areas, performance, and sustainability, which is also missing in the existing approach. This information lays the groundwork for an inclusive approach to nonprofit sustainability, offering invaluable insights for practitioners, researchers, and policymakers striving to amplify nonprofits’ impact. The findings are helpful and valuable for all global nonprofits to address the complex sustainability problem and contribute to SDGs without concern.