Beyond survival mode: Organizational resilience capabilities in nonprofit arts and culture fundraising during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Abstract

Organizational resilience remains an under-explored topic in the nonprofit management literature (Searing et al., 2021). Despite an increasing number of studies framed by management perspectives and organizational theory, their focus is on how forprofit organisations react against external crisis by developing 'resilience capabilities'; ways of understanding and of working designed to reduce uncertainty and restore balance to the organisation (Lengnick-Hall, et al., 2011; Williams et al., 2017). This article draws on literature on 'resilience capabilities' and on in-depth interviews with nonprofit fundraisers, carried out during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, to examine how they compensated for a sudden drop in financial revenue by devising alternative, strategic ways of fundraising. It argues that non-profit fundraisers deployed cross-capability building, which combined and merged emotion-related and behavioural capabilities to achieve strategic, practical results.