Change management and strategy in the Victorian charitable sector

Charitable organisations around the world and in Australia face unprecedented challenges as macro political and economic pressures force many of them to change rapidly and continuously in order to survive and continue to provide essential services for users and other stakeholders.The literature review that follows is not a research method. Rather, it serves the critical purpose of explaining the environment for Australian charities and introducing, using prefatory and relevant discussions, key change management concepts, legislative, economic and political trends. This establishes the comparative basis for the core research tool of the interviews conducted within the selected charities. This study challenges the holistic notion that charities should simply adopt modern change management and strategy strategies practised in the for-profit sectors (Butcher, 2011; Kelleher & Nolan, 2010) for effective strategic change. This approach is simplistic and inadequate for a sector whose size is growing in numbers and complexity. Rather, it finds that key elements traditionally researched by scholars and practised in profit-based corporations may provide a suitable conceptual framework for charities to use, but these are subject to the impact of key external influences: legislative, economic and political that manifest themselves differently for the not-for-profit (NFP) sector.Additionally, charities typically have less financial resources to direct towards internal training, recruiting and infrastructure, endorsing the notion that the key elements researched: mission statement, organisational culture, unique positioning, leadership and the strategy process must be robust and transferable so as to underpin a more nuanced and pragmatic suite of change programmes and concepts for Australian charities.