Nonprofit scholars have generally paid little attention to the organizational features of voluntary associations. This article starts to fill this gap in nonprofit scholarship. It proposes five key challenges of associational organization: meeting long-term goals and individual member's needs, balancing member-benefit and public-benefit goals, setting priorities in the face of competing interests, controlling member volunteers, and integrating paid staff. The article suggests that voluntary associations are conceptually and organizationally distinguish able from the bureaucratic service-delivering agencies of the broader nonprofit sector and merit specific research attention to build descriptive data and specialist theory.
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