Effective nonprofit leaders and managers understand that their organizations develop, grow, and thrive because they have developed an important mutually beneficial relationship with the world they exist to serve. Similar to all organizations, nonprofits succeed because they offer value and make a valuable difference in the communities and societies they emerge to serve. The chapters of Part Three of this Handbook build on the foundational information of Part Two to explain how nonprofit organizations start, develop, grow, and (sometimes) disappear. Many nonprofit leaders assume their roles when their organizations are relatively mature, but no nonprofit starts life as a fully formed organization. In Chapter Eleven, Matthew T. A. Nash helps us understand various ways that nonprofits and other social ventures get their start and how those with socially innovative ideas hone and develop them to become functioning organizations that make a difference—that achieve a social impact. This is the realm of the increasingly popular but oft-misunderstood topic of “social entrepreneurship.” Nash explains how successful socially entrepreneurial ventures evolve from ideas to plans to actions to results and what we are learning about what it takes to succeed at this unique kind of entrepreneurial activity.

Scott T. Helm, in Chapter Twelve, builds on the concepts presented in Nash's chapter with practical information about the ingredients and elements of the process by which nonprofit leaders can develop their nonprofit or other social venture into a viable enterprise that has greater potential for becoming sustainable and successful. Helm offers a thorough explanation of the process of business planning for social ventures, including how nonprofits can use the concepts and practices of business planning to effectively operationalize their visions for community service and impact.

Each of the last four chapters in this part of the Handbook explains a specific element of the larger process of leading and managing a nonprofit organization, including how each links to longer-term nonprofit success. In Chapter Thirteen, Brenda Gainer explains nonprofit marketing, the discipline that enables us to understand how to effectively develop and manage relationships and engage in the exchanges that every enterprise (nonprofit and for-profit) must develop with its key constituents, clients, and stakeholders to survive. Gainer describes the key elements of nonprofit marketing and explains the most important ways in which nonprofits can use marketing concepts and practices to advance their impact.

One of the most important and underutilized of exchange relationships in the nonprofit world is that of advocacy. In Chapter Fourteen, Marcia A. Avner explains the advocacy process, including but not limited to the practice of lobbying, and discusses the most effective approaches that nonprofits can employ to engage constituents and exercise influence in governmental policy processes to have an impact on legislation and policy that will affect their work and, often, their clients' lives. In Chapter Fifteen, James E. Austin and M. May Seitanidi offer a new perspective on collaboration and how nonprofits can understand and develop valuable collaborative relationships and alliances—alliances that have the greatest potential for generating additional benefit and impact for all partners. In a world where it takes collaborative and collective action to achieve some of the most important of social outcomes, Austin and Seitanidi's framework offers useful guidance for how to assess and develop the most productive and valuable options.

Of course, the press for nonprofits to show that the work they and their programs do makes a difference requires that nonprofit leaders and managers understand how to assess and communicate about the performance and impact of these programs. With the widespread and growing demands for nonprofits to be highly accountable and provide evidence of performance (as Ebrahim discusses in Chapter Four), nonprofit organizations must develop and maintain systematic ways to analyze and report on program and organizational effectiveness, and this work is addressed in the final chapter of Part Three, Chapter Sixteen by John Clayton Thomas. Program evaluation represents work at the intersection of management and accountability. Thomas explains the core principles of program evaluation, offers guidance for how nonprofits can most pragmatically assess program effectiveness and results, and discusses the basic approaches that agencies often employ to assess outcomes and evaluate programs.