The Future of Nonprofits

Increasingly, I see the nonprofit sector in failing health.  If it and its parts (that is the individual 1.6 million nonprofits that comprise the sector) don’t take stock and implement some corrective actions, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

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First, let’s recognize the schizophrenia plagues too many nonprofits.  I’ve lost track of the number of clients who have told me:  “my nonprofit is not like others.”   Nonprofits see themselves as different from their peers, as unique, when, in truth, there are far more commonalities across the entire sector than there are differences.   Somehow, in their minds, their mission is different, how they have to operate is different, their fundraising challenges are different—it is just all different from everyone else.

Logic dictates that that simply can’t be true.  The challenges of building a strong board are pretty universal:  finding people passionate about a particular mission, people with the time and willingness to commit to doing the job of nonprofit board member, people with the stamina to do the hard work when the rewards may not be as readily coming, etc.  The challenges of fundraising are the same for those who have a ready alumni base as those without, despite the fact that the latter thinks their fundraising problems would all be solved if they only had an alumni pool; the challenges of competing for a limited pool of donors’ attention and dollars, of constantly having to cultivate what you have and while also trying to bring on those who will be the future, of convincing board members that donor cultivation is part of their job, and more, are experienced across the spectrum of missions, organizational size and age and even geography.  The challenges of attracting and retaining qualified staff and finding sufficient and affordable space—and all of the other challenges of running a mission-driven business are experienced by practically every nonprofit that has ever existed.  We simply are not that different despite what we actually do day in and day out to uphold and fulfill our missions.

So, why do nonprofits fight it?  Why not embrace it and learn from the experiences of millions rather than trying to slice and dice things to satisfy a sense of false uniqueness?  Why?  Because it brings a comfort, albeit a fabricated one, and presents as an excuse for all potential and real failures.  And this feeling of uniqueness is, as it should be, so ephemeral, that when expedient, nonprofits easily forget they ever made that claim.  We see this, too, time after time, when nonprofits need help, as they try and play both sides of the field>  Suddenly, their uniqueness will be best addressed by someone seeped in the commonalities of their mission slice of the sector, their staff size, their budget size.  Now, it is far more important that someone know health care or the arts than know how to ask good, strategic questions and have the rare talent to design an appropriately customized, engaging planning process just for their “unique” organization.

Now, it is far more important that a potential consultant have worked with big-budget organizations than how well that consultant truly understands finance and how to deconstruct the realities of an organization by looking at its finances.  Nonprofits forsake the cake—depth of experience in the nonprofit sector, command of the theory, science and realities of the practice of the area needing help, the flexibility to customize design and execution to match organizational capacity, skills that transcend particulars—for the icing—knowing their special slice of the sector, which, reality tells us, simply isn’t that special.

My other source of concern is what is happening to our emerging leaders—those individuals to whom we look as the future leaders of our sector.  We seem to be doing everything we can to chase them away and very little to keep them close and engaged.

One of the legs up that the nonprofit sector has always had over the for-profit sector is that we consistently engage people’s hearts, as well as their heads, in their daily work.  Sadly, with the ever-growing expectation that nonprofit employees are supposed to do more and more with less and less, we are burying the joys of the heart with the unrealistic demands of the job.

I regularly hear reports of staff leaving or being let go and rather than new people hire, the responsibilities of the vacated position are distributed among those who remain.  There is no assessment or query as to whether there is the capacity to do the additional responsibilities and no offers—or even suggestions of such in the future—of additional compensation.   And while similar tales of every expanding job expectations are not uncommon in the for-profit sector, those jobs come with compensation packages that far outpace those of the nonprofit sector.

If, as analysts tell us, Millennials and Generation Xers will have far more employers and types of jobs in the course of their careers than was the case for earlier generations, there is nothing to say that they won’t move back and forth across the divide between for-profit and nonprofit.  With more opportunities to satisfy the heart—to some extent—in the for-profit side, and challenges that don’t make it always financially feasible to come back to the nonprofit side, we may end up losing far more than we can afford.

Despite the fact that the data have been out there for the last 10 years telling us, loudly and clearly, and repeatedly, that executive directors (and, increasingly, other executive positions) want less work and responsibility for more money, very few nonprofits have moved in the direction of balancing that equation.  Our failure to change this dynamic continues to drive potential future leaders away from the position and, for some, even out of the sector.  The more we structure executive positions so that they are well-removed from the organization’s purpose, over-burdened with tasks that could easily be done by others paid less, and unsupported in the key areas of insuring sustainability, the more likely we are to banish a bright future for our sector.