From burnout to bow out: uncovering the nonprofit retention crisis

Experts advise that all new business ventures should begin with a "customer discovery" stage. The customer discovery stage seeks to identify whether there is a market for the product a business wants to sell. The inquiry follows three main questions –

1) what is the customer’s current problem?

 2) how are they currently working to solve this problem? and

3) is this solution working?

Through such a process, businesses flip the script – they challenge the assumptions of what they think their customer may want by centering the investigation on what the customer may actually need.

The nature of my work puts me in a constant, modified state of customer discovery because I consistently speak with nonprofit leaders about their challenges.

Truth be told, and no surprise to anyone, funding is always the top challenge for nonprofits: finding funding, qualifying for funding, and keeping funding.

In recent months, however, a second pain-point has persistently surfaced: staffing.

More specifically, keeping staff.

The Great Resignation Continues

The Great Resignation, first recognized as a trend in early 2021, has not only survived the COVID-era but has taken on greater nuance.

Anecdotal accounts suggest that these resignations occur with greater speed and precision than previously observed.

Accounts include employees:

- quitting before the 90-day introductory period was over;

- quitting just after funding came through to support a staff member for an additional three years;

- quitting without having another job lined up; and

- quiet quitting the work months before resigning from the actual job.

These patterns are not just happening within the small subset of my conversations; they are mirrored in survey data.

Moments before pressing send on this blog, The Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) published its 2024 report on the current state of nonprofits in the United States. 69% of nonprofit leaders surveyed expressed extreme concern about employee burnout, a leading predictor of staff turnover.

Burnout and turnover are dangerous to a nonprofit’s bottom-line.  

As the CEP report reveals, 75% of nonprofit leaders believed burnout had at least some effect on their organization’s ability to succeed.

Remember that a candidate search can take two to three months to conduct and then another two to three months to train the new hire to execute the job effectively. That is six months of necessary investment without necessarily any return.

In short, when staff leave, program execution stalls.

The Blame Game Isn't Serving Us

The finger-pointing of who or what is to blame for this new quitting culture goes in many directions.

Some highlight the predictable difficulties of working in nonprofits, including the failure to offer competitive salaries and the stress experienced by human service providers managing heavy caseloads/workloads.

Some attribute the issue to workplace culture. (Though even nonprofits with high workplace culture rankings are experiencing this pattern.)

Some place blame on an entire generation. A recent Newsweek article reported that small business owners who worked with Gen Z employees (those born between 1996 and 2010) perceived them as unreliable. And a CNBC article promoted that  Gen Z had the “highest rates of wanting to quit their jobs within the last three months compared to all other generations.”   

However, I don’t think any of this finger-pointing serves us well.

The fact of the matter is that the nonprofit space is not the environment it was ten years ago. 

The cost-of-living pressures that exist today make it very difficult to stay in lower paying jobs.  

The current unpredictability of donor giving and government funding may heighten staff insecurity, causing them to feel like they need to look out for themselves.

In such an environment, new rules apply.

Let's Be Solution-Focused

To explore ways to resolve the quitting phenomenon, I have turned again to my modified customer discovery conversations.

I have asked my conversants question 2 from the customer discovery model: how are they currently working to solve this problem?  

The good news is that they offer some sensible ideas:

-          increase salaries (duh, but that may not be possible for everyone);

-          offer onsite childcare (also difficult for some nonprofits);

-          offer remote work;

-          provide flexible work hours;

-          provide professional development certification; and

-          survey staff to take the temperature of their work culture.

These ideas have significant merit, and we should be exploring, researching, and testing several others.

I am hoping we work together as a nonprofit community to find some solutions because if nonprofits are to do their jobs effectively, they need people to stay in their jobs.

So I have a question to ask you: how are you currently working to solve this problem?