A Small Nonprofit’s Superpower

For many years now, likely given my roles within various nonprofits and teaching graduate students, I have been asked by many folks to chat about their ideas for a nonprofit startup.  Consistently, I counseled against it.  I have, for all these years, decried the proliferation of small nonprofits, citing the way in which they split up the philanthropic pie into tiny, ineffective bites and how these same funders can potentially overwhelm a startup’s meager infrastructure.  I have ended these chats with encouragement to seek out an existing larger agency aligned to target population, mission, and values and sell the idea for program expansion.  To this end, I was also a big proponent of mergers and acquisitions.  I would like to say something about all of this: I was wrong. 

In certain sectors within the field and in certain geography, a large nonprofit has its place and can do very good work. However, as I have worked in larger and larger nonprofits over the course of my career, I have been troubled by the inherent challenges their size presents on a number of fronts:

§  successfully onboarding the never-ending slew of new employees and effectively evaluating the hundreds of existing employees, setting them all up for measurable success;

§  the inability to support the infrastructure necessary for a massive workforce, numerous locations, and numerous financial tracking and reporting obligations; and

§  being able to really measure impact and support data-informed continuous quality improvement; there is truth in the adage, “being the jack of all trades often means you are the master at none.”

I have learned that there is really something to be said about the small nonprofit, often with a singular, specialized focus and very in tune with the community it serves.  The workforce is small and therefore manageable relative to onboarding, particularly in the challenging workforce environment we find ourselves nowadays.  There is also a greater ability to create a healthy, equitable culture in which employees feel valued and want to stay, thus reducing turnover and making performance appraisals a more doable and impactful process. A smaller workforce also means that the entire organization is closer to the work and thus the evaluation of its quality and impact. 

However, the ultimate superpower of the smaller nonprofit, by my observation, which happens to also help smaller nonprofits overcome my aforementioned viability concerns, is their ability to focus on horizontal versus just vertical partnerships.  Larger nonprofits demand very hierarchical organizational structures; most of an employee’s time is spent with those on the employee’s team and the team manager, who then spends their remaining time with their boss.  Thus, the often-lamented silo effect occurs.  There is very little time for innovative thinking and considering inter-departmental and inter-agency collaborations.  I think smaller nonprofits, perhaps with necessity as the mother of invention, must be always looking to the left and right to see who might help in various ways or on various projects.  Via such innovative, collaborative partnerships, a collective of small nonprofits can craft innovative, well-informed, well-measured community responses, raise meaningful dollars for the work, and share the infrastructure burden.