Reexamining Nonprofit Management Requirements

Changing nonprofit demands - Part 1

Image description: surreal image with a landscape of dead trees, a figure, and several distorted pocket watches flying overhead. Image by Susann Mielke from Pixabay

Over the course of my 35-year nonprofit career, the nonprofit sector and the requirements for leadership have changed significantly. I have witnessed positive and negative shifts, and I have definitely had to adapt to change. I’ve absorbed the new requirements slowly and been able to adjust to most of them. Luckily, I truly enjoy learning. But it is clear to me that possessing all the skills and knowledge ideally needed to run a modern nonprofit is difficult to impossible. This is of course not news. The question is, how do we daylight some of the trends and requirements and reevaluate which are actual improving our results?

In my next three posts, I will discuss how expectations of nonprofit leaders have changed over the course of my own career in the areas of professionalization, evaluation, and fundraising.