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Challenge 16 in the series 50 Reasons Why It Is Hard to Run a Nonprofit
Every nonprofit executive director I've worked with has a version of this story. The board spent nine months on a strategic plan. The consultant was expensive. The document was beautiful. It identified five strategic priorities, 15 objectives, and 47 action items.
Eighteen months later, three of those priorities have been touched. The other two sit in a binder on a shelf, referenced at board meetings with the phrase "we're making progress on that."
But here's the thing. They aren't making progress on that.
It's tempting to blame execution failures on poor management or lack of follow-through. Sometimes that's true. But more often, the real problem is structural: nonprofits chronically operate with too few people trying to do too many things, without the project management infrastructure that other organizations take for granted.
Project Management Institute research on nonprofits has found that only about 16% of nonprofit projects are completed on time and on budget, with roughly half completed late and over budget, and nearly a third canceled outright.
The bottleneck here is capacity, not motivation.
Consider what a typical nonprofit asks of its staff. The program director manages client services, writes grant reports, supervises three employees and two volunteers, handles a piece of the fundraising, and serves on two community coalitions. She's also supposed to implement Strategic Priority 3.
Strategic Priority 3 doesn't stand a chance.
In my book, I identify "projects falling through the cracks" as one of the 50 challenges that makes nonprofits fragile. The cracks aren't random. They follow predictable patterns.
No project ownership. A strategic objective gets assigned to "the team" or "the leadership group." In practice, that means nobody owns it. Without a single person whose name is on a deliverable with a deadline, the work doesn't happen.
No infrastructure for tracking. Most nonprofits don't have project management tools. They don't have regular check-in cadences for implementation. They don't have dashboards. The strategic plan lives in a document, not in a system. When nobody is watching the progress, progress stops.
Volunteer-dependent execution. Some implementation tasks get assigned to board members or volunteers. Board members have day jobs. Volunteers have competing commitments. The work gets done when someone has time, which means it often doesn't get done at all.
Competing urgencies. Nonprofit staff live in permanent triage. Today's crisis — the funder who needs an emergency report, the client who shows up in crisis, the staff member who just resigned — always beats next quarter's strategic priority. The urgent crowds out the important, every time.
Too many priorities. A strategic plan with five priorities and 47 action items isn't a plan. It's a wish list. When everything is a priority, nothing is. The organizations I've seen execute most effectively are the ones that choose two things and did them well.
The standard nonprofit response to dropped balls is to try harder. Work longer hours. Add another initiative. Ask the development director to also manage the volunteer program.
That response makes the problem worse. Every new task assigned to an overstretched staff member doesn't just risk that task failing — it increases the odds that existing tasks fail too.
The reframe is this: your capacity to execute is a strategic variable, not a background condition. If your organization can reliably execute three major initiatives per year, then your strategic plan should contain three major initiatives — not seven. The plan should be built around your actual capacity, not your aspirations.
This is where lean risk management comes in. When I work with nonprofits on risk identification, "projects falling through the cracks" shows up in almost every risk inventory. But most organizations treat it as an operational nuisance rather than a strategic risk. It belongs on your risk register with an owner, a response plan, and a review cycle.
Assign a single owner to every strategic objective. One name. One deadline. One check-in schedule. If you can't name the person, the objective isn't real.
Build implementation check-ins into your calendar. Monthly 30-minute reviews of strategic plan progress. Not the annual board retreat — monthly operational reviews where staff report on movement. If there's no movement, name why. If the "why" is capacity, that's data you need.
Cut your priorities in half. If your strategic plan has five or more priorities, you have too many. Pick the two or three that matter most and do them. The others can wait. This feels like failure. It's actually discipline.
Stop assigning implementation to volunteers. Volunteers are valuable for defined, bounded tasks — not for sustained strategic execution. If a strategic priority depends on a board member finding time on weekends, it's not going to happen. Be honest about that.
Invest in basic project management. This doesn't mean buying software (though that can help). It means creating a simple tracking system — even a shared spreadsheet — where every strategic action item has an owner, a status, and a next step. If you're looking for practical tools to build this kind of operational discipline into your nonprofit, that's a central focus of Nonprofit Good News Premium.
Pull out your strategic plan. List every action item. Next to each one, write the name of the person responsible and the date it was last touched. If you can't fill in both columns for every item, you've just identified your implementation gap — and now you can decide what to do about it.
This is part of an ongoing series based on the 50 challenges outlined in Appendix 1 of Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience (Wiley, 2023). Each post names one challenge clearly and offers a practical reframe with steps you can take this week. For deeper coverage of nonprofit strategy, risk, and resilience — including tools you can put to work immediately — check out Nonprofit Good News Premium.