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Challenge 21 in the series 50 Reasons Why It Is Hard to Run a Nonprofit
When was the last time your organization sent a staff member to a management training program or event that wasn't required by a funder or a regulatory body?
If you had to think about it, you've just identified the problem.
Nonprofits chronically underinvest in professional development. Training budgets are the first line item cut when money gets tight — which, in this sector, means they're almost always cut. The result is a workforce that's expected to deliver increasingly complex services with the same skills they had when they were hired.
The Association for Talent Development reports that organizations across all sectors spend an average of $1,054 per employee per year on training and development. For companies with 100 to 999 employees — which ATD calls "small" — total training spending averages about $374,000 per year.
Many nonprofits spend far less than that. In my experience, a nonprofit with 20 staff members is more likely to have a training budget of $2,000 to $5,000 — roughly $100 to $250 per person per year — than anything approaching industry averages. And that budget usually goes to compliance training (CPR, mandated reporter requirements, HIPAA) rather than skill development.
The Bridgespan Group has documented what they call a "leadership development deficit" in the nonprofit sector — a persistent gap between the number of leaders saying development matters and the number whose organizations actually invest in it. Their survey research found that most nonprofit leaders acknowledge the importance of developing the next generation, but far fewer report that their organizations are actively doing it.
That gap — between intention and action — is one of the most damaging patterns in the sector.
When you don't invest in developing your staff, three things happen — and all of them cost more than the training would have.
Skills stagnate. The grants landscape changes. Data management tools evolve. Funders expect outcomes measurement frameworks your staff wasn't trained on. The gap between what your team can do and what they need to do widens every year you don't address it.
Good people leave. Professional development isn't just about skills. It's a signal of organizational investment in the person. When a talented program manager sees no investment in her growth — no conferences, no coaching, no new skill-building — she correctly concludes that this organization sees her as a resource to be used, not a person to be developed. She starts looking.
The organization can't adapt. Nonprofits that don't invest in learning are the ones that struggle most when circumstances change — a new funding model, a shift in the regulatory environment, a community need that requires different skills than the staff currently has. Adaptability requires capability, and capability requires investment.
The way I define resilience in Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience is the ability to absorb shocks and spring forward. An organization whose staff hasn't learned anything new in three years can't do either of those things. It's brittle.
The sector treats professional development like a nice-to-have. Something for when there's extra money. There's never extra money. So it never happens.
The reframe: professional development is infrastructure, like your database or your accounting software. You wouldn't say "we can't afford QuickBooks this year" and then wonder why your finances are a mess. You shouldn't say "we can't afford to train our staff" and then wonder why your programs aren't improving.
Build development into every grant budget. Most funders will accept reasonable professional development costs as part of a grant budget. Many actively encourage it. If you're not including $500-$1,000 per staff member per grant, you're leaving money on the table.
Use free and low-cost resources strategically. Webinars, peer learning cohorts, state nonprofit association trainings, and mentoring relationships don't require a budget line item. They require intentionality. Schedule them. Protect the time. Follow up.
Create internal learning systems. Cross-training, job shadowing, and structured case consultations are free. They also build exactly the kind of organizational knowledge that reduces the risk of single points of failure (which I covered in Challenge 14).
Make development a management expectation. Every supervisor should be able to answer: what has each of my direct reports learned in the last quarter? If they can't answer that, development isn't happening — regardless of what the budget says.
One thing I've learned working with nonprofits: the organizations that figure out how to develop their people on a shoestring outperform the ones with bigger budgets but no learning culture. That's a theme I keep coming back to in Nonprofit Good News Premium.
Ask each of your direct reports: what's one skill you wish you had for your current role? Write the answers down. Then find one low-cost or free resource for each — a webinar, a peer connection, a book — and schedule time for them to use it within the next 30 days.
That's a $0 investment with a real return. Start there.
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.