Doing good while reading good — join the Nonprofit Good News-Letter.
50 Reasons Why It Is Hard to Run a Nonprofit — Challenge 34: Enhanced Threat of Failure
A reentry program director sits across from a funder. She's presenting outcomes. Of the 200 participants last year, 68% were re-arrested within three years.
The funder's face says it all: that's a 68% failure rate.
Except it isn't. And that misreading — by funders, by boards, sometimes by the organizations themselves — is one of the most damaging dynamics in the nonprofit sector.
Here is what the data actually shows.
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, 68% of formerly incarcerated people are re-arrested within three years. Within nine years, the number rises to 83%.
Those are baseline rates — not program outcomes. They describe what happens to the ENTIRE population of people leaving incarceration, most of whom receive little or no reentry support. A program that matches the baseline isn't failing. A program that beats it — even modestly — is demonstrating measurable impact against one of the hardest problems in public policy.
But funders don't see it that way. They see 68% and hear "failure."
The mismatch extends beyond criminal justice.
Substance abuse relapse rates run between 40% and 60% in early recovery. Those numbers look terrible in a grant report. But here's the comparison that changes everything: hypertension treatment has a relapse rate of 50-70%. Asthma treatment: 50-70%.
Nobody calls diabetes treatment a failure because a patient's blood sugar spikes. Nobody defunds a cardiology clinic because some patients stop taking their medication. These are chronic conditions. Relapse is a feature of the condition, not a failure of the treatment.
Addiction is a chronic condition. So is the constellation of poverty, trauma, mental illness, and social exclusion that drives homelessness, recidivism, and family instability.
The nonprofit sector has accepted a measurement framework designed for acute problems — fix it once, declare victory — and applied it to chronic conditions that require ongoing management. The framework was wrong from the start.
The data on long-term outcomes tells a very different story than the short-term metrics funders typically demand.
Hazelden Betty Ford's patient outcomes research found that 69.6% of patients discharged with staff approval remained abstinent at 12 months. And long-term outcomes improve further — recovery is real, but it's measured in years, not quarters.
Homelessness data shows a similar pattern. According to research across 388 continuums of care, return-to-homelessness rates vary dramatically by exit type. People leaving emergency shelters return at 22% within two years. People exiting to permanent housing return at only 12%.
The intervention matters. The timeline matters. But the measurement window funders use — typically 6 to 12 months — is too short to capture the real impact.
And the trend lines are actually encouraging. State-level reincarceration rates have dropped 23% since 2008, according to the Council of State Governments Justice Center. The field is making progress. It's just invisible in quarterly reports.
The internal damage from the measurement mismatch is severe.
Staff morale erodes. When your team works with people in crisis — pouring skill, energy, and emotional labor into every case — and the funder report frames their outcomes as failure, the message is devastating. Challenge 31 in this series covered the existential weight of facing unsolvable problems. Challenge 34 is what happens when that weight gets reinforced by your own metrics.
Board engagement drops. Board members who see "68% re-arrested" don't hear "we're beating the baseline by 12 points." They hear "this isn't working." Over time, the board loses confidence in the program and starts asking whether the resources should go elsewhere.
Funding dries up. Funders who expect acute-problem success rates from chronic-condition work will eventually stop funding. Not because the work isn't effective — because the measurement framework makes effective work look like failure.
The single most important thing you can do is change the frame before you present the data.
The next time you sit across from a funder or stand in front of your board, put this comparison on your first slide: substance abuse relapse rates are 40-60%. Hypertension relapse rates are 50-70%. Nobody defunds hypertension treatment.
Then present your outcomes. The frame changes everything.
This isn't spin. It's accuracy. You're not hiding bad results — you're providing the context that makes the results interpretable. Without the baseline comparison, a 40% relapse rate looks like failure. With it, a 40% relapse rate looks like exactly what the clinical literature predicts — and the question becomes: what are we doing to bend that rate lower over time?
The organizations that sustain funding for chronic-condition work are the ones that educate their funders and boards on what realistic outcomes look like BEFORE presenting data. If you're walking into a board meeting without that context, you're setting yourself up.
For a deeper look at how to build outcome frameworks that honestly capture impact with challenging populations — and how to present them to boards and funders — Nonprofit Good News Premium covers this regularly. It's one of the most consequential framing challenges in the sector.
Look at the outcome metrics you report to your largest funder. Ask yourself: does this report include the baseline rate for the condition we're treating? Does the funder know what success looks like for the population we serve?
If the answer is no, draft a one-page context document. Include the clinical or population-level baseline, your results against that baseline, and the timeline over which meaningful change occurs in your field. Attach it to your next report.
You're not lowering the bar. You're putting the bar where the evidence says it belongs.
This is part of an ongoing series exploring the 50 challenges outlined in Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience (Wiley, 2023). Subscribe to Nonprofit Good News Premium for implementation tools and deeper analysis.