As nonprofits of all sizes gear up for the coming new year, it’s important to look back at the past year and identify the things that have and haven’t worked. Nonprofits have their own unique set of trends and best practices, distinct from the public and private sector, but they also depend on many of the same technological and organizational tools as everyone else. Because they rarely have the discretionary funding and resources to explore every new tool, nonprofits tend to be much more careful about following trends.
They also have a different set of performance indicators and a wholly different definition of “success”, which may lead them away from best practices adopted by the business world that could actually prove quite beneficial and be worth exploring. Some areas of focus, such as security, hiring, and staff retention, are critical for nonprofits to invest more effort in 2025, as they offer the same exact risks and benefits as they do at any other organization. In areas like fundraising, however, there are some clear indications of a shift in the coming year, one which could offer good news to struggling nonprofits and mean leaving organizational austerity in the past. Here are some key trends you should plan to move away from in the coming year:
Financial belt tightening can finally loosen
The yearslong fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, surge in inflation, and resulting economic uncertainty seems to be ending. While there are reasons to be skeptical of a full-on boom, many indicators show that the economy is in good shape, with wages growing, inflation lowering, and unemployment staying low. While many factors, including the results of the recent election, could lead to changes in either direction, it’s clear that the financial situation in the country has by many measures returned to pre-pandemic stability.
This is great news for many nonprofits, who learned to accept cost- and program-cutting as a standard part of survival during the lean post-pandemic years. As a nonprofit leader, it may be time for you to consider shifting gears in your approach, starting the new year moving away from a reflex towards cost-cutting and instead looking into expanding your fundraising efforts to support more ambitious programs. Some predictions show that the increases in individual and organizational giving are set to increase in the coming year by as much as 5.3%. While this isn’t going to be evenly spread across every nonprofit, it is a sign that you can start to embrace more ambitious fundraising goals and organizational efforts.
Return to office mandates aren’t changing minds
It will depend on the nature of your organization, as some organizations do require in-person work for face-to-face interactions with clients or the general public, but the overall trend in work indicates that most employees are highly invested in hybrid or fully remote work. This once hot button issue seems to have settled, even as some large organizations demand a full return to office. Many of the most high-profile reversals of remote work policies have been revealed to be ‘layoffs in disguise’, and have done little to reverse the growing employee sentiment in favor of hybrid work.
As a nonprofit, giving some or all of your team remote work flexibility can lead to many benefits, saving you on office overhead, allowing you to recruit from a much wider geographic range, and to offer hybrid work as a perk to attract new employees. Although many balk at this new trend and still believe in the many hard to measure benefits of in-office work, it’s clear that employees are moving in a different direction. You would do well to take note.
It’s time to take data security seriously
Amid the high profile data breaches and disclosures of zero day vulnerabilities is another trend, one which is going to cause major issues for nonprofits which don’t take heed. Nonprofit and other mission-driven organizations are becoming increasingly popular targets for hacking, with almost 68% falling victim to a data breach in the last three years. Nonprofits may not themselves have extensive financial resources to plunder but still collect large amounts of donor and other personal information, all of which hackers can use to engage in digital extortion schemes or other crimes.
Many organizations do not invest seriously in digital security tools and best practices, quite often making the mistake of assuming that because they are small in scale or in financial resources, they do not present a significant target. Additionally, smaller and less well-resourced organizations typically choose to spend less on security training, which makes them an easier target to penetrate and extract data from. If you’re like many other nonprofits and you’ve been putting security on the back burner, now is the time to start taking it seriously.
It’s time to take a closer look at AI hype
We’re now a little over two years removed from the release of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and the explosive growth of AI tools in nearly every aspect of our digital lives. AI organizations like OpenAI have attracted more investment dollars than any organization in history, thanks to the gaudy adoption numbers and projected productivity benefits of these tools. Nonprofits are no stranger to AI, outpacing other organizations in terms of adoption and usage.
However, many are predicting that 2025 will be a “prove it” year for AI. As the costs for running AI tools balloons, many are starting to question whether there is a route to profitability. Some are also predicting a stock market bubble localized around AI products, as the increasing cost of running data centers forces AI tools to become highly expensive and not worth the potential productivity boost. Whether you’re only dabbling or an enthusiastic adopter, these indicators should lead you to reexamine the ways you may already be depending on AI tools, and consider alternatives should any of these predictions come true.
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The information contained in this article is not a substitute for legal advice or counsel and has been pulled from multiple sources.
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