I work for a nonprofit that gets poor results for the amount of money we spend

[ResidentialBusiness]

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I have worked in nonprofits for the entirety of my career (~15 years). I’m a highly mission-driven person, so I am generally a lot happier in my work when I feel strongly connected to the nonprofit’s aims. As an example, I’ve worked at both a public library and a private college, and I was much happier at the library even though the hours were longer, the pay less, and the work more menial — just because I felt like my work was contributing to a better cause.

I was recently hired at a very small nonprofit that, on paper, seemed to tick all the boxes for me. However, having been there for a few months now, I’m growing increasingly uncomfortable with the way it operates.

It’s a little difficult to describe while maintaining anonymity, but I think the best comparison would be a soup kitchen (very similar in terms of the services we provide and overall “goodness” of the mission). If you look at the hard data — which in my comparison would be organization budget vs. people served — the overall impact becomes … not very impressive. When you do the math, it’s like it costs our soup kitchen $50 for each individual meal served. (Again, this is not exactly what we do, but this is the best analogy I could find. We do not have any additional programs that could be justified as part of the expense while having a nebulous hard-data result, like educational programs.)

I don’t think there’s any fraud going on. I’ve seen the budget sheets and everything seems to be accounted for; the director and founder does not pay himself an exorbitant rate (it’s actually fairly low, in my experience — in fact, identical to the other staff salaries, which are good for the area we live in but definitely not luxurious). I honestly think it’s just bad management (it’s a very recently founded nonprofit and the director had no prior experience in nonprofits) and, mostly, a giant blind spot where the director doesn’t seem to have recognized that the math ain’t mathing. I think when the org was first founded, the numbers were a little better, but he’s added staff over the years at a rate that our actual output doesn’t match.

In addition to just making me unhappy, this disparity is affecting my work. Part of my job is applying for grants and other funding, and we are very often rejected. I can’t be sure, but I am assuming that the budget-to-services ratio is turning off a lot of funders. (Why would you give us $1,000 to feed 20 people a single meal, when the average meal cost in our state should mean that could feed 250 people?) It’s definitely obvious to anyone who pays a little attention; I have a good friend who works in a nonprofit of similar size and she pointed it out in casual conversation: “Wow, that’s like $X per person served.”)

So I suppose I have two questions:

1. Is there any way possible to point this out to the director in a way that is constructive? Fixing it would require a complete overhaul of the entire organization, which isn’t my purview — but as I said above, it’s affecting the results I get for the work I do. I’m afraid I’m going to just blurt it out defensively if the director continues to moan about the fact that we get rejected for grants I’m applying to. No matter how eloquently you write, a lot of funders want the hard numbers.

2. Does this reflect poorly on me? Should I just get out? I very much get the vibe that this organization is just an outlet for our director to feel good about himself — he comes from money, and has never had a real job where he wasn’t working for family, so this essentially allows him to LARP as a do-gooder without making any real difference. If I do depart, is it worth mentioning in an exit interview, or would that just be seen as a cheap parting shot?

I am grateful for any advice you might have for me. This job ticks a lot of boxes for me in terms of salary, commute length/hybrid work, and the actual tasks I’m doing, so I don’t know if I should just plod ahead while ignoring the giant elephant in the room.

Nah, you should get out.

You want to work for a mission-driven organization that’s making a real difference, and this isn’t that. This sounds very much like, as you said, a chance for the director to play at charity work without the accompanying results that make charity work worthwhile.

You want to work somewhere that’s effective. This organization isn’t.

If you were someone who just wanted a paycheck, it might not be a problem to continue on there. (Even then, it still could be a problem, depending on where the org’s funding is coming from; at a certain point there are ethical issues with working for an ineffective organization that’s taking funds away from more worthy recipients … although one can certainly argue that it’s incumbent upon funders to do enough research to see when that’s happening.) But you are someone who wants work where you have a real impact on the world, and you’ve seen enough to know this doesn’t check that very important box for you.

Moreover, this job risks holding you back professionally, especially as a fundraiser. When you’re applying for your next job, employers will want to hear about the successes you had in this one, and if you can’t point to any, that’s going to be a problem! (Perhaps less so if you don’t plan to stay in fundraising, but even then you’d still want to be able to point to a pattern of results and this job doesn’t sound like it’s positioning you well to do that.)

As for pointing out your concerns to the director, you’re actually situated very well to do that! As the person who applies for grants, it’s part of your job to know what funders are looking for and it’s entirely consistent with your job to explain that funders want to see a better budget-to-services ratio. Hell, if you really want to put effort into helping him see that, you could even try to arrange a few conversations with potential funders to get them to comment on either the org’s weakness in that area or what metrics they look for generally, so that you can then relay that back to your director. But even if you don’t do that, there’s lot of material out there that you can reference about what expenses are and aren’t considered reasonable when applying for grants. You’d be doing this not necessarily because you expect the director will overhaul the entire organization in response to it (he probably won’t, although who knows) but simply to try to break through the blind spot that he appears to have. If he’s moaning about being rejected for grants, this is a conversation that absolutely should happen.

And yes, you can mention it in an exit interview too. It’s not a cheap shot to say, “As someone who’s in this field because I want to have an impact, I ended up being disappointed by the results we get for the money we invest, and would like to see a higher effectiveness rate as measured by X.”

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