Scarcity Mentality Is Robbing Your Nonprofit Blind
My nonprofit hot take for today: Scarcity mindset absolutely crushes nonprofit teams.
I hear it ALL the time in nonprofit circles:
“We don’t budget for comm staff roles, so we ask volunteers to craft all our donor communications.”
>> But your donors aren’t receiving regular updates or reports on their missional impact—and that stunts repeat giving.
“We don’t budget for professional graphic design services, so we add those tasks to our admin’s stack.”
>> But your admin is overworked and hasn’t been trained to create to use design in strategic and consistent ways—and that minimizes your missional impact.
“We don’t budget for tech support, so each team member troubleshoots their own tech issues.”
>> But your team loses hours trying to resolve email settings, database management, and website errors—when they could be connecting with donors and implementing life-changing programming.
All of this is related to scarcity mentality. It’s assuming that a shoestring budget is the best way to move dollars toward advancing the mission.
Scarcity mentality actually steals traction from your mission by pulling your team away from their respective roles and skill sets into the emergency of the day. Those essential tasks are put on hold to manage the emergency—which usually lasts longer without experts at-the-ready to resolve it.
Now, this isn’t about the whole team taking time out to pull together in pinch to get a project over the finish line. I’m talking about a mental framework that keeps your team spinning and ineffective, day in day out. Asking your team to put their own responsibilities on hold to handle Other Tasks (or Emergencies) as Assigned is not only draining, but also detrimental to your team’s productivity and mental stamina.
Your team’s energy and overall health directly impacts their work from day to day. Scarcity mentality stretches your team thin and adds a lot of stress. And that has a direct, often negative, missional impact.
That’s why it’s essential to expel scarcity mindset as the ruling factor in your decision making as CEO / executive director. (Even when it comes to tracking time to daily work, as I covered in the previous installment for this series.) All this is summarized in an entry for the 40 Nonprofit Trends for 2022 report from NonProfit Pro. This report is full of insights from leaders, including #30 from Tim Sarrantonio titled Put Employees’ Health Over Budget. Sarrantonio urges:
“For too long, the nonprofit sector has relied on a scarcity mindset that asked its workers to do too much with too little. We need to focus on creating healthy work environments, meaningful support for diversity, equity and inclusion, and to prioritize investments into emotional and physical health for the people we rely upon. If a budget is a moral document, then we need to see actual line items for professional development of staff, paid time for organizational initiatives related to social justice in our communities, and support for childcare and remote work.”
I agree completely. When you eliminate scarcity mentality, it’s a win for your team and it directly affects your missional impact.
Is your nonprofit running on scarcity? Make sure your team is having the greatest impact—schedule a 15-minute Change Chat to discuss how.
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