What can we do to improve nonprofit staff retention?

Last fall we wrote about findings from the first two years of the Social Impact Staff Retention (SISR) project. An annual practitioner-led survey, SISR tracks why U.S.-based nonprofit employees stay, leave, or stay anyway. In the survey’s third year, the data is beginning to paint a clear, consistent picture about the experience of nonprofit workers. Here’s a weighted average of key findings from the 2024-2026 survey responses:

—71% of employees say they are, or will be, looking for new jobs within a year.

—21% of employees suggest they are rarely fulfilled in their work.

— Of those looking for new jobs, 34% expect to definitively stay in the social sector.

The reasons given for staying or leaving have remained steady, as well. Those staying cite hybrid/remote flexibility (76%), being aligned with the mission (67%), and healthy work environments (66%). Those planning to leave cite inequitable workloads (59%), unsupportive bosses (54%), and inadequate compensation/benefits (53%).

What can nonprofits do to improve staff retention? Here are a few suggestions based on some of the more striking SISR data and decades of our own experiences guiding and growing staff.

Rethink workloads to protect staff and those they serve

The data is clear about the main issue driving nonprofit employees away: workload. It’s an issue of plates being too full and lacking clarity on expectations; two employees can hold the same title yet carry different workloads. We’ve seen this with outright and obvious tasks, like whose responsibility it is, really, to update the CRM. It also includes invisible work, like coordinating action items from all-staff meetings. 

To support a real conversation about workload, auditing the capacity of your staff is doable and, frankly, necessary. You can search for various examples on your own, though a helpful formula looks like this:

admin time (e.g., meetings) + assigned hours (e.g., donor visits) ÷ gross hours = utilization

Imagine Michelle has 40 hours available (gross hours) and spends 10 hours in meetings plus 36 hours on donor visits. That’s a utilization rate of 46 hours, or six hours (15%) beyond her capacity. In this scenario, Michelle’s workload leaves no room for a conversation about self-care. This means, along with Michelle suffering, the work itself suffers—as well as the people we intend to serve through the work.

In our experience, the optimal utilization rate is 80-85%. Beyond the argument for staff retention alone—which, to be clear, should be enough—a fair utilization rate can pay off on the business side, too. Companies like 3M have built this kind of “slack” into their work for decades. Its “15% culture” lets employees spend up to 15% of their work time on projects of their choosing. That freedom has produced some of the company’s most famous products, like Post-its. The lesson for nonprofits? If we’re all operating at 115% capacity, we leave ourselves no time to think, experiment, and rest.

If you’ve looked at your utilization rate and it’s overloaded, you may want to consider your programming. If you held up a mirror to [Program X], can you confidently still say it’s still relevant and running well? A question to ask might be simpler than you think: If we launched [Program X] today, would we do it the same way? If not, has anything changed that might change our work?

Build on what’s working

Survey respondents have also been clear about why they stay: flexibility, mission alignment, and healthy environments. In our experience, however, these things often work by accident instead of by design. They’re worth building with purpose to encourage staff to stay. Here’s how:

Flexibility: If you purport to be a flexible organization, write it down. It doesn’t need to be a robust policy (e.g., Centre for Public Impact’s “Flexibility with Responsibility”), but it does need codifying so the same opportunities exist for, and apply to, everyone.

Mission alignment: It’s one thing to hire people who are passionate about the work. But how do you sustain them once they sign on? Think about how you can build deliberate touchpoints that keep the work visible under increasingly weighty workloads. For example, Evan begins every meeting with a simple prompt: Hi, hello, how are you/we? It centers individuals and teams as humans first before diving into the important work. This translates well to the idea of healthy environments.

Healthy environment: We’ve all heard the saying that people leave because of their managers. The opposite is also true: People stay because someone checked in. It could be a manager who notices spikes in workload, a team that covers for you without keeping score, or a work culture where asking for help is not read as falling behind.

None of this is a fix-all and we don’t pretend to have one. What we do have is data from three years of nonprofiteers telling us what keeps them at their jobs and what pushes them out the door. Consider it an invitation to discuss it and care for your teams as seriously as you care for your communities. 

The 2027 SISR survey is open for responses through October 31. If you’re a nonprofit employee, we’d welcome your perspective and voice.

Photo credit: anatoliycherkas/Getty Images

Candid insights publication guidelines