Stop Calling It Resilience
When financial vulnerability becomes business as usual.
Nonprofit leaders are remarkably good at making things work.
A major donor pulls back? We adjust. A grant doesn't renew? We find another way. 16 holiday gatherings? We show up each time like it’s the only. Revenue comes in below projections? We tighten the budget, rally the team, and somehow keep moving.
And when we make it through to December 31, we call it resilience. Sometimes it is. But sometimes we're celebrating our ability to survive organizational conditions that stopped serving the mission and its people years ago.
There's a difference between being resilient and being really good at operating on the edge.
The numbers behind the narrative.
As nonprofit leaders, we tend to measure fundraising success by the numbers we can see most easily. Total revenue. Progress toward the annual goal. Year-over-year growth. Those numbers matter. But they don't always tell us how financially resilient our organizations actually are.
Consider two organizations that each raise $2 million annually.
One receives that revenue from a relatively diverse group of donors with consistent giving patterns. The other receives half its annual philanthropy from just ten relationships.
Both can report the same fundraising success. But their exposure to donor loss is very different. Neither model is inherently wrong. Major donor relationships can be extraordinary assets. But concentration creates dependencies that leadership should understand and actively steward.
And here's the uncomfortable question: Without pulling a report, can you identify accurately how dependent your organization is on its ten largest donors?
We normalize what we learn to survive.
I've spent more than twenty years working as and alongside nonprofit executives, and one pattern continues to stand out. We're often so focused on making the current year work that we don't create the space to step back and examine the conditions making the work full of friction in the first place.
We celebrate the development team that closes an unexpected funding gap. We praise the Major Gifts Officer who personally saves a major donor relationship. We applaud the organization that manages another year of financial uncertainty without disrupting programs.
Those accomplishments deserve recognition. But what if our extraordinary ability to respond is masking an organizational vulnerability that deserves attention? What if our revenue model is more fragile than our annual fundraising results suggest? And what if we could do something about it before the next unexpected challenge?
A question worth answering before year-end.
Here's a simple exercise I encourage nonprofit executives to try. Pull your most recent completed fiscal year's philanthropic giving report. Identify your ten largest donors and calculate their combined contributions as a percentage of total philanthropic revenue.
Then ask yourself:
What percentage of our revenue depends on these ten relationships?
How has that dependence changed over the last several years?
What would happen if one or two of those relationships changed significantly?
Do we have a deliberate strategy for strengthening and diversifying our donor relationships?
There's no universal percentage that automatically makes an organization healthy or unhealthy. Context matters. But the exercise can reveal a dependency that deserves more attention than it currently receives.
Grab the free Revenue Dependency Check Worksheet here.
We've put together a simple worksheet to help you calculate your organization's donor concentration and interpret what you find.
Resilience should be something we build, not something we continually prove.
As we move toward 2027, nonprofit leaders have enough uncertainty to navigate without being surprised by risks hiding in their own fundraising history. Understanding those risks doesn't eliminate them. But it creates opportunities to make more informed decisions about donor stewardship, revenue diversification, staffing, and organizational priorities.
That's the kind of work we're doing through The Collaborative Collective's Five-Year Fundraising Lookbacks. We examine five years of giving history to help nonprofit leaders understand not just how much they've raised, but how donor relationships, revenue patterns, and opportunities have evolved. Because your organization deserves more than another year of surviving. It deserves the capacity to thrive.
If you're curious about what your donor history might reveal, we’d welcome a conversation. Book a zoom call or send us a text message!
The future doesn't wait. We help you meet it.
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