Before the Crisis Chooses for You: Rethinking Strategic Options for Nonprofits

Every nonprofit board I have worked with has at least one conversation it isn’t quite having. It surfaces in the parking lot after a meeting, or in a phone call between the board chair and the executive director that starts with “this is probably nothing, but.” A long-tenured leader is starting to talk about what comes next. A program that once paid for itself now quietly draws on everything else. A neighboring organization seems to be serving the same families, applying to the same funders, and hiring from the same small pool of people. 

None of these is a crisis. That is precisely why they tend to stay informal. When things are steady, raising a question about the organization’s future can feel disloyal, or premature, or like inviting trouble. So the question waits. And in my experience, questions that wait have a way of being answered later by circumstance rather than by choice. 

It’s the case I make with our clients and partners, and the one I want to make here: have those conversations earlier, while the organization still has the time, the relationships, and the financial footing to treat them as planning rather than rescue. 

The word that closes the room 

Part of what makes these conversations hard is vocabulary. Mention the word “merger” in a board meeting and you can feel the temperature change. For many people in our sector, it carries an unspoken verdict: if we are talking about merging, we must be failing. The conversation ends before it starts, and the underlying question (is the way we are organized today still the best way to serve our mission?) goes unasked. 

That framing does real damage, because a merger is only one option among many, and rarely the first one worth considering. Between “business as usual” and a full combination of two organizations sits a wide range of choices. An organization can redesign a program, develop earned revenue, or restructure internally. It can run a program jointly with a peer, share back-office functions like finance or HR, take on or seek out a fiscal sponsor, or enter a formal strategic partnership. These options are not new. What is new, for many nonprofit leaders, is thinking of them as an ongoing menu of tools rather than a last resort. 

In our work, most organizations that explore this territory land somewhere in the middle: shared services, joint programming, some consolidation of administrative work. That middle ground is where much of the real progress happens, and it rarely makes headlines. A useful principle is to start with mission and impact, and then look for the least complicated option that addresses what you are actually seeing. Sometimes that is a partnership agreement. Sometimes it is a shared bookkeeper. Sometimes, after honest examination, it is nothing at all, and that is a perfectly good answer when it is reached on purpose. 

Reframed this way, the question shifts from “should we merge?” to something far more generative: what future are we building toward, and what range of moves best protects our mission on the way there? 

Openness is not the same as readiness 

A board that is willing to talk about structure has taken an important step. But willingness is not readiness, and confusing the two is how good intentions turn into rushed decisions. The right question is not “are we ready to merge?” It is “can we explore our options responsibly?” 

Exploring responsibly asks a few things of an organization. It needs a clear sense of what must be preserved, whether that is a program, a community relationship, or a way of working that defines who you are. It needs a board that can discuss the organization’s structure calmly, without treating the topic as an alarm bell. It needs some awareness of who else serves the same people, and some help from outside: a peer who has been through it, legal counsel who knows nonprofit partnerships, a funder brought in early as a collaborator rather than a decider. 

And it needs a clear view of the numbers. This is where I see the most organizations stall, and it is rarely for lack of effort. Many small and midsize nonprofits have books that are accurate but not yet useful: they satisfy the auditor, yet they cannot quickly tell a board how many months of runway the organization has, how much of next year’s revenue is restricted, or what a given program truly costs to run. Without that visibility, every option on the spectrum looks either safer or scarier than it really is. Sharing services changes a cost structure. Fiscal sponsorship changes how restricted dollars flow. A merger means reconciling two sets of books, two reserve policies, and two sets of donor commitments. 

That is why I’m glad to share this piece with the readers of The Charity CFO. The partnership between an executive director and whoever stewards the finances, whether on staff or through an outsourced team, is often what makes a strategic conversation possible at all. When a leader can put a clean, current picture of the organization in front of the board, the conversation shifts from anxiety to analysis. A simple scenario (what would we do if our largest funding source fell by a fifth?) stops being a frightening hypothetical and becomes a planning exercise. 

Readiness as a habit 

The organizations I’ve seen navigate change most gracefully are rarely the ones with a perfect plan. They are the ones that have practiced the conversation. Their boards treat “what if” as a normal agenda item rather than a sign of trouble. It becomes a standing component of annual 

and quarterly planning activities. Their leaders keep a current snapshot of the organization close at hand, and they know their peers well enough to pick up the phone when an opportunity, or a problem, appears. When a real decision finally arrives, it lands on prepared ground.

None of this requires deciding anything today. In fact, one of the most valuable outcomes of an early, honest conversation is the confidence to say “not now” and mean it, because the choice was made deliberately rather than by default. Each step of exploration can end in “continue” or “pause,” and both are legitimate. 

So if there is a conversation your board has been circling, consider this an invitation to bring it into the room. Being ready isn’t about planning for failure. It’s about staying open to what’s possible, and leading with clarity when change comes, as it always does. 

About the author 

Christophe Poirrier is co-founder and Strategy and Operations Lead at Two Five One, which advises nonprofit leaders through change and transition in strategy, org design, nonprofit mergers, fundraising, and capacity building. Before Two Five One, he worked in strategy consulting and financial services. Readers who want to go deeper can find Two Five One’s series on the phases of a nonprofit merger and the firm’s piece in NonprofitPro, What Nonprofit Leaders Should Know About Mergers and Partnerships.