There is nothing random about nonprofit success.

Random Acts of Kindness Week is a once-a-year, worldwide reminder to “make kindness the norm.” It is precisely the sort of positive, change-oriented thinking that drives almost every nonprofit organization. Yet how much randomness is actually at play here? If people around the world start making a conscious and collective effort to inject more kindness into their day, it’s suddenly not so random at all. In fact, there are even school-centered curriculums, “RAKtivist” databases and weekly activities translated into 11 different languages just for this one week of kindness.

So why the lack of randomness? Because that’s what works. If you’re actually trying to “make kindness the norm,” you need a plan — even if that plan is counterintuitively built around randomness. 

This is a lesson every nonprofit organization needs to learn.

Failures in philanthropy aren’t about anything unknowable. They aren’t about something random. Quite the contrary, quantitative studies of nonprofit failure are becoming increasingly common. And what’s the underlying lesson? Nonprofits fail for predictable, not-so-random reasons. After decades of evaluating organizations at every level, these are the five not-so-random reasons for failure I’ve noticed most often.

1. Their organizational assessment happens too late.

You wouldn’t promise someone you’re going to chop down a tree before knowing whether or not you’re strong enough to swing an axe. Likewise, you wouldn’t spend all week preparing a garden before you knew whether or not the soil underneath was fertile.

Nonprofit organizations have a bad habit of putting the cart before the horse — the mission and vision before the organizational assessment. The leadership at these doomed organizations starts dreaming up objectives and milestones before even developing a deep understanding of their own capabilities. Nonprofit capacity is considered one of the chief indicators of social performance, and these organizations don’t even take a comprehensive look in the mirror before getting started.

The ones that do are the organizations that find sustainable success. After all, early organizational assessment is directly linked to organizational efficiency and building out greater capacity in the long term. 

2. They don’t differentiate between growth strategy and impact strategy.

The Super Soaker was one of the most popular toys of the 1990s. A hand-pump water blaster with a sleek design, these guns would shoot streams of water much more impressive than any traditional squirt gun. The only catch was that the guns were manually-pressurized, meaning you always had to keep pumping in air to keep shooting at a steady rate. If you stopped pushing in air altogether, the gun simply wouldn’t work.  

Your organization’s impact strategies are about hitting specific targets — achieving certain impacts. Meanwhile, your organization’s growth strategy is what keeps your resources expanding with one eye fixed on the challenges of the future. There’s nothing wrong with an organization getting focused on achieving a specific outcome. However, if those organizations fail to understand that scaling social impact is critical to any future success, then it all comes to nothing.

3. They don’t create a full-fledged business plan and pitch deck.

Nonprofits don’t need less strategic planning. They just need more business planning — and a perfectly polished pitch deck.

Strategic planning is essential to resource allocation, long-term financial viability and organizational alignment on what really matters: vision and mission. At the same time, preparing a business plan is a unique and comprehensive process that yields strategic clarity and performance measurements that cannot come from traditional strategizing.

Unfortunately, this isn’t standard for most organizations. In fact, almost half of nonprofits don’t even have a written-out strategy, much less a robust business plan and subsequent pitch deck. Has your organization nailed down the specifics of revenue sources, operating costs, program costs and capital structure? If not, it’s time to get started.

4. They don’t get the most out of their feedback. 

Up to 96% of nonprofit organizations collect some form of feedback. For most, this feedback is little more than a means of advanced accountability. However, it can be so much more than that.

When an organization identifies the right stakeholders and asks the right questions, performance feedback continually produces results much more dynamic than simple verification. This type of feedback goes beyond accountability to take a closer look at additional issues that matter to funders and providers, such as performance measurement and service improvement.

Is this the sort of feedback your organization collects? Does it know how to use it?

5. They lack formalized investment and partnership teams.

If your organization doesn’t have a formal investment and partnership (I&P) team, you’re already at a disadvantage. 

Your I&P team is the group responsible for putting the business plan and pitch deck to work. These teams should be structured and intentional with public investment and partnership officers (IPOs) gleaned from core members of the organization’s senior-most leadership. While these individuals are largely devoted to fundraising, additional responsibilities around planning and execution gives team members the knowledge they need to court prospects effectively.

During the test and fund phase, IPOs act as the “eyes and ears” of the organization, gathering market feedback and revising the plans in turn. What’s more, IPOs are accountable for execution, measuring outcomes even if they don’t completely align with aspirations, which is typical for younger or struggling nonprofits.

From random kindness to real change

Take time during this year’s Random Acts of Kindness Week to notice just how not-so-random effective philanthropy must be in order to achieve social impact. The most successful nonprofits are full of purpose and intention. How does your organization measure up? Are its efforts more in line with random kindness or real social change?

Donald Summers is the founder and CEO of Altruist Partners LLC, a social impact advisory firm dedicated to helping mission-driven organizations achieve their most ambitious goals. Summers is also the founder and executive director of the Altruist Accelerator, the firm’s nonprofit arm, which delivers the Altruist Growth and Impact Methodology to ambitious nonprofits and NGOs of all sizes and stages. His 2024 book Scaling Altruism: A Proven Pathway for Accelerating Nonprofit Growth and Impact became the #1 New Nonprofit Release on Amazon.