The 10 moves nonprofit leaders are making to navigate this moment

This moment is a hard one, and naming it plainly helps. Funders are shifting priorities. Federal policy and funding are changing fast, and often without warning. Boards and funders want more proof of impact at the very moment results are hardest to produce. And teams are being asked to do all of it with less.

See if any of this sounds like your last few months:

• A funder’s priorities shifted, and a big part of your budget suddenly feels shaky.
• Partners aren’t signing on to keep working with you, even when the results have been strong.
• There’s real interest in your work coming from the field, but no team or system in place to follow up and turn it into anything.
• The board wants a growth plan, and you don’t have the capacity to build one, let alone deliver it.
• You’re doing more than ever, and it’s still not adding up to the traction you expected.

If a few of those landed: it’s not you, and you’re not the only one. We hear versions of these every week.

[Add a real anonymized ED quote here to ground the list in a concrete field voice.]

Across hundreds of engagements, a clear pattern has emerged in what leaders focus on to navigate moments like this. They’re doing relatively the same handful of things to increase impact, reach sustainability, and move their mission forward: making sure their services actually hit the mark for the field, tuning how they deliver, building systems that create real demand, funding the mission deliberately, and a few more. There’s a menu, and the strongest organizations are all ordering from it.

But here’s the second half, and it matters just as much: they’re not trying to do all ten at once. That’s what overwhelms a team and leaves nothing done well. Instead, they pick a few of these moves, some external, some internal, and pull them in concert. That combination, the right few, pulled together, is what actually creates momentum.

We call these ten moves strategic levers. Here they are.

Skim the ten below for the signals that sound like your organization right now.

These ten aren’t theoretical. They’re the moves that keep moving the needle for resource-constrained social-sector leaders, tried and true ways to push through a tough stretch. The art is judgment: picking the right combination for your context, your sector, and the moment you’re in.

What this looks like in practice

Here’s how the “pull a few together” idea plays out in real life. A national leadership-development nonprofit we worked with was spending too much to run its core program. It ran a cohort program for aspiring principals, and to serve each new cohort, a team of three rebuilt the content from scratch, roughly 60 design hours, about $20,000 per cohort. On top of that, it ran five in-person conferences a year, which drove up costs and made it harder for the very participants it wanted to reach to take part. The work was strong. The model paying for it was not.

Faced with rising costs, most organizations either push to raise more money or cut the program back. This one made a more deliberate choice. It read the signal, delivery was eating staff time and budget, and chose Rethink Delivery as its lever. But it didn’t stop there. It paired that with Sharpen the Offering, getting clear on what actually needed to be customized versus standardized, and Prove Impact, making sure the redesigned model still delivered results worth paying for.

What changed:

• Rethink Delivery: they redesigned the core content once, with outside support, instead of rebuilding it for every cohort, cutting customization from 60 hours to about 8 per cohort, and cost from roughly $20,000 to $2,600.
• Rethink Delivery: they replaced the five costly conferences with a model built around what partners actually wanted, one in-person kickoff, two online modules plus communities of practice, a mid-point convening, two coaching sessions, and a year-end gathering.
• Sharpen the Offering + Prove Impact: they confirmed the leaner model still produced strong results, so the savings didn’t come at the cost of quality.

The result wasn’t just cheaper. It was more sustainable to run and a better experience for participants: lower cost, less team strain, stronger engagement. That’s the pattern worth noticing. They didn’t fix everything, and they didn’t just cut. They pulled a few connected levers together, and the combination is what moved the organization from underwater to steady.

The real question: which few?

Here’s where it usually goes sideways. Faced with ten good moves, the natural instinct is to nod along and try to make progress on all of them. That’s not a strategy, it’s a to-do list, and it’s how you end up busy and stuck. Choosing well comes down to five moves.

Where to start

Here are practical tools you can use to get started immediately in figuring out which levers to pull.

None of this requires hiring anyone. Pick your levers, grab the tools, and start. And if you’d like a thought partner as you work through the choices, that’s exactly the kind of conversation we’re always glad to have.