Nonprofit Crisis Toolkit
How do small, community-based nonprofit organizations effectively manage and succeed in moments of crisis?
Crisis is inevitable. Luckily, there are plenty of resources to help your nonprofit prepare, mitigate, and respond—if your organization has the capacity to get help.
For a small nonprofit, most crisis response resources are financially out of reach, improperly scaled, and reliant on a large employee base to be effective.
So, if your tiny nonprofit is in crisis, what do you do? Chances are, you don’t have time to research and scale down tried and true methods or the budget to hire a consultant; you need to act quickly and efficiently.
This toolkit is here to help.
It’s a free resource that discusses how small nonprofit organizations can effectively manage and succeed in moments of crisis to help you identify, respond, and later protect your organization from the inevitable.
Low on time?
Skip ahead to the 5 key characteristics for crisis success or the worksheet for Building your own Crisis Response Plan.
Click here to learn more about consulting options for workshops or one-on-one assessments.
Need more help?
Let’s talk about scope.
We’re looking specifically at organizations that:
have annual budgets of $300,000 or less
have 4 or less full-time employees
are community-based* organizations
*I’m defining community-based as an organization that is a) representative of a specific region, segment of a community, or common interest and b) provides educational or related services in that community. Arts and cultural organizations are common type of this subsection.
So, what is a crisis?
And why is it so different for a small, community-based organization?
4 horsemen of the nonprofit apocalypse
Scholars point to these hallmark signs:
An element of surprise
Mission is threatened or significantly disrupted
There’s a sense of urgency
The crisis is specific to the organization and there are no large-scale supports to help the organization through
Crises are not the same as major changes!
In community-based organizations, responses to crisis and change can look the same because timelines are slowed to allow for community input.
Organizational change models are a great resource for navigating crisis and building an ethical, community-centered action plan.
Just be careful to use these theories as tools to inform your plan, not the only solution. If not handled properly, major changes can quickly lead to crisis.
for a small nonprofit, crises often appear as:*
funding threats
aka a major funding source disappears suddenly
building threats
aka there’s an expensive problem with your physical space
internal threats
aka a key person acts unethically or left suddenly
small organizations are often less equipped to deal with these crises because:
Smaller budgets = smaller margin of error. They have less ability to prepare for and prevent crisis or hire help when it arises.
Staff often are spread thin. They have little capacity to take on crisis management roles without it affecting mission related activities.
Single staff members are often in charge of multiple (or all) aspects of the organization. So, when someone leaves, the organization must either look for someone with a unique combination of skills (aka a unicorn) or reformat the organization’s structure entirely (which drains valuable administrative time).
Labor is often volunteer reliant. Volunteers have limited time, resources, and expertise in crisis management (it’s also unethical to expect volunteers to change their lives drastically to help).
Smaller client bases = less external supports. Major news outlets, public figures, or companies are less likely to know the organization or have any interest in helping.
*Literature on crisis management identifies other types of threats, such as external (like purposeful sabotage or an unwarranted media attack) or natural disasters. This toolkit can generally apply to those situations, but because they don’t occur as often with small, community-based organizations they aren’t directly addressed in this toolkit.
So, how can small nonprofits survive crises?
Turns out, the odds aren’t totally against you (even if it feels like it).
Let’s dive into the literature:
Click a question to review what scholars have said on the topic.*
In fact, we can take all of this literature and funnel it into one key question: