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** When Pivoting in Times of Crisis, What Should Small and Medium-Sized Nonprofits Prioritize First?
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December 11, 2025

Welcome back to Ask a Nonprofit Expert, the nonprofit sector’s go-to advice column where seasoned nonprofit leaders offer advice and answers about how to build thriving, equitable organizations.

In today’s issue, nonprofit strategy consultant Jeanne Bell answers a reader’s question about pivoting in a time of crisis.

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When Pivoting in Times of Crisis, What Should Small and Medium-Sized Nonprofits Prioritize First?

By Jeanne Bell

Dear Ask a Nonprofit Expert,

When pivoting in a time of crisis, what should nonprofits prioritize first? Diversify funding, get the board and stakeholders into strategy conversations?

What else do you advise?

Sincerely,

Organizational Pivoter

Dear Organizational Pivoter,

The things you list as crisis responses—income diversification, strategic thinking—certainly are important. To complement your ideas, I offer three potential pivots that may be less comfortable to name out loud, but that I think are equally important to the long-term sustainability of organizations:
* Initiate necessary staff separations
* Reduce or eliminate office space
* Walk away from the wrong funding

Initiate Necessary Staff Separations

For a range of complex factors—from our values of equity and belonging to our habits of conflict avoidance—nonprofits are not very good at initiating graceful separations from people who are no longer thriving at the organization. In some cases, we prioritize the needs of a single person over the wellbeing and flow of the rest of the staff. Or we allow people to remain in roles that are no longer strategically necessary to the organization’s theory of change.

While leaders should not wait for financial threat to make these hard separation choices, it is true, in my experience, that times of crisis can be very clarifying as to who must be part of the organization’s future and whose time may be at a natural transition point.

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