Let's Stop Romanticizing Doing More with Less

By: Liz Lazar, Co-Founder & Principal

There’s something I’ve never quite understood about the nonprofit sector. We’re constantly told that nonprofits should operate more like businesses: strategic, efficient, innovative, and data-driven. On its face, I agree with most of that. But when it comes to investing in the people who make all of this possible, the comparison suddenly falls apart.

I’ve spent years working alongside extraordinarily talented nonprofit professionals. They manage complex budgets, navigate regulatory compliance, build impactful programs, cultivate high-dollar donor relationships, and lead teams through immense uncertainty. These are skilled leaders who could easily step into the private sector. They aren't doing less demanding work because they’re in the nonprofit world. In many cases, they’re doing more, with far fewer resources.

Yet a persistent assumption remains: working for a cause should require a financial sacrifice. That passion for the mission should compensate for lower salaries, limited advancement, and unsustainable workloads. Apparently caring deeply about your work should mean your work is worth less.

Meanwhile, consider what we demand from nonprofit leaders: vision, financial expertise, fundraising skills, and measurable results. In the private sector, compensation reflects those expectations. In the nonprofit world though, competitive pay is often met with skepticism, as if paying fair market value is somehow incompatible with responsible stewardship. In reality, underpaying talented professionals isn't prudent management; it’s underinvestment in organizational effectiveness.

For nonprofits, "doing more with less" has become the industry slogan. Resources are finite, community needs are vast, and every dollar matters. Somewhere along the way, though, we began romanticizing operating with too little. But what happens when staff continually absorb responsibilities meant for additional positions? Experienced professionals leave, institutional knowledge disappears, and the remaining team burns out. Those hidden costs don't show up in a grant budget, but they directly compromise the communities we serve. An understaffed, exhausted organization isn't efficient, its true operating costs are just being absorbed by its people.

Much of this stems from how we view overhead. We’ve long equated low administrative costs with organizational effectiveness. Unfortunately, programs don’t run in a vacuum. They require technology, financial oversight, strong leadership, and fairly compensated people. Having developed many grant budgets myself, I know how hard it is to reconcile the true cost of service delivery with what funders are willing to cover. But if a program is worth funding, we must be equally committed to funding the infrastructure required to deliver it well.

Shifted thinking is needed across the board:

- Funders need to support the true cost of operations and infrastructure rather than restricting grants to program delivery alone.
- Boards and Leaders must base compensation on market realities rather than historical precedent, evaluating whether current capacity is truly sustainable.
- Organizations must recognize that building long-term impact sometimes means strengthening internal operations rather than launching another new initiative.

I've never believed that nonprofits should operate identically to businesses.  Their core missions and measures of success are fundamentally different. That said, successful businesses understand one crucial principle: people aren't an expense to minimize, but an investment in success. While financial constraints are real and not every nonprofit can match corporate pay, we need to stop treating chronic underinvestment in people as a virtue.  Instead, as a sector we need to ask ourselves a fundamental question: are we building organizations that can sustain their missions for the long haul, or organizations that only survive because their people are willing to burn out? That distinction matters.