Let’s Talk Failure

I’m going to say something you may have never considered: it’s okay to admit it’s not working.

As nonprofit people, we tend to lead with our bleeding hearts. And that’s a gift—it helps us show up, care deeply, and keep going when things are hard. But that same instinct can make it incredibly difficult to accept when something isn’t working and a project needs to be abandoned or a course correction needs to be made.

We become attached to the dream.

This is a common problem in the small business world, too. When you’ve put blood, sweat, and tears into something, admitting it’s not working can feel like admitting you failed.

In nonprofit work, failure doesn’t feel like a professional misstep. It feels personal. It feels like you failed your community—the very people you exist to serve. Staying the course feels necessary when your reason for existing is to support your neighbors. Persistence becomes a virtue. Mission-driven people know hard work and are not afraid of it. When it’s hard, we keep going—sometimes without stopping to recognize that it’s hard because it’s not working.

That kind of failure is difficult to digest. It’s difficult to accept.

I know. I’ve been there.

Recognizing failure isn’t giving up—it’s deciding to do it better. It’s admitting there’s a problem and choosing a different path.

I currently serve as the Executive Director of a regional symphony orchestra. During COVID, we went two full seasons without concerts, and our donations were cut in half. We survived on one-time grants from foundations and the government. Like many organizations, we were in survival mode.

When it came time to reopen, I made a huge miscalculation.

I believed our audience missed live music so much that the moment we opened our doors, they would come flooding back—even with mask mandates and vaccination requirements. We planned a full season—actually, the biggest and most expensive season we’d done in years—because we knew the audience would be there.

We couldn’t have been more wrong. During our first season after reopening, our audiences were a quarter of what they had been before the pandemic. Donations didn’t rebound at the pace we anticipated. We ended the season in a $50,000 hole.

The next season’s revenue then started being used to fill that hole—which meant the hole just got pushed forward into the next season’s budget. And then pushed again. For three years.

Our audiences slowly rebuilt. Donations slowly climbed. But while we had enough revenue to cover each season as it came, we never quite had enough to fill the deficit we dragged behind us.

This decision—to allow our mistake to haunt us for so long—is a common narrative for small community nonprofits. We often only define failure as complete collapse. But sometimes failure happens alongside success. In our case, we were pulling out of the pandemic. But our failure to correct the mistake continued to haunt us, and the uncorrected failure was hurting our ability to fulfill our mission.

Eventually, we had to stop and face reality.

We needed to understand what was happening—and make different decisions.

So we did.

We planned a season with fewer concerts to reduce expenses. We restructured staff hours. And our board fundraised like they never had before.

We filled the hole.

And for the first time in years, we started the next season in the black.

What’s more—that painful reset actually set us up for a stronger future. We built a more secure donor base. We stabilized our finances. And we ripped up our old strategic plan and fundraising strategies in favor of something far healthier than what we had before the pandemic.

That course correction allowed us to build something better.

Choosing to intentionally cut back on mission-fulfilling programming is difficult. We had plenty of patrons and musicians vocalize their disappointment in our reduced season of concerts.

But what sometimes feels counterintuitive—like cutting back on the very reason you exist—is the responsible move. Realigning, restructuring, and redesigning when your current direction isn’t working is stewardship—even if it doesn’t look like it in the moment.

So now that we’ve established it’s okay to admit something isn’t working—how do we get from failure to success?

Admit the failure—and take responsibility.

Admitting failure needs to happen at all levels of the organization’s management structure. Your board and management staff need to sit down together and define the problem and where it came from. This is not always easy. We all know how hard it can be to get your whole board and management staff on the same page about anything. But failure in a nonprofit is everyone’s responsibility—and everyone should own it.

The key is to take personalities out of the equation. Identify why something failed without pointing to people. This isn’t about blame. It’s about understanding. A bad decision is rarely a single person’s failure; it’s an organizational failure—whether that means not recognizing the decisions were leading down a path of failure, or failing to provide oversight and allowing a few to make decisions that led there.

I’ll say it again: don’t point to people. Point to actions.

Trace the decisions.

Go back to the beginning of the end. Identify the decisions that were made—the assumptions, the risks taken, the trade-offs accepted—that led you here.

Pick those decisions apart. Treat them like scientific data. Conduct a failure autopsy.

Learn from what you find.

Once you’ve mapped the road that led to the failure, analyze it.

What could you have done differently? Where was the last off-ramp? Why did those decisions feel right at the time? What information did you not have—or underestimate—or ignore? What would have been a better choice?

Failure comes in many forms, and the reasons are rarely simple.

But the point is this: accept that something went wrong, learn the lesson, and carry it forward.

Those lessons make you stronger. Smarter. Better equipped to take your next steps.

When something isn’t working—when you realize you’re going from one emergency to the next—start by taking a moment to ask yourself, and your organization, these questions:

• What is really going wrong?

• Where did this start going wrong, and what decisions led us here?

• How do we correct course?

• Are we willing to accept that sometimes course correction means cutting back or ending programming?

• How do we rebuild stronger?

• What lessons did we learn from the mistake?

Failure doesn’t end the work; refusing to face it does.

Now, go do some good.