Recapping & Reflecting: How to Learn from Nonprofit Mistakes

Mistakes are part of being human, and they’re certainly part of nonprofit work. Nevertheless, a large portion of the population is deeply afraid of failing and making mistakes. 

A Linkagoal survey found that 31% of adult respondents feared failure—that’s more than those who feared spiders (30%) or the paranormal (15%).

Mistakes are nothing to fear when you reframe them as opportunities to learn, grow, and, ultimately, better serve your nonprofit’s community. Keep the following tips in mind to leverage your internal culture, software solutions, and training resources to help your team learn from its mistakes and move forward productively. 

Make risk-taking a normal part of your team’s culture. 

Surveys have shown that adults in the U.S. overwhelmingly prefer playing it safe to taking risks. However, a study from Susan R. Fisk of the Kent State University Department of Sociology found that “failed risk-takers are perceived as more likely to be hired and promoted… risk-taking—regardless of outcome—considerably increases perceptions of agency and decreases perceptions of indecisiveness, and these attributions predict positive workplace outcomes.” 

In the for-profit world, the biggest risk-takers are often rewarded for their bold, decisive actions. Why can’t the same be true for your nonprofit? 

We recommend promoting risk-taking within reason as an organizational value. Failures and mistakes are a natural side effect of taking risks, but they don’t have to completely derail your efforts. When risks don’t pan out, don’t retreat to safer grounds—identify what went wrong and work to correct the specific issue. Additionally, encourage your team to continue to be bold and think outside the box. 

Embrace open communication with your nonprofit staff. 

For many nonprofits, the biggest challenge in learning from mistakes is getting staff members to talk about them openly. This is understandable—making mistakes can cause embarrassment or fear of professional penalties. 

However, your team can’t learn from its mistakes if staff members don’t feel comfortable debriefing them as a team. Encourage open communication with your team by taking these steps: 

• Establish a culture of transparency, accountability, and communication from the top down. Have your nonprofit’s top leaders promote transparency by addressing their own mistakes and taking accountability in team-wide communications. This practice signals to your employees that mistakes are considered a normal part of the job. 
• Quickly address mistakes without calling out individuals. Provide specific feedback privately and debrief lessons learned as a team. This way, team members won’t feel called out or embarrassed in front of their colleagues, but your team will still understand the valuable lessons learned from the situation. 
• Use team meetings to share challenges and work through mistakes together. Encourage staff members to share roadblocks and collaborate on potential solutions in team-wide meetings. For example, a team member could raise a roadblock they’re facing involving engaging major donors between in-person meetings and events. Other team members could chime in with the strategies and best practices they’ve found most helpful for interacting with major donors year-round. 

The most effective way to encourage transparency among your staff is to have a measured response to mistakes. This approach should focus on understanding what went wrong and moving forward productively rather than chastising team members unnecessarily. 

Investigate root causes. 

Recurring mistakes likely stem from the same root issue. Without addressing the core problem, the mistakes may continue and snowball into larger problems. 

For example, consider a fundraising team that continually encounters the issue of having insufficient or outdated information when meeting with potential major donors. Recently, one team member met with a major donor and invited them to a volunteer event, not realizing that the same donor had just helped out at the organization’s annual 5K the previous weekend. Awkward! 

If similar issues keep arising, you could be facing a deeper issue with data silos. In this case, if your volunteer management system and nonprofit CRM don’t integrate, you may not be able to see the full picture of each donor’s involvement with your organization. 

Understanding this root issue enables you to fix the core problem, giving staff members greater access to each donor’s complete involvement history with your organization. 

Keep stakeholders informed as needed. 

Learning from and moving past mistakes requires your organization to be transparent with external stakeholders and internal staff members. Inform stakeholders of any mistakes that affect them. These may include: 

• Data privacy issues, such as a potential breach of your donor database
• Event cancellations, such as canceling your annual fundraising silent auction event because of an accidental double-booking of the event space
• Miscommunications, like unintentionally sending out a year-end giving reminder email in July

For larger issues like data privacy concerns, send an email and letter immediately notifying stakeholders who may have been affected. For lesser issues like typos or wrong dates in emails or social media posts, issue corrections ASAP to clear up confusion. 

Establish safeguards to prevent future mistakes. 

Whether a mistake involves internal or external stakeholders, put measures in place to prevent the mishap from recurring. Here are a few strategies you can use to mitigate a wide range of issues: