Written by Tricia Smith, Founder of The Jule Group®, a nonprofit operations and AI-readiness consultancy.

You've heard about it happening. Maybe you've lived it. An organization invests in a new system. It could be a CRM, a project management tool, a donor database. There's research. There are demos. There's a rollout plan, a training session, and a lot of hope that this will finally be the thing that fixes the chaos. And then, a few weeks later, people are quietly working around it. Back to the spreadsheets. Back to the email chains. Back to "I just keep track of it my own way."

I walked into a nonprofit last year and within 20 minutes, the Executive Director was telling me about her mother's dementia diagnosis, the federal funding cuts she'd just seen hit the headlines that morning, and how if she doesn't leave by 4:15 pm, she'll miss her dog's vet appointment and end up back on a seven-week waitlist. Her fifth grader has a bake sale tomorrow and needs store-bought cookies with the ingredient labels left on. Her board meeting is Thursday, and the fi

I once watched an organization spend six months implementing a project management system. They did everything right. Researched the options. Got buy-in from leadership. Paid for the premium tier. Hired a consultant to customize it. Six weeks after launch, half the team was back to sticky notes and email chains. Not because they were resistant to change. Because the system made their jobs harder, not easier. Every task required five clicks instead of one. The dashboards were b

There is a moment many nonprofit leaders recognize instantly. You are sitting in a board meeting. The questions are coming. Some are sharp. Some feel slightly off. A few drift into operational territory even though everyone knows that is not where the board is meant to live. You leave the meeting tired, not because anyone behaved badly, but because something felt harder than it needed to be. Most of the time, that tension is not about trust or intent. It is about visibility.

Before I became an Executive Director, I believed I understood nonprofit leadership. I had worked alongside organizations for years. I had seen strong operations, committed staff, and thoughtful leadership. I understood how much care goes into running a nonprofit well. What I did not yet understand was what happens when many reasonable decisions , made over time, collide with rapid change. The organization was not broken The organization I stepped into was not chaotic. It was

Most nonprofits do not choose bad systems. They inherit them. They patch them. They make them work just well enough to get through the next grant cycle, the next board meeting, the next audit. “Good enough” becomes the standard, not because leaders are careless, but because capacity is thin and urgency is constant. Over time, though, good enough starts to get expensive. How nonprofits end up with duct-taped systems Nonprofit tech stacks rarely begin with a strategy. They grow

Nonprofit leadership is often framed as a calling that requires endless resilience, personal sacrifice, and emotional stamina. When leaders burn out, the story usually goes something like this: you took on too much, you did not set boundaries, you needed better self-care. That narrative is incomplete. And for many leaders, it is deeply harmful. Burnout in nonprofit leadership is rarely a personal failure. It is a systems failure. The invisible workload no one prepares you for

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