Burnout in the Non-Profit Sector

Guest article by Adam Revay of ASR Consulting

An epidemic is gripping the nonprofit sector, and no one is safe. Not executives, not fundraisers, not frontline staff. This isn’t a new virus. It’s burnout, and it could become one of the defining leadership crises of our time.

Burnout is endemic. According to YMCA WorkWell and Charity Insights Canada, 58% of nonprofit staff and a staggering 71% of leaders report feeling burned out. Carleton University found that 41% of staff considering leaving cite burnout as the primary reason.

The risk is even higher for nonprofits where demand regularly exceeds capacity. For struggling nonprofits, losing your best people to burnout, on top of everything else, can push your organization past the breaking point..

Nonprofit leaders and their team members are miracle workers. Every day, they improve the lives of countless people, and they do it on a shoestring budget while shouldering an immense emotional burden. Just because we can do it doesn’t mean we should. And it certainly doesn’t make it sustainable. Yet, when this burden finally catches up to us, we write it off as a personal issue, or worse, a performance problem.

That tells us we have a lot to learn about burnout and its causes. Burnout is the natural consequence of chronic stress. As the body becomes increasingly flooded with stress, it becomes harder to function. Burnout makes people less productive, less present, and more isolated. All too often, we mistake that for laziness or disengagement. If we’re ever going to deal with burnout as effectively as we pursue our missions, we need to reframe our understanding of burnout. 

Task overload can cause burnout, but it’s rarely the only factor. People with high-demand jobs who also have a lot of autonomy and agency rarely burn out. Workload matters, but it’s seldom the root cause.

A lack of direction or clarity can lead to cognitive overload and burnout. Having a clear understanding of our place in the bigger picture, and knowing how each task we accomplish drives the organization forward, is extremely important for mitigating burnout. Never assume employees will figure this out on their own. Like organizational culture, leaders need to model connection to the mission.

If people in high-demand, high autonomy jobs rarely burn out, it’s because they have the resources and support they need to succeed. Expecting our employees to work the miracles we demand of them, without the right tools for the job, is a recipe for burnout. Employees should be given every opportunity to succeed, and that includes giving them the resources they need to do their jobs effectively. And, understand that “resources” go well beyond funding. Do they have the right systems in place? For example, does your fundraising team have a way to search for and identify funding opportunities effectively? Does the team have the authority to make decisions and respond to issues as they arise, or are they locked behind bottlenecks waiting for somebody to approve every move they make? Removing roadblocks and providing real support is what separates thriving teams from burned-out ones.

If your people don’t feel like their work is being recognized and valued, they’re at risk for burnout, too. If they only feel seen when something goes off the rails, they’ll be in an even worse position. Regularly acknowledging and appreciating your team’s efforts can significantly reduce the risk of burnout. It costs almost nothing to keep tabs on our people and occasionally pull them aside, or call them out in a meeting, to thank them for their contributions to the team and the organization. And the sense of belonging and positivity that comes with recognition builds a strong bulwark against burnout. 

It’s essential to understand that burnout is not just an individual problem, but a cultural issue. A burned-out team member can negatively impact their colleagues, but changes to our organizational cultures are another way to mitigate burnout.

Many nonprofit leaders are proud of what their organizations can accomplish with limited resources, but this can lead us to praising overwork, even unintentionally. A burnout-aware culture normalizes boundaries around workload, stress, and time management. 

And, while being proud of our ingenuity and resourcefulness should never be lost, that doesn’t give us license to constantly ask our people to ‘do more with less.’ In the long term, that attitude is unsustainable. That’s why it’s essential to invest in tools that help our employees stay organized, reduce the grunt work and give space to focus on strategy and relationships. 

Last, but not least, we must listen to our people. Regular check-ins are valuable tools, and when used correctly, they also provide a barometer for how our employees are managing stress and avoiding burnout. 

Burnout’s prevalence in our sector means you’re at risk of losing some of your best people. And you probably don’t see it. You might even be among them. But if you act early—if you listen, adjust, and lead—you can build a burnout-resistant culture. Not by demanding less from your team, but by leading them better.

If the thought of making changes to your team or organization’s culture feels daunting, it doesn’t have to be. You can take the first step towards a burnout-resistant culture by booking a free introductory call with Adam Revay at ASR Consulting and getting the clarity you need to work through team or culture issues.

Using Relationship Mapping to Research Private Family Foundations

Private family foundations play a significant role in Canadian philanthropy. For researchers, understanding the people behind these foundations—and their connections—is key. Relationship mapping helps uncover how board members link across charities and companies, revealing potential pathways for outreach and engagement.

What Is Relationship Mapping?

Relationship mapping shows how individuals are connected through board memberships, professional roles, and other affiliations. For prospect research, it can help:

  • Identify individuals who sit on multiple boards
  • Uncover cross-sector ties between charities and businesses
  • Understand influence and access points within a network

This is especially valuable when engaging with private family foundations, where personal networks often guide giving.

Examples of Foundations and Their Networks

Weston Family Foundation

Overview: A major funder in health, science, and the environment.

Board Connections: Galen G. Weston Jr. is Chairman and CEO of George Weston Limited and Executive Chairman of Loblaw Companies Limited. Past and current Weston family members have also served with the Nature Conservancy of Canada and the Royal Ontario Museum. Mapping these connections can help identify shared interests in conservation, food security, and education.

Bronfman Family Foundation

Overview: Focuses on culture, urban sustainability, and community life.

Board Connections: Bronfman family members have held roles with the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and McGill University. Their legacy in Seagram and involvement in The Samuel Bronfman Foundation (U.S.) further link them to academic and cultural institutions.

Laidlaw Foundation

Overview: Supports youth-led initiatives, arts, and Indigenous reconciliation.

Board Connections: Directors and advisors have been involved with the Toronto Arts Council, the Centre for Young Black Professionals (CYBP), and the Atkinson Foundation. These links reflect a strong focus on local community building and equity.

How to Use Relationship Mapping in Research

  1. Collect Board Data: Use charity and corporate filings to track directorships
  2. Map the Network: Platforms like CharityCAN can visualize how people connect across sectors
  3. Identify Overlap: Look for individuals with ties to both your organization and target foundations

A relationship path search showing connections between the Board of Governors of the University of Calgary and the Shaw Family Foundation

Final Thoughts

Private family foundations often operate within tight-knit networks. Relationship mapping gives fundraisers a strategic advantage by revealing shared governance and mutual affiliations. Whether it’s identifying a corporate board connection or a shared trustee on a museum or university board, these insights can help tailor cultivation and deepen engagement.

Key Features and Data 2024

Features 

Donor Discovery

Donor discovery is a new way to identify prospective donors that builds on a classic donation record search by adding relationship filters. Use donor discovery to quickly identify a list of prospects who have a history of supporting your cause and have relationship map connections to your organization. 

Integrated Search 

An integrated search looks for information in all of CharityCAN’s datasets for an individual, foundation or corporation. This search is perfect for researching a prospect or finding out more information about a current donor. 

Relationship Mapping

Relationship Maps show you who your prospect is connected to. CharityCAN maps relationships based on:

  • Shared time on charity boards
  • Shared time on corporate boards
  • Shared time on the board of federally registered corporations
  • Shared ownership of a federally registered plane or boat
  • Shared surname and postal code

You can use relationship mapping to:

  • See how your prospect is connected to your organization
  • Search board members’ networks for major gift prospects
  • Better understand your prospect’s network and connections
  • See how your donors are connected to your prospects 
  • Create your own relationship maps 

Relationship Paths 

Relationship paths allows you to quickly identify connections among people, charities, and companies. This search is perfect for seeing who your board members, major donors, corporate donors, or any other friend of your organization is connected to. 

Household Data Search

Using CharityCAN to find out household data information is simple. Navigate to Household Data and enter a 3 or 6 digit postal code and CharityCAN will return the following information: 

  • Average household net worth
  • Average dwelling value
  • Average dwelling value minus mortgage
  • Average household annual income
  • Average household discretionary income
  • Average household annual donations to religious and non-religious organizations

This data set can also be used to populate a list of individuals CharityCAN has been able to associate with a postal code and view connections to any individuals who live in the postal code.  

Foundation Search 

Foundations are an important source of funding for fundraising organizations and CharityCAN makes it easy to search for potential foundation donors. You can search by name, keywords, charity number, cause/category, charity type, location and revenue level. You can also search by donee category and program.

Data 

Donation Records 

Donation records are aggregated from Canadian NOZAsearch records, which have been gathered from publicly available websites across the internet, and the gifts to qualified donees section of the T3010 charity tax filings from the Canada Revenue Agency. All donation records are updated monthly. 

Canadian Who’s Who 

Canadian Who’s Who is the standard reference source of contemporary Canadian biography, listing prominent Canadians on merit alone. Biographies are updated on an ongoing basis and each biography lists the date it was last edited.  

Political Donors 

Political contributions are from Elections Canada’s open data sets and are updated monthly. 

Refinitiv & Corporate Canada 

Both our Refinitiv salary records and Corporate Canada records are sourced from Refinitiv and include compensation and biographical information on the board of directors and top named executive officers from public and large private companies across Canada. Records come from public disclosure documents from Canadian companies required by the Canadian Securities Administrators and are updated daily. 

ZoomInfo 

ZoomInfo search results come directly from ZoomInfo’s contact database. ZoomInfo uses their diverse portfolio of proprietary technology, community of 300,000+ users, and third-party integrations to collect, organize, validate, and publish the most comprehensive directory of business data in the marketplace. 

Public Sector Salaries 

Public sector salaries are released by their respective provincial governments and imported once a year. Records are updated when governments disclose salaries.  

Charity Directors 

Data on the directors of charitable organizations are sourced from the T3010 tax filing required by each registered charity in Canada. Records are updated on a monthly basis. 

Prospect Profiles 

Prospect profiles are programmatically created profiles that attempt to identify unique individuals within the various CharityCAN datasets and bring that information together into one profile.  

Profiles are updated monthly. 

Household Data 

Household data values are estimates based on past Census data, the Survey of Household Spending, the Survey of Financial Security, the monthly Labour Force Survey and the monthly Consumer Price Index from Statistics Canada; Royal LePage’s quarterly Survey of Canadian Housing Price; and monthly housing statistics from the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation. 

This dataset is updated annually.  

FullContact Social Data 

FullContact social data is available on our corporate and saved prospect profiles and can provide an overview of an organization or individual’s social media accounts, a social media biography, and a summary of social media interests. 

Aircraft Registry 

Search Canadian aircraft owners with our Aircraft Registry Search. You can search for owner name, type of aircraft or geographic area to find some plane owning prospects near you. 

Marine Craft Registry

Search marine pleasure craft from Transport Canada’s Register of Vessels. Boats on this registry are mostly vessels of 7 metres or longer whose owners want to register their vessel name or need a marine mortgage. If your prospect’s name is on the list as an owner, we’ll show you the vessel’s name, size and date of registration in our Integrated Search results. 

Federal Corporations 

Data from Corporations Canada on all federally registered corporations and their directors. This data includes information on not only privately held corporations but also not-for-profits, co-operatives and boards of trade from all across the country. 

Obituaries 

Obituary data from Canada Deceased List’s ObitScan and Canada Bereavement Registry products. With their help we’ll be providing thousands of recent Canadian obituaries from public online sources every month.

How Accurate is CharityCAN’s AI Profile Summary Tool?

Donor Prospect Profiles contain a lot of data – donation records, relationship maps, real estate info, the list goes on – and typically, that’s a good thing. The more data we have, the better we are able to qualify (or disqualify) a prospect. 

That said, sometimes a high level summary will do. 

To help our users put together profile summaries, we decided to build an AI Profile Summary tool. Large Language Models (LLMs) are fantastic at summarizing large amounts of data. And LLMs are AI tech that is here now – not something that may be transformative in the future.

The video below is quick examination of the accuracy of CharityCAN’s AI Profile Summary tool:

Maximize the Potential of Giving Tuesday with Donor Screening

Giving Tuesday is one of the most important days of the year for Canadian charities. Every Giving Tuesday, thousands of charities across Canada receive millions of dollars from donors.

In 2021, CanadaHelps estimates that Canadians donated $43.6 million on Giving Tuesday. As Giving Tuesday continues to grow in popularity, it’s a safe assumption that this number will continue to grow, as well.

In 2021, Canadians donated $43.6 million on Giving Tuesday

– CanadaHelps

It is clear that Giving Tuesday has a positive impact on Canadian Charities. One, it is extremely effective in encouraging people to give (some of whom will be brand new donors) and two, it raises the profile of philanthropy in Canada generally, creating an increased awareness of Canadian charities, the work they do, and the funding required to do that work. But is there a way Canadian charities can benefit from Giving Tuesday beyond the gifts made and the recognition received?

Consider a charity that receives $100,000 in donations from 2000 new donors on Giving Tuesday. Fantastic, right? $100,000 in incoming donations from people who have never given to the organization is an amazing accomplishment and  should be celebrated.  But is that organization maximizing the benefit these donors could provide?

To truly maximize the benefit of Giving Tuesday, charities should look beyond the initial gift, and funnel new donors into their pipelines. The best way to do this is through screening and segmentation. 

Here’s an example:

Consider the charity that received $100,000 in donations from 2,000 new donors on Giving Tuesday. If that organization screens and segments those donors, the impact of Giving Tuesday will be far beyond $100,000.

Let’s say, if after screening, the breakdown of the group’s 5 year total giving capacity is as follows:

Suppose, if after segmenting: The top 5% (100 people) are funneled into the Major Gifts pipeline.  After careful cultivation and stewardship 10% (10 people) of them make a major gift with an average size of $10,000 (which is just a fraction of this group’s total 5 year giving capacity). The result is $100,000 in additional revenue stemming from Giving Tuesday, just from the Major Gifts segment of the screened Giving Tuesday donors.

Giving Tuesday is an important day for Canadian charities. It generates fundraising revenue, increases recognitiion, and creates awareness. Screening and segmenting the new donors a charity acquires on Giving Tuesday and funneling those donors into appropriate pipelines will ensure the impact of Giving Tuesday lasts far beyond a single calendar day.