If there’s one thing we’ve learned after years of sitting alongside nonprofit boards, executive directors, and leadership teams, it’s this: organizations rarely struggle because they lack passion. They struggle because the environment around them keeps changing faster than the systems designed to support them.
The nonprofits that are thriving aren’t simply working harder—they’re becoming more adaptive.
The recently released 2025 Nonprofit Standards Benchmarking Report reinforces many of the same shifts we’ve been observing across our own client work. While every organization is unique, the patterns are remarkably consistent. Strategic planning is becoming more dynamic and collaboration is becoming essential. Technology is improving decision-making rather than simply increasing efficiency. And leaders are thinking differently about what sustainability really means.
None of these trends exist in isolation. Together, they tell a larger story about where the nonprofit sector is headed and what leadership will require in the years ahead.
1. Demand for Services Continues to Grow But So Does the Need for Organizational Sustainability
One of the biggest misconceptions we encounter is that sustainability means slowing growth.
In reality, most nonprofit leaders aren’t trying to do less. They’re trying to figure out how to continue meeting growing community needs without exhausting the people, resources, and systems that make their mission possible. The BDO report confirms exactly that reality, finding that 78% of nonprofits have experienced increased demand for services, while nearly three-quarters anticipate expanding programs over the coming year.
We see this tension in nearly every strategic planning engagement. Leadership teams rarely ask us, “How can we grow?”
Instead, they’re asking more thoughtful questions:
How do we continue growing without overwhelming our staff?
How do we increase our impact while protecting organizational health?
How do we build an organization that can sustain this work for years to come?
Those questions fundamentally change the conversation. They shift the focus away from expansion as a sole priority and toward organizational sustainability; the structures, leadership, processes, and accountability needed to ensure growth remains healthy over time.
2. Strategic Plans Are Becoming Living Documents
For many years, strategic planning followed a familiar rhythm. Organizations invested months developing a thoughtful plan, celebrated its approval, and then often found themselves revisiting it only when it was time to begin the next planning cycle 3-5 years later.
Today’s environment simply doesn’t allow for that approach. According to the BDO report, more than half of nonprofits have already modified their strategic plans in response to changing federal policies and external conditions. We don’t see that as a sign that strategic planning failed. We see it as evidence that organizations are beginning to think differently about strategy itself.
At coLAB, we believe a strategic plan should never be viewed as a finished product. It’s a framework for decision-making that helps organizations remain aligned as priorities shift, opportunities emerge, and communities evolve. The strongest organizations aren’t rewriting their strategy every year. They’re continually reconnecting everyday decisions back to their long-term vision.
Strategy isn’t something you complete.
3. AI Is Supporting Better Strategy—Not Replacing Strategic Thinking
Few topics have generated as much conversation over the past year as artificial intelligence.
The BDO report found that 97% of nonprofits are already using AI in some capacity, an extraordinary level of adoption in a relatively short period of time. What we find encouraging isn’t simply how many organizations are using AI, it’s how they’re using it. Leaders are moving beyond asking whether they should adopt AI and are instead asking more practical questions.
How can AI reduce repetitive work?
How can it strengthen analysis?
How can it improve the quality of decisions?
How do we ensure people remain at the center?
We’ve never believed technology should replace leadership. Instead, it should remove the friction that keeps leaders from leading. AI can summarize information, identify patterns, and accelerate insight, but it cannot replace judgment, relationships, empathy, or the thoughtful conversations that shape great organizations.
The organizations finding the greatest success aren’t replacing strategy with AI. They’re giving leaders more time to focus on strategy.
4. Collaboration Is Becoming a Strategic Capability
One of the most encouraging themes emerging across the nonprofit sector is a renewed commitment to collaboration.
According to the report, 64% of nonprofits are actively pursuing partnerships with other organizations, recognizing that today’s challenges are simply too complex for any one organization to solve alone.
Whether organizations are working in food security, education, healthcare, workforce development, housing, or economic development, the conversation inevitably turns toward partnerships. Community challenges rarely fit neatly within organizational boundaries.
Achieving meaningful progress depends on organizations aligning their strengths, sharing expertise, and working toward common outcomes. From our perspective, collaboration is no longer simply a partnership strategy. It’s becoming a resilience strategy.
Organizations with strong networks are often better equipped to adapt, innovate, and respond when circumstances change because they’re drawing from collective knowledge rather than navigating uncertainty alone.
The future belongs to organizations that understand that impact grows when collaboration becomes part of how they operate.
5. Technology Investments Are Really Investments in Better Decision-Making
Technology continues to be one of the fastest-growing areas of nonprofit investment, with 74% of organizations expecting to increase technology spending over the coming year. But the most important shift isn’t the amount being invested. It’s the reason behind those investments.
After years of facilitating strategic planning and stakeholder engagement processes, we’ve learned that organizations rarely suffer from having too little information. More often, they struggle because information lives everywhere.
Survey results sit in one system.
Board notes live in another.
Strategic plans become PDFs.
Progress updates happen in meetings.
Community feedback gets buried in spreadsheets.
Leaders spend more time gathering information than using it.
Technology has the opportunity to change that, not because software is the solution, but because better systems create better conversations and better decisions. The organizations making the greatest progress aren’t simply collecting more data. They’re creating connected systems that help leaders understand what’s happening, recognize emerging trends, measure progress, and confidently decide what comes next.
Technology is valuable because it strengthens leadership. Not because it replaces it.
What These Trends Mean for Nonprofit Leaders
Looking across these five trends, one message stands out.
The nonprofit sector isn’t simply adapting to change—it’s becoming more intentional about how organizations lead through it.
We’re seeing leaders move away from viewing strategic planning as a periodic event and toward embracing it as an ongoing practice. They’re investing in stronger partnerships, using technology more thoughtfully, creating healthier organizational systems, and building the capacity to evolve alongside the communities they serve.
Perhaps most importantly, they’re recognizing that strategy doesn’t end when a plan is approved. That’s when the real work begins.
At coLAB, we’ve always believed strategy should be something organizations live—not something they revisit every few years. VERVE was built around the same philosophy that has guided our consulting work for years.
Organizations don’t need another place to store a strategic plan.
They need a place where strategy stays connected to stakeholder feedback, organizational knowledge, AI-powered insights, measurable progress, and everyday decision-making.
By bringing assessments, stakeholder engagement, strategic priorities, implementation tracking, and AI-supported insights together in one living platform, VERVE helps organizations move from collecting information to creating momentum—from insight to action.
Because the future won’t belong to the organizations with the most impressive strategic plans.
It will belong to the organizations that build the capacity to learn, adapt, collaborate, and move forward, again and again.