Nonprofit Lifecycle

What is the Nonprofit Lifecycle and what does it mean for my organization?

Organizations grow and change, just like people.  

Understanding where your group is along the continuum helps you know what you need and how to improve.

The question we most often hear from nonprofit leaders is they want to know how they're doing along the continuum of improvement.  The nonprofit lifecycle is a map (see below) that shows the natural process of organizational growth and change.  These are the main stages of the lifecycle:

• Core Program Development is the stage at which you make sure there is alignment between two things: programs and your mission/vision. What do we do? And what do we want to achieve? Are these in alignment?
• Infrastructure Development is when an organization is working on taking their programs to scale.  The focus is typically on management and reaching more people.
• In the Impact Expansion stage, organizations are looking outside of their organizations to things like: strategic alliances, partnerships, outreach, policy/advocacy work.

Nonprofit Pathways is focusing on an organization's ability to achieve its mission as the key determinant of its stage of development.

The important question is:

To what extent is your organization consistently delivering high quality programs to all of the people or constituencies it exists to serve?

Growth is not necessarily linear and it doesn't necessarily reflect how long you've been in business because this is a cycle that recurs over and over - as you see on the map below, an organization must renew or become defunct.   It's helpful to do the work to discover where your organization is on the lifecycle map.

This diagram shows the human-type stage of development, along with the organizational levels or stages identified based on over two decades of work with thousands of nonprofits by TCC Group:

(Right click on the image to see a larger version or save this graphic.)