Ask a nonprofit leader how their organization ended up running a particular program and you'll sometimes get a long pause. Nobody sets out to wander off mission. It happens one reasonable yes at a time: a grant that was close enough, a volunteer with a great idea, a new leader with plenty of energy and no one asking questions. A couple of years later, the board can't explain what the organization does, the volunteers are all saying something different, and the people you serve aren't sure you're for them anymore.
That's the conversation I picked back up with Sharmon Lebby in this episode. Sharmon is the Founder and CEO of Blessed Designs Consulting, and she joined me earlier this fall for "Is Your Nonprofit Ready for More Money?" When we got to talking afterward, we landed on mission drift and kept going, so we decided to come back and record it properly.
What I appreciated most is how honest Sharmon was. She's been the person who said "let's do it" to a project that fit but didn't fully fit, and she talks openly about what happened when the funding and the community drifted away. We also cover the question I hear all the time: what do you do with a program that's already funded but no longer belongs? Her answer starts with your community, and then with assessing every program against your mission, vision, and values, not just your budget.
Sharmon also gave me a framework I keep thinking about. There's mission drift, where you've wandered and need to work your way back. There's mission evolution, where you change on purpose because your community needs something different. And there's mission agility, a short-term pivot (think COVID) where you plan to come back. Knowing which one you're in shapes how you talk about it.
And then we got into communication, which is where so many good decisions fall apart. If the board decides in a meeting and the ED sends a mass email the next morning, you're going to lose staff, volunteers, and community. Get your house in order first: board, then staff, then volunteers, then the public, and say it more than once.
SHOW NOTES
How does a nonprofit end up doing work nobody remembers signing up for?
Sharmon Lebby is the Founder and CEO of Blessed Designs Consulting, where she helps nonprofits and purpose-driven organizations build strong, sustainable foundations. She's back on Nonprofit Nook after her first episode, Is Your Nonprofit Ready for More Money?, to pick up a conversation she and Wendy started off the record: mission drift.
Sharmon says drift rarely starts with a big decision. It starts with a small one. A grant that's close enough. An enthusiastic volunteer, or a brand-new executive director with big ideas and no one asking questions. One program leads to another, and the rest of the board goes quiet. The clearest warning sign is when people can no longer explain what your organization does.
She's lived it herself. Sharmon shares the project she championed because it sounded exciting and close enough to the mission. A couple of years later, the funding dried up, the community drifted away, and she had to eat some humble pie. Wendy and Sharmon also talk about why so many development directors leave, often within about 18 months, and how much of that traces back to a mission nobody can describe.
In this episode of Nonprofit Nook, Sharmon joins Wendy to share how to tell whether a funded program is still worth keeping. She explains why your community should be the first conversation when you decide what stays and what goes. She also lays out the difference between mission drift, mission evolution, and mission agility.
Then they get into communication, the piece that makes or breaks a reset. When the board decides in a meeting and a mass email goes out the next morning, people get left behind. Get your house in order first: talk with your board, then your staff, then your volunteers, and only then go public. Plan to say it more than once.
Underneath the warning signs and assessments, this conversation is really about honesty. It takes courage to admit your organization has wandered, especially when you were the one who said yes. Sharmon's answer is transparency with your board, your team, and the people you serve.
If you lead, volunteer with, support, or dream of starting a nonprofit, this conversation is a reminder that the people closest to your work will tell you when you've drifted, if you ask them.
In This Episode
You'll hear Wendy and Sharmon talk about:
How mission drift starts with one reasonable decision, and why it's so often tied to funding
The red flag Sharmon sees most often: no one can explain what your organization does
How an enthusiastic volunteer, board member, or new ED can pull an organization off course when everyone else goes quiet
What mission drift has to do with development directors leaving after about 18 months
What to do with a program that's already funded but no longer fits
Why your community comes first, and how to assess programs against your mission, vision, and values
The difference between mission drift, mission evolution, and mission agility
How to communicate a change from the inside out (board, staff, volunteers, then the public), and why one email won't cut it
Connect with Blessed Designs Consulting
Connect with Sharmon on LinkedIn, and follow Blessed Designs Consulting on Instagram and at blesseddesignsco.com.
Purpose Drift Diagnostic: Sharmon's free tool to see how far your organization has drifted and what it will take to get back, plus more free resources.
Watch this episode on YouTube.
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TRANSCRIPT
Sharmon: A couple of years later, everything has fallen apart, we no longer have funding, and nobody knows how to explain what the organization does. It's really a time of having to eat some humble pie and say, okay, I was all gung-ho on this, but we've lost engagement on our Instagram, which was our highest-engaged platform. We had over 400,000 followers and people were really into it, but we've lost them, and we're losing funding.
Wendy: That's tough.
Sharmon: We're losing our community, and the tides have turned, and now even this project isn't bringing in the funding it once was.
Wendy: Hey everyone, welcome back to Nonprofit Nook. Today I'm so glad to welcome back Sharmon Lebby, founder and CEO of Blessed Designs Consulting. If you caught her first episode, "Is Your Nonprofit Ready for More Money?", you heard Sharmon talk about what it really takes to build an organization strong enough to hold growth, and why money is only as useful as the foundation underneath it. Sharmon is a nonprofit leader, speaker, writer, and consultant with more than 20 years of experience across nonprofits, movement building, and ethical entrepreneurship. She partners with mission-driven organizations to strengthen their strategy, governance, and operations so they can grow in a way that lasts. Today we're picking back up with a conversation about mission drift, and I can't wait to dig into this. Sharmon, welcome back to Nonprofit Nook.
Sharmon: I am so glad to be here. This is exciting.
Wendy: It's so exciting. I love that we've kept in touch. When we got to talking last time, we got on this topic and went for a bit, and I thought, gosh, I wish we'd hit record. So we decided to come back and do this formally. So let's talk about mission drift. How does it start to happen? I don't think anybody wakes up and decides to wander off the rails, but we tend to figure it out later. How does that happen?
Sharmon: I always tell people it starts with one little decision that ripples into another. It usually involves funding in some way. Not always, but a lot of times it's, you know what, this grant is close enough. Then we start building one program, and that leads to another and something else. A lot of times it's just, this is a really cool idea. And the red flag that pops up most often is that people stop being able to explain your organization. Your board has no clue what you're doing. Your volunteers are saying fifty million different things. You've lost the course. Nobody really knows what's going on, or they think they know, but nobody's saying the same thing.
Wendy: I think the other way it happens is when somebody comes in as a committee member, a day-to-day volunteer, or even a board member, and they have an idea of what they want to do with the organization. It's their interpretation of the mission. And because they're that active person, that leader, they come in and say, yes, let's do it. Everybody says, sure, I'm glad she has the energy, let's do what she wants to do. And then we end up drifting right off the rails.
Sharmon: Yes. I love that example, because when people are really excited and want to do something, you immediately say yes. Whatever you want to do.
Wendy: Right. Yes, please, I need the help. Come on in.
Sharmon: Whatever keeps you happy and here. The most recent example I saw was a new executive director who came into an organization so excited and enthusiastic, with all these ideas. Lord, they loved themselves some ChatGPT and would bring full-on proposals. And the board was like, okay. There were really no checks and balances, so everything started falling apart. And they asked, how did we get here? And I'm like, well.
Wendy: That's something else you and I talked about: when the other board members just go quiet. I've been there myself, where you think, that person is on it. I don't really know enough about that, and it doesn't feel like what I'm doing at the nonprofit, so I'll be quiet and let them run with it. That's another sign you've gone off course, because everybody else got quiet. It's just one person pushing this and making it happen, which is great, but the whole team needs to be able to explain what we're doing.
Sharmon: Exactly. And I stepped into an organization where we're dealing with the aftereffects of that right now. We're trying to finish up projects, but nobody has the skill sets, because the one person who did is gone. We're asking, what happened to this organization? Who are we? What are we doing? We can't keep up, because the person who knew how to do what we were supposedly transitioning to do is no longer here. It's a really interesting mess to clean up, y'all.
Wendy: You also mentioned something I found fascinating: a fundraiser quit at another nonprofit you'd worked with, because they felt like they couldn't explain the organization, since it kept changing.
Sharmon: Yes. I was listening to another podcast (I was not cheating on you, Wendy, I promise).
Wendy: It's fine. I encourage people to listen to a ton, because I listen to a ton. You should see the library in my Apple Podcasts. It's ridiculous.
Sharmon: They have these Fundraising Fridays, and this guy was talking about how development directors only last 18 months. And I thought, I know so many people like that who get into an organization and then quit. You see development director jobs constantly posted on LinkedIn. Everybody's trying to hire a fundraiser. That conversation really brought to light for me why so many people keep leaving, why so many grant writers say, I'm done, and why so many are moving into consulting and strategy. They're realizing that organizations are missing really elemental pieces of their foundation, or their mission has completely drifted and nobody has a clear idea of what they do anymore or how to articulate it. So what do you do when your fundraiser leaves? Because they don't know what you do.
Wendy: And let's be honest: if the fundraiser left, it's not just because there's mission drift. It's also because they felt like they couldn't do anything about the drift. They didn't have a good enough relationship with their CEO or their board to say, hey, we've drifted, I can't really explain this, and I'm struggling to communicate to donors what you want to do. That's a red flag too. And it's hard, because a lot of times when we have mission drift, like you said at the beginning, it's because of funding. We got a grant that sort of fit, and now we're doing it and we have that funding source. When we want to reset and get back to our mission, that can be harder. What do we do when a program is already funded?
Sharmon: I think that's the hardest thing to reconcile. Are we willing to give up this money? Are we willing to say goodbye and figure out how we fund the organization as a whole, because we recognize we've completely drifted? This is always a good time to come back to community. If we can justify it with our community, it makes it so much easier. When the program's bringing in money but your community is asking, do we need this? When they no longer feel like you're for them, that's a signal that maybe this money wasn't worth what we thought it was. If we're losing the community we claim we serve, was it worth it?
Wendy: That's a really great way to look at it. We can all get our toes stepped on or get a little sensitive when maybe we're the ones who started the drift, or we got that grant, and now it's, hey, I got you money and now you don't want it? How can we come back to our decision makers, whether that's the board or the CEO or whoever has their hand in this, and say, we've stepped over the line, without causing problems?
Sharmon: I'll tell you what I did, because I was that person. I was really excited about an idea that fit, but didn't fully fit, and wasn't fully thought out. It was pitched as a way to bring in all this funding and do all these things, it sounded so cool, and it was so in line with something I'd wanted to produce myself. So I said, let's see how this goes. Let's do it. Let's all do it. And then a couple of years later, everything had fallen apart, we no longer had funding, and nobody knew how to explain what the organization does. It's a time of eating some humble pie and saying, okay, I was all gung-ho on this, but we've lost engagement on our Instagram, our highest-engaged platform, where we had over 400,000 followers. We've lost them, we're losing funding, we're losing our community, and even this project isn't bringing in the funding it once was. It's time to step back, reevaluate, and figure out how we reengage. So don't worry, y'all. I have been that person. I was the one saying, let's do it.
Wendy: And you brought up some interesting KPIs people can watch. What's your Instagram following like? What's your engagement rate? What are your donors saying? Are they renewing, or are they saying, I don't think we're a great fit anymore? And let's be real, they probably won't come to you and say that. They'll just drift away. Somebody has to keep an eye on that. That's the kind of thing to bring back to decision makers: I've noticed our Instagram engagement dropped. I noticed this funder didn't come back, so I reached out, and here's what they said. That helps the conversation, because it's not just me saying there's a problem. Other people are showing us there's a problem.
Sharmon: Yes. There are data points indicating things aren't going the way we'd like them to.
Wendy: Absolutely. So once we've identified some drift, how do you recommend deciding what stays and what goes? How do you get it back on track?
Sharmon: It goes back to reengaging your community and letting them help decide. That's the piece we often forget. We look at the numbers and the data, we figure out what the board wants and what the staff wants, but we forget to go back and ask our community. Be transparent: we messed up, and we want to know where you want us to take this. Transparency is only going to help you. That's always step one. Once you've talked to them, you can reevaluate programs, do a little SWOT analysis, a mini assessment of all your programs, figure out where your money is coming from, and go down the list of what you're doing and how. And the biggest thing is to assess it not just against dollars and your community, but against the mission, vision, and values you set for your organization. Those are ultimately what tell you how far you've gotten from what you set out to do.
Wendy: That's great advice. Hopefully everyone's doing surveys and tracking KPIs to help them stay on track. But if you haven't, don't feel guilty. This happens so much, and you're not abnormal. Sometimes it even leads to a new mission, because your nonprofit has solved some of the problems you set out to solve, and now you've grown and can address other issues. But like you said, if you're not talking to your community, sending surveys, or tracking the effectiveness of your programs, you won't know that. You've got to look at all of it. Have a little strategic planning meeting and talk about what we're doing and what our mission is. Is it the same mission? Have things changed? Do we need to change with them? I've sat down with boards to talk about what we want our actual mission statement to be. Not just a refresh, but realigning with our original intent. And after you've made that decision, it's super important to communicate it with everyone. So where are some of the places you feel people miss when they don't communicate well about this? I feel like there are a lot of little things they forget.
Sharmon: I want to say, honestly, it's everywhere. A lot of people feel like the mission statement is this internal thing we stick on our website, and that's the end of the conversation. You almost never look at it again. It's like the bylaws: we wrote these, and we'll never look at them again. It starts at the top. The board develops the new mission, or realigns it, and gets really in-depth about what that means and looks like. Then we bring it to executive leadership, then the staff, then the volunteers. Once you're good internally, then you put it out there, because everybody internally needs to be able to say what's happening.
Sharmon: A good example: I was listening to a guy talk about business, and he told a story about Southwest. Someone in line went up to an agent and said, it would be great if you had all these seats and all these things. And she said, that's a really good idea, but it would probably cost more money, which means raising ticket prices, so they probably wouldn't do that. And he said, there's someone who knows what the mission is. They've trained their staff so well that they can respond and say, that's not part of our mission. Your volunteers need to be able to do that. Your staff needs to be able to do that with anybody who talks to them about the organization. Being solid internally is so important. And an email is not going to cut it.
Wendy: You took the words out of my mouth. So many times I see the board make a decision in the meeting, and then the ED sends out a mass email to everyone. There are no internal meetings, no segmenting of information, no "I'm going to explain this to my staff first, so board, let's not tell anybody we're shutting this program down yet." Let's talk about it internally. Let's reset jobs, because it might affect what a staff member or volunteer is actually doing. Let's explain why we made the decision and what went into it. If they don't understand and just get a mass email, I've seen it too many times: you'll alienate your staff, lose volunteers, and lose community, because you can't explain it.
Sharmon: That why is so, so important.
Wendy: A hundred percent. Get your house set first, before you go public with that info. The public may not need to know all the things, but your staff does.
Sharmon: And to your point about whether you have to write a new mission, I think there are three tiers. There's full-on mission drift. Then there's mission evolution, where it's done on purpose. We're changing on purpose. And I was talking with a guy who defined something as mission agility, where we do a slight pivot for the times and then come right back. Everybody knows COVID.
Wendy: COVID's the perfect example.
Sharmon: We had to pivot things for a bit. That's being agile and flexible with your mission without completely leaving it. Figuring out where you are on that spectrum is really important, and so is being able to communicate it. Hey, we've drifted, we're not in a good place, and we're working our way back. Or, we're doing this on purpose for a little while, and then we'll make our way back. Or, the community has told us this no longer works for them, and we need to change. That's a whole other thing entirely.
Wendy: I love that you classified it, because you're right. There are three different ways this can happen and three ways it can go. That's an important question to ask when you're communicating it, too. How do you want to brand this change?
Sharmon: Storytelling.
Wendy: The true gift of nonprofit marketing is storytelling. Truly. So say we've done the evaluation, figured out which bucket we're in, gotten our house in order, and we're ready to communicate. What should they see if they've done it well?
Sharmon: Number one, people are on board. It's hard to get a hundred percent of people on board, but there shouldn't be major objections, outside of the people whose feelings you probably hurt because you got rid of their program. People are excited about what you're doing, on board with the mission, and rowing in the same direction. The other part is that people can explain what you do. It feels like such a simple, basic thing, and everybody says, of course people know what we do. But do they, though? Having people able to explain what you do is essential to getting anything. We don't give enough credit to our community, our little invisible ambassadors out there talking about us. If they're not talking about you the right way, or don't know what to say, that's a problem. I was just in a communications meeting with another organization I'm part of, and we were developing talking points. One woman said, this is great, because people ask me about this organization and I don't know what to tell them. And someone else said, that surprises me, because when I tell them this, they fully understand. And I'm like, you're on staff. You're inside the organization. She isn't. That's an issue.
Wendy: A hundred percent. I hear it all the time.
Sharmon: It's got to flow.
Wendy: If they can nail the communication part, that's how they'll know they've done it well, because everything gets easier. It's easier to fundraise, easier to get donors to renew, easier to get aligned volunteers. That's where we started with mission drift: everything was getting harder. It'll all get easier again if we can rein it back in and communicate it.
Sharmon: Crazy how that works, right?
Wendy: It's amazing how communication is the key to everything.
Sharmon: I think we talked about this in our other conversation, but I was working with an organization that was starting to lose funding, and things were getting tight. One of the things I requested was a one-sheet for the board. And they said, just send them to this page on the website. And I'm like, that's not even the home page. When we want people to talk about this organization and help board members get funding, why are we sending them to some page that isn't the home page? I should be able to send people to the home page, and it should tell them what this organization is about.
Wendy: I've thought that at almost every nonprofit where I've been a board member. What would you like me to tell people? Well, check out the website. That doesn't help me, because I've already looked at your website and it didn't tell me.
Sharmon: It's so wild to me. I have a hard time explaining to people that because you're inside it and doing this work every day, you know. But people who aren't have no clue. You think they should know, but they don't, and you need to lay it out crystal clear for them. I did this with another organization, and the leader did lay it out, and the board still didn't understand, I think because it was different from what they'd joined the board to do.
Wendy: Right. Somebody realigned something and didn't come back and say, here are the changes and here's how that affects what we do. Again, communication is key. If you make changes, you have to tell everyone, and you have to tell them in the way that works for each group. You don't just send a mass email and expect board members to repeat it. That needs to be a discussion in the board meeting. Same thing for staff: a discussion in the staff meeting. Same with volunteers. We have to hit it on all fronts so people can understand it and ask the questions they need to, so they can become the ambassadors you always want them to be.
Sharmon: And we can't just say it one time. We feel like we're repeating ourselves, but even in marketing they say it takes five or six times for somebody to really see something.
Wendy: I think we're up to seven now.
Sharmon: You have to repeat it over and over for people to really get it. And you have to do it in multiple ways: your email, a graphic for your visual learners. Cover the bases, and send it out multiple times.
Wendy: Absolutely. Well, girl, thank you so much for coming back to talk about mission drift with me. Everyone needs to hear this, because we need to be on watch for it. We need to track our KPIs and listen to the people doing the fundraising and the people trying to get folks in the door. What's changed? Is it getting harder? Why is it getting harder? I'm so glad we got to do this today, and hopefully this will help people avoid drifting off their mission, or realign easily.
Sharmon: I actually have a purpose drift diagnostic on my website at blesseddesignsco.com/friends. It helps you figure out how far you've drifted and what it's going to take to get you back.
Wendy: That's fantastic. Hopefully people will take it, and listen if it tells them they've drifted.
Sharmon: Please listen.
Wendy: All right, everybody. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time on Nonprofit Nook.