If your executive director announced tomorrow that they were leaving, what would leave with them?
I’m not talking about their leadership style or the relationships they’ve built. I’m talking about everything they know about your organization.
Why certain decisions were made. What happened when a program didn’t work as expected. The history behind a longstanding partnership. The lessons learned from a difficult funding decision.
Nonprofit knowledge management may sound like a technical process, but it starts with a simple question: What does your organization know, and who has access to that knowledge?
It’s a question nonprofit leaders and boards should be actively asking, especially as they think about organizational sustainability.
What New Leaders Don’t Know Can Hurt an Organization
I recently connected with Jennifer McKenzie, founder of Organized Synergy, whose work focuses on nonprofit sustainability.
Jennifer shared her 2026 Nonprofit Sustainability Guide, which draws on a survey of 106 nonprofit executive leaders and extensive conversations with leaders, board members and funders.
This finding grabbed my attention:
35% of the executive leaders surveyed said they inherited organizations in worse condition than they expected.
The guide also makes an important distinction between organizational stability and sustainability.
A stable nonprofit can pay its employees, deliver its programs, and meet its current obligations. But an unexpected leadership departure, a funding reduction, or another significant change could quickly threaten that stability.
A sustainable organization has developed the capacity to respond to those changes and keep moving forward.
Jennifer describes sustainability with a simple formula:
Sustainability = Clarity × Capacity
This resonates with me because her definition of clarity involves a shared understanding of organizational priorities and how decisions get made.
Communication is one of the five essential practices in her framework. Information needs to flow throughout the organization so people can make decisions based on shared understanding rather than assumptions.
But that’s a challenge for nonprofits with small teams, where a handful of people often hold years of organizational knowledge.
Here’s my concern:
What happens when that knowledge lives primarily in the heads of one or two people?
The Knowledge That Lives in Someone’s Head
I’m experiencing this very problem right now. I’m on the board of a local business owners group and we’re getting ready to celebrate a pivotal anniversary date. I’ve been planning a landing page on the website celebrating the anniversary with a timeline, photos, videos, stories, quotes from members and more.
For such an active chapter of a national organization with hundreds of current and past members, you’d think there would be plenty of record’s of the chapter’s history. But I’m finding very little. No collection of old memos, letters, photos or other materials that tell the story of what we’ve accomplished.
Or maybe we just don’t know where it all is.
I’ve realized that our board has always relied on our very efficient and lovely chapter manager to answer questions, provide guidance, and keep things running smoothly. She’s been such a reliable source of information that we’ve never felt much urgency to develop standard operating procedures or create a shared system for storing organizational knowledge.
If the chapter manager ever left us, we’d be in big trouble.
We may have decades of valuable information tucked away somewhere. But if only one person knows where to find it or understands its significance, how useful is it to the rest of the organization?
This isn’t the first time I’ve experienced a lack of shared organizational understanding. And I suspect it’s familiar to many nonprofit professionals.
Every organization has people who remember why something happened, how a process evolved, or what was learned from a particular experience.
These employees are incredibly valuable. But when important knowledge exists primarily in their memories, the organization becomes dependent on their continued presence.
And the problem often goes unnoticed until they leave.
Succession Planning Should Include Knowledge Continuity
Most nonprofit boards understand the importance of executive succession planning. They know they need to prepare for leadership transitions, whether those transitions are planned or unexpected.
But identifying an interim leader or developing a transition plan addresses only part of the challenge.
Leadership continuity also requires knowledge continuity.
A new executive director needs more than access to documents and an introduction to key stakeholders. They need to understand the thinking behind the organization’s decisions.
The same is true when a longtime program director retires, a development officer leaves, or a board member completes their term.
In her sustainability guide, Jennifer describes sustainable organizations as those capable of adapting to disruption without depending on any one person to hold everything together.
I think that principle applies directly to organizational knowledge.
An organization may appear stable because experienced people know how to keep things running. But if those people leave and their knowledge goes with them, that stability can disappear quickly.
I recently explored this issue in my review of Critical Knowledge Transfer: Useful Ideas for Smaller Organizations. The book offers practical ways to transfer the experience and judgment that longtime employees develop before that knowledge disappears.
Documentation Is Only Part of the Answer
When we talk about preserving organizational knowledge, the first solution that comes to mind is usually documentation.
Nonprofits already produce a tremendous amount of information. We’ve got strategic plans, board minutes, annual reports, program evaluations, policies and procedures clogging up our shared drives and filing cabinets.
All of that documentation is important. But preserving information is only part of building shared understanding.
The existence of those documents doesn’t guarantee that people understand the information they contain or know how to use it.
Think about what happens when a nonprofit decides to discontinue a program. The decision might appear in board minutes. A financial report might explain the costs. An annual report might mention a shift in priorities.
But could a new leader two years later easily understand what led to that decision? What the organization learned? Whether those lessons should influence a similar decision today?
That’s important context that could affect future decisions.
That’s why Shared Organizational Understanding is important.
The goal is to make essential organizational knowledge available, understandable, and useful to the people who need it.
That might mean documenting the reasoning behind major decisions, creating frameworks that explain how decisions should be made, or building knowledge-sharing into employee onboarding. It could mean building knowledge-sharing into employee onboarding or giving experienced employees opportunities to teach others what they’ve learned. It might also mean involving more employees in important organizational initiatives so they understand the thinking behind decisions and can contribute their own knowledge.
I’m not suggesting that we document every conversation or create an elaborate knowledge management system.
I think shared understanding starts with recognizing which knowledge is important to the organization’s future.
I’ve written more about this distinction in Shared Organizational Understanding: Turning Information Into Better Decisions. The challenge goes beyond storing information. People need to understand what that information means and how to apply it.
Knowledge Continuity Is a Capacity-Building Strategy
Nonprofits often think about organizational capacity in terms of funding, staffing, technology or infrastructure.
But knowledge is an organizational resource, too. When people understand why decisions were made and how their work connects to organizational priorities, they’re better equipped to make decisions themselves.
This also affects how an organization presents itself to the public. As I explored in Why Nonprofit Brand Consistency Breaks Down, employees often communicate inconsistently because they have different understandings of the organization and its work.
New employees can become productive more quickly. Leaders can build on previous experience. Teams can adapt to changing circumstances without repeatedly starting from scratch.
And when someone leaves, the organization retains more of what that person helped it learn. That’s an important part of organizational sustainability.
Knowledge continuity helps organizations retain what they’ve learned, even as employees, leaders and circumstances change. That’s an important part of building the capacity to sustain their missions.
A Question Worth Asking
Think about the people in your organization who seem to know everything.
Maybe it’s your founding executive director or the program manager who single-handedly built a program. It could be that longtime employee everyone calls when they need historical context.
Now imagine one of those people gave notice tomorrow.
What important knowledge would your organization struggle to recover?
Here’s one place to start. Identify someone whose departure would create a significant knowledge gap. Ask them to explain the history behind three important decisions or processes. Capture what they know, including the reasoning and lessons learned, and make that information accessible to others.
You don’t have to preserve everything at once. Start with the knowledge your organization can’t afford to lose.
Organizational knowledge is too valuable to depend on someone’s memory alone.
Preserving and sharing that knowledge helps nonprofits make better decisions, navigate leadership transitions and sustain their missions over time.
I help nonprofits build Shared Organizational Understanding by identifying the knowledge, frameworks and messages people need to make better decisions and work toward common goals. If your organization is struggling to preserve or share important knowledge, click the button below to set up a discovery call.
