[Article] How data is helping experts navigate the non-profit sector’s capacity and funding issues

Charities and non-profits are struggling with a “trilemma”: rising demand for their services, financial instability, and workforce precarity. Here are the problems and solutions, according to the data.

The non-profit sector’s “trilemma” is increasing each year: more demand for charitable services, more financial instability across organizations, and more workforce challenges. According to data experts from the Ottawa Food Bank and Volunteer Canada, these issues are interconnected. Anne Millar, Ottawa Food Bank’s officer of data and research, and Harar Hall, Volunteer Canada’s policy and research manager, are looking at how data can be harnessed for solutions across the sector.

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The trilemma, according to the data

The Ottawa Food Bank has experienced a 90% increase in visits since 2019, according to Millar.

Volunteering has declined by 41% since 2018, according to Hall.

More than half of the Ontario Nonprofit Network’s survey respondents report that their organizations’ revenues are staying the same or declining, with some relying on their reserve funds to operate, according to ONN’s 2024 State of the Sector policy report.

These critical issues are compounding across organizations.

The Ottawa Food Bank provides food and collects intake data from people accessing services from a network of 98 regional food programs. According to Millar, 61% of people visiting food banks in 2024 were considered severely food insecure, compared to the 32% from 2018/2019. “Severely food insecure” includes people missing meals, having a reduced food intake, and at times going a day or some days without food. According to Statistics Canada, 10 million Canadians were considered food insecure in 2023. Despite this, the Ottawa Food Bank lacks the funding it needs to provide food for those in need. It receives 1.4% of its budget from the municipal government and no provincial or federal funding. Millar describes this as “inadequate support.”

Millar says that while finding additional funding was the top priority for 56% of food security organizations in their network in 2021, the need rose to 91% of organizations in 2024. At the same time, 48% of organizations needed additional staff in 2021, and by 2024, 87% of organizations were short-staffed. “It’s becoming overwhelming,” she says. Many organizations lost a majority of their volunteers during the pandemic, given the safety concern of having seniors on the front line. “But we haven’t seen them coming back. So the need for volunteers increased from 32% to 65% between 2021 and 2024.”

Hall explains the trilemma as a “self-fulfilling prophecy” of organizations lacking capacity through the decline of volunteers. “You have a decreased capacity to engage volunteers, which means that you then have less volunteers to be there to support programming, to support service delivery, to support ongoing engagement and connecting with communities. And then that sort of decrease in capacity to engage volunteers specifically is reinforced by a lack of sustainable funding for the sector.”

How data can disrupt the cycle

“We have a decreased capacity internally for analyzing, collecting, rolling up, and sharing our data as a sector but an increased demand for data storytelling, advocacy advanced by data, strong and compelling numbers – and we have no money to sort of build that capacity overnight,” Hall says.

Funder reporting, an opportunity for storytelling and data analysis, demands considerable capacity for non-profit employees that not all organizations can afford. Hall says one way to increase data literacy and management is “having a really honest and upfront conversation with funders about the various ways that they ask organizations to collect data in a non-standardized way that means that organizations are spending more time trying to report to funders than actually collecting the data that they need to improve their services and improve their delivery, to improve their impact, to improve the way that they serve their communities.”

Volunteer Canada is attempting to build more capacity through the National Volunteer Action Strategy, which aims to optimize volunteering across Canada. The strategy is also an attempt to “break down some of those silos that organizations sometimes operate in,” Hall says. Though there are many organizations that operate with the same mandate and collaborate, Volunteer Canada hopes to enable best practices and guidelines among them.

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