2025 Survey Methodology

The tenth Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF) State of the Nonprofit Sector Survey was designed to assess the financial health, funding, and operational landscape of US nonprofits in 2024, as well as anticipated experiences in 2025. It included questions that delved into enduring issues over many years as well as questions that examined emerging trends or responses to our current social, political, and economic context. The survey was conducted in collaboration with EVITARUS and Ambit 360, who provided input on survey design, questionnaire construction, and data analysis. EVITARUS also administered the survey. 

Core Lines of Research Inquiry: Enduring Issues 

• What is the state of service demand? Are nonprofits able to meet the demand for their services? 
• How are nonprofits doing financially? Are nonprofits able to access the capital they need? 
• What are the current challenges for nonprofits and the communities they serve? 
• What programmatic and organizational actions are nonprofits taking? 
• What are the dynamics of government funding and how are nonprofits coping with government payment delays? 

Core Lines of Research Inquiry: Emerging Trends 

• How have foundation funding practices changed since late 2022 and what impact have post-pandemic shifts had on nonprofit financial health? 
• What is the state of worker wellbeing in the nonprofit sector? 
• What is the impact of recent events, such as the 2024 election, natural disasters, federal court system rulings, and inflation, on nonprofits and the communities they serve? 
• In what ways are nonprofits contributing to the local economy? 

The survey was conducted as an online questionnaire, using Qualtrics, and distributed via email and social media. It included questions with multiple-choice, single-choice, Likert scale, and open-ended options to allow for both quantitative and qualitative analysis. In line with ethical research standards, respondents provided informed consent before participating. Respondents remained anonymous unless they chose to identify themselves. 

Time Frame 

The survey soft launched with a rollout for nonprofits in the Dallas-Fort Worth area on January 28, 2025. It opened nationally on January 30, 2025, and closed on March 14, 2025, remaining open for a timeframe similar to the State of the Nonprofit Sector Survey in prior years.  

Target Population and Methods of Outreach 

This is a sector-wide Survey and data was collected using convenience sampling. NFF invited leaders of all active US nonprofit organizations to participate. Respondent recruitment and survey promotion involved broad community efforts in collaboration with many partners, including other nonprofits, funders, associations, umbrella organizations, and many more.  

Outreach involved multiple mass and targeted emails, personal outreach, social media campaigns, announcements during live and online meetings, and promotion by NFF and many partner organizations who utilized NFF’s outreach kit. Several reminder emails were sent after the initial launch. 

Special outreach efforts were also made to recruit target populations of particular importance to the analytic goals of this survey. 

• To allow longitudinal comparisons of survey results from the 2022 and 2025 surveys, respondents who took the survey in 2022 and consented to be recontacted were directly contacted and encouraged to complete the 2025 survey. Eligible respondents were provided $50 compensation for completing the survey. 
• To allow in-depth analysis of organizations in key states or regions (California, Hawaii, Greater Philadelphia, Dallas-Fort Worth, New York City, Georgia), special efforts were made to encourage organizations in these areas to complete the survey. In addition, eligible respondents from organizations in California, Greater Philadelphia, and Dallas-Fort Worth were provided $50 compensation for completing the survey.  
• To allow comparisons to be made between nonprofits led by People of Color and those with Non-Hispanic White leaders, special efforts were made to identify and reach out directly to organizations led by people of color and encourage them to complete the survey.  Eligible respondents were provided $50 compensation for completing the survey. Our use of the term "people of color" includes the following groups: American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian or Asian American; Black or African American; Hispanic or Latine; Middle Eastern; and Native Hawaiian and/or Pacific Islander. 

The survey was developed by Nonprofit Finance Fund, in collaboration with Ambit 360 and EVITARUS. Questions were informed by both enduring and emerging trends that NFF has observed over its 45 years working with thousands of nonprofits, as well as quantifiable trends that we've discovered over 15 years of surveying nonprofits at different intervals. Nonprofit leaders in Philadelphia and Los Angeles provided input on the issues they wanted to see addressed via live events hosted in Fall 2024. An internal advisory group from a cross-section of NFF departments also provided input on the questions. To validate the relevance of survey questions and address technical or user-related needs, the survey underwent two rounds of beta testing with reviewers from NFF and a pilot test with an external participant. 

The survey contained 63 questions and included mandatory, optional, branch, multiple-choice, and open-ended items in four sections: Your Organization and the People You Serve, Supporting Your Staff, Responding to the Current Landscape, and Your Organization’s Financial Story, plus a wrap-up question and information concerning follow-up communications and incentive payment, if applicable. For tracking purposes, the 2025 survey retained 35 unaltered questions from NFF’s 2022 survey and three that were reworded. 

Question topics in both 2022 and 2025 included: 

• Basic organizational characteristics (e.g., location, annual operating expenses, key area of work, year established, fiscal sponsorship, geographic focus) 
• Organizational leadership (e.g., CEO/Executive Director demographics and tenure) 
• Populations served (e.g., number served, demographics of populations served) 
• Organizational finances and funder dynamics (e.g., revenue sources, operating results, reserve funds, months of cash on hand, unrestricted funding, funding trends) 
• Current issues and emerging trends (e.g., critical needs in the community, demand for services, management challenges, operational challenges) 

Additional question topics in 2025 included:  

• Impact of recent events (e.g., elections, policy changes, extreme weather events) on the organization and community 
• Nonprofit economic contributions to the community (e.g., amount paid in salaries, amount spent on local vendors) 
• Nonprofit staffing (e.g., staff turnover, benefits made available, ability to pay living wages) 
• Facility ownership and aspirations (e.g., benefits of owning a facility, desire to own a facility) 

Before conducting analysis, the survey results were reviewed for data quality to remove invalid or duplicate responses, recode a number of open-ended responses into relevant existing answer options, and group select responses into broader categories. 

Completions 

NFF establishes a minimum threshold of questions that respondents must answer for their responses to be included in the analysis. For the 2025 survey, this threshold was the completion of all required questions within the first section of the survey (Your Organization and the People You Serve), plus five additional survey questions from sections two, three, and four. To reduce bias towards completion of earlier sections, the order for sections two, three, and four was randomized across respondents. After removing incomplete, duplicate, and invalid responses, the final sample size for analysis was 2,206. 

Analysis 

Survey responses were reviewed by several NFF staff and project contractors, who reviewed the national data alongside dozens of cross-tabulated results that allowed for comparisons by region, budget size, sector, and more. Select open-ended responses were analyzed thematically to capture narrative insights and contextualize numerical findings, partially using Microsoft Co-Pilot. 

Because of conditional (branching) questions and question-level nonresponse, the number of responses (N) varies by question. For each question, the reported sample size reflects only those respondents who provided a substantive answer, excluding “prefer not to answer” selections. The total sample size (N) thus differs from question to question. Calculations use as N the number of respondents for each individual question, as appropriate. 

Respondents could select more than one answer to certain questions: in those cases, the resulting percentages sum to more than 100 percent. 

NFF used a nonprobability selection method to invite nonprofit leaders to complete the survey, and results therefore reflect the responses of nonprofit leaders who heard about the survey and elected to respond. This creates a probable voluntary response bias from nonprofit leaders who chose to participate.[i] 

As with all self-reported data, there remains an inherent risk of inconsistent and inaccurate data reporting. Survey respondents reflect a convenience sample and the results have not been weighted, so findings may not be representative of the nonprofit sector as a whole and may over- or under-state differences between respondent groups.  

In particular, the survey over-represents nonprofits located in several areas of the country that were deliberately oversampled to permit meaningful analyses within those regions: Georgia, Hawaii, Dallas-Fort Worth, Greater Philadelphia, California (specifically, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area), and New York City. Weights designed to adjust for these regional oversamples turned out to have very little effect on the overall survey findings, resulting in differences of no more than four percentage points across all substantive survey questions.   For these reasons, we decided to present unweighted results, while being transparent about known differences between sample and population characteristics. 

Finally, except for the 163 respondents who took NFF’s survey in both 2022 and 2025, this dataset should be treated as a snapshot capturing a moment in time and not considered longitudinal. 

[i] Voluntary response bias can occur when respondents are allowed to freely opt-in to participate in a survey. Frequently those who volunteer to respond have stronger opinions on a given subject matter than the general population.