Top reasons why OKRs fails in Nonprofits
Have effective team meetings and meaningful 1:1s, build collaborative meeting agendas, assign action items, view OKRs & KPIs

OKR is a simple, flexible goal-setting methodology and it is used by many organizations across industries including nonprofit. OKR can be a very effective tool for organizations to set ambitious goals, align stakeholders with strategy, focus execution on what matters, continuously monitor progress and build a culture of transparency or accountability. But the effectiveness of the framework depends on how it is adopted in an organization, below are some of the top reasons why OKR framework can fail in a nonprofit organization
We will discuss each of these items in more detail and also review how these can be prevented when implementing OKRs in your organization
- Not involving all the stakeholders in the goal setting process
- Setting OKRs top down without inputs from team members
- Not setting simple, understandable OKRs
- Not setting OKRs based on outcomes
- Not setting ambitious OKRs
- Not being agile – OKRs should be reviewed and learnings should be used to continuously update OKRs
- Having too many OKRs – focus on what matters
Not involving all the stakeholders in the goal setting process

Nonprofit organizations have many stakeholders such as board members, employees, volunteers, corporates, government agencies. It is important to involve key stakeholders in the goal setting process to ensure everyone is aligned behind the strategic goals. Adopting OKRs is a cultural change for any organization and it is critical to have the support of key stakeholders for successful adoption of the OKR framework.

Setting OKRs top down without inputs from team members

Not setting OKRs based on outcomes
One of the main principles of OKRs is to become an Outcomes based organization rather than output/activities based organization. Outputs/Activities provide a way to measure progress but it does not have to lead to desired outcome. So it is important to set OKRs that are outcomes based. Good outcome based Objectives help to identify which outputs/activities will most likely help to achieve the desired outcomes. If the OKRs are set properly, the objectives will clearly describe the outcomes in simple understandable words while Key Results will provide the outputs/activities that will help achieve the desired outcome.
Not setting ambitious OKRs

Not being agile
OKR is a flexible, agile framework. Organizations should continuously monitor OKRs and adapt them as necessary. Reviewing OKRs is as important as planning OKRs, all the learnings from previous periods should be incorporated into the OKRs for the new period. Even within a period, OKRs can be adapted if there is a need for change. OKR encourages t to continuously monitor the progress, we highly recommend updating quarterly OKRs at least once a week and annual OKRs at least once a month. Using software such as OKRify can help with continuous monitoring of OKRs with automatic progress update with data from Salesforce and notifications for updating OKR progress.
Having too many OKRs
