70% of Executive Directors Plan to Leave in Five Years.
Is Your Board Ready?
Is your nonprofit board prepared for your executive director to leave?
Most aren’t. Roughly 70% of nonprofit executive directors plan to leave their roles within five years, and most boards still don’t have a written plan for what happens next. As a board member, you carry the governance responsibility for replacing your Executive Director, and in some cases stepping into that role yourself until someone is found. That responsibility only works if you build the plan before you need it.
Every Executive Director eventually leaves. Some retire. Some get poached by a job with a real salary and real benefits. Some just burn out and need something the nonprofit sector hasn’t been able to give them. Whatever the reason, the exit is coming for almost every organization, and most boards treat it like a surprise.
Roughly 70% of nonprofit Executive Directors plan to leave their current role within the next five years, according to recurring sector surveys, and fewer than a third of nonprofits have a formal succession plan in place to meet that moment. If your board hasn’t talked about what happens the day your Executive Director resigns, you’re not alone. But you’re also not prepared, and the gap between those two things is where organizations get hurt.
This is meant to name something true so your board can actually plan for it, on your own timeline, with your Executive Director still in the room to help (because how invaluable is that?)
Why Are So Many Executive Directors Planning to Leave?
Executive directors leave because they can find better pay, better boundaries, or a slower pace somewhere outside the nonprofit sector. The work asks a lot of one person: fundraising targets, board management, staff supervision, program oversight, and public accountability, often for a salary that doesn’t match the weight of the job.
None of this is new. Research from CompassPoint and the Meyer Foundation found that as far back as 2006, three quarters of nonprofit executives did not expect to be in their current role five years later. Nearly two decades on, the pattern hasn’t changed. What has changed is how few boards are actually ready for it.
Think about what that means for your organization specifically. If your executive director is quietly weighing their options right now, you likely wouldn’t know until they’d already decided.
What Does the Board Actually Owe the Organization When an ED Leaves?
This is the part most board members underestimate. Executive leadership transitions are not something HR handles or something that resolves itself. According to Wipfli’s research on nonprofit leadership turnover, boards of directors bear primary responsibility for executive leadership transitions, and that responsibility goes well beyond posting a job listing. It includes emergency succession protocols, transition communication, and a plan for who holds the organization together in the meantime.
That’s the board’s job. If your bylaws and governance structure put hiring authority for the Executive Director in the board’s hands, then the responsibility for what happens when that seat empties sits there too. Funders, staff, and the community you serve are counting on someone to hold that continuity, and by default, that someone is the board.
Could You Step Into the Executive Director Role If You Had To?
Here’s the question most board members haven’t sat with: if your Executive Director left next month and you couldn’t find or afford an interim right away, could you or another board member actually run the organization for a stretch? Do you know where the passwords live? Do you know which grant reports are due when, who signs checks, or how payroll actually gets processed? Likely, if you have good staff, the answer is no.
This is why staying genuinely connected to your executive director matters, not just at board meetings, but in the operational weeds. You don’t need to know every task, but you do need to know that the information exists somewhere other than your executive director’s head, and that someone besides them could find it.
Ask yourself honestly where your organization stands today. Could a board member log into the bank account this week? Do you know your grant reporting deadlines for the next quarter, or would that knowledge leave the building along with your executive director? This is exactly the kind of documentation and operational structuring work that keeps an organization running when the person who built it steps away, whether that’s for a two-week vacation or a permanent departure.
Should Your Board Hire Externally or Build Leadership From Within?
Once you accept that a transition is coming, the next question is what kind of transition you actually want. That’s a conversation worth having long before there’s an opening to fill.
Encourage your Executive Director to have honest conversations with staff about where people want to grow. Some boards assume the next executive director has to come from outside the organization. But an internal restructure, one that moves toward a more horizontal or shared leadership model, might serve the mission better than a traditional external hire. Promoting from within can preserve institutional knowledge and give your team a real growth path instead of a ceiling.
Neither option is automatically right for every organization. An external hire brings fresh perspective and distance from internal dynamics. An internal promotion brings continuity and a team that already trusts the person stepping up. What matters is that the board is choosing deliberately, with real input from staff, instead of scrambling to fill a seat the moment it opens.
This kind of decision is part of a larger strategic transition process, not a single hiring decision made under pressure.
What Does a Real Transition Plan Actually Look Like?
According to BoardSource’s Leading with Intent research, only 29% of nonprofits report having a written succession plan, and separate research from Boardable found that 78% of nonprofits lack a formal board succession plan even though most nonprofit leaders expect to exit within five years. The gap between how likely a transition is and how few boards prepare for one is the real risk here, more than the transition itself.
A real plan names who takes over immediate decisions on day one. It documents financial systems, key relationships, and login access somewhere the board can reach. It includes a communication plan for staff, funders, and community partners so nobody is left guessing what happens next. And it gets built while your executive director is still there to help write it.
Boards that treat succession planning as ongoing governance work, not a one-time document that gets filed away and forgotten, tend to handle transitions with far less disruption. Revisit the plan annually. Update it whenever staff roles shift or new systems get put in place. That’s the difference between an organization that can continue moving during transitions and one that quietly falls apart.
What This Means for Your Board Right Now
You won’t have the luxury of figuring this out slowly once your executive director actually resigns. The conversations that matter now, about documentation, about internal growth paths, about who could step in and how, are the ones that happen before the emergency, not during it.
At Triple Creeks, we help boards build the kind of resilient organizational structure that can weather a leadership transition without losing momentum, clarity, or trust. If your board hasn’t had this conversation yet, that’s the place to start.
Book a free discovery call and let’s build the plan before you need it.
