Staff Supervision and Management Guide for Nonprofit Leaders
Updated: 3 days ago
Table of Contents
At the Nonprofit Learning Lab, we offer daily online nonprofit training on training, facilitation, fundraising, strategic planning, communications, volunteer management, and free resources to help you lead your organization. These resources are designed to help executive directors, c-suite staff, development directors, program directors, volunteer managers, operation directors, and board members.
We offer a variety of free nonprofit resources from downloadable guidebooks to webinars to blogs!
We’ve compiled a list of all our internal resources relating to staff supervision & leadership along with highlighting some of our favorite external resources.
Activity Sheets: Goal Setting & Employee Development
We offer free downloadable, printable worksheets to help you brainstorm on nonprofit topics such as strategy & planning, fundraising, and volunteer management.
This tool is designed to support employees in their professional growth by setting clear development goals and outlining actionable steps. It includes sections for essential details, specific skills to be developed, a detailed action plan, and a timeline for tracking progress. Additionally, it highlights supervisor support, success metrics for evaluating achievements, and a review process for ongoing feedback.
Prompt employees or yourself to articulate goals, motivations, challenges, and resources of support, while providing space for detailed action steps and timelines for each goal. By breaking down each goal into manageable components, including start dates and projected due dates, the sheet encourages focused progress. This comprehensive framework fosters accountability and clarity, empowering individuals to navigate their path to success effectively.
Free Webinars & Past Free Webinar Downloads
Join us for live free webinars, covering topics from data analytics to fundraising & our diversity, equity and inclusion webinar series. Participate live to ask questions and learn from our expert speakers!
In addition to our live, upcoming free webinars, we provide access to all our previous free webinars! You can download both the recording and slides for our free webinars.
10 Free Leadership Webinars You Can Access Today
Bridging Generational Communication Gaps in the Nonprofit Workplace
An Equation to Unleash Collective Impact and Foster Meaningful Collaboration
Managing (or Initiating) Rapid Growth: Collaborative Solutions for Visionary Leaders
Becoming a Nonprofit Thought Leader
Why Retention & Succession Belong in your Strategic Plan
How to Be An Inclusive and Inspiring Leader
Navigating Nonprofit Leadership: Leadership is Hard... And That's Ok
Our Roles in Creating Inclusive Environments
Organizational Lifecycle During Times of Change
Nurturing Safe Space: Ensuring Employee Retention
To gain access, just fill out our short form and you’ll receive an email to browse them all!
Upcoming Free Webinars
The meetings are pleasant. The program officer is encouraging. The invitation to apply never comes. In 30 minutes, learn the specific signals that separate an aligned funder relationship from a stalled one, get language for asking a funder a direct question, and leave with a one-page audit for your current funder list.
LinkedIn is no longer optional for nonprofit leaders. It’s a powerful platform to advance your mission, attract partners, influence funders, and shape public narrative. In this session, executives will learn how to position themselves as credible voices, optimize their profiles, create engaging posts, and build community - fostering consistent thought leadership that supports fundraising, partnerships, and growth.
A well-produced report is one of the most durable and lasting products your organization can put into the world. They produce content that gets repurposed and reshared through social media, newsletters, fundraising campaigns, conferences, and your website for years to come. This session is for leaders who care just as much about strategy and impact as they do about deadlines and budgets.
We all move through the world shaped by experiences, messages, and stories that influence how we see others. Implicit bias is a natural part of how the human brain categorizes information, yet without reflection it can shape decisions and relationships in ways that limit equity and belonging. This interactive session invites nonprofit professionals to explore implicit bias with curiosity rather than blame, building awareness through reflection, dialogue, and real-world application. Participants will deepen their understanding of how empathy and emotional intelligence help interrupt automatic assumptions and strengthen leadership. The session concludes with practical tools to align organizational values with everyday practices.
AI is transforming nonprofit work, from fundraising and communications to programs, operations, and decision-making. This interactive session introduces the AI Equity Framework, a practical tool for asking who benefits, who may be harmed, what data is used, and where human judgment belongs. Participants will also explore findings from the AI Equity Project, a three-year study of nonprofit AI adoption, governance, and equity across the U.S. and Canada.
Workshops for Supervisors & Leaders
We offer online nonprofit training on supervision, facilitation, fundraising, strategic planning, communications, volunteer management, board management, and more! Check out our trainings related to staff supervision & leadership below.
Effective staff management is essential to completing work, employee satisfaction, and retention. Whether you are new to the role or are a supervisor with extensive knowledge, there is a need to understand how to use systems to communicate and create clarity around expectations, tasks, and job performance. As a supervisor, there is a balance between micro-managing and believing in the skills of your employees for whom you hired them in their roles. This workshop will dive into supervision strategies, including span of control, performance, project monitoring, feedback, supervision methods, and how to build a high-performing team.
This engaging and practical presentation explores how organizational culture shapes every decision, relationship, and behavior within a nonprofit. Grounded in storytelling and real-life examples, it challenges leaders to reflect on how their personal histories, unspoken norms, and unchecked behaviors influence culture- often more than stated values or mission statements. Participants will learn why culture must be intentionally shaped, how to assess and align it with desired outcomes, and leave with actionable strategies to build trust, accountability, and alignment within their teams.
Burnout is reshaping the social impact sector, and too frequently the causes get minimized to employees being overworked and underpaid - limiting the range of solutions available to organizational leaders. Leaders need bold and practical approaches to meet the moment, including a more expansive way of understanding burnout as a systemic, organizational issue and the underlying factors that can be addressed. This workshop will blend reflection, research, and care to help you understand six drivers of burnout and identify opportunities to effect change at your organization.
Your staff is already using AI. The question is whether you're governing it—or hoping for the best. Here's the problem: 68-82% of nonprofit employees are using generative AI tools right now, but only 5-14% of organizations have an AI use policy in place. That 60+ point governance gap exposes your organization to serious fiduciary risk—uncontrolled data exposure, inconsistent practices, and the kind of "hope-based development" that keeps finance and operations leaders up at night.
A strong budget does more than track numbers — it helps organizations make informed decisions, stay aligned with their mission, and prepare for growth. In this workshop, participants will walk through best practices for nonprofit budget development, from early planning conversations to implementation after board approval. We will discuss how to build a realistic budgeting timeline, engage staff and leadership throughout the process, and create stronger board conversations around financial priorities. Explore how strategic plans, organizational goals, and funding realities should shape budgeting decisions.
Use code friend10 when registering to get $10 off!
Nonprofit Learning Library
Our nonprofit library contains hundreds of recordings and slides for nonprofit professionals on a variety of topics from marketing, fundraising, program management, diversity equity and inclusion, volunteer management and more.
Membership provides you with access to our previous nonprofit workshops. Interested in seeing what's in the resource library but not a member? Click here to see an abbreviated list of resources in our library.
Working on your continuing education credits and looking to get CFRE or CVA credits? Our library is filled with hundreds of sessions pre-approved for CFRE and CCVA credit! Additionally, as a CAE registered provider, many of our workshops qualify for ASAE credit as well!
Blogs on Staff Supervision & Management
Weekly blog posts on fundraising, nonprofit marketing, donor management software, nonprofit storytelling, volunteer management, social media and more!
Quick Link to all Leadership Blogs
Some of our favorite blogs for staff supervision & management:
How to be a Better Supervisor: Motivating Employees as they Work on Projects
Communicating with your Staff: Platforms for Organizing and Tracking Performance
Creating Project Timelines to Improve Staff Management at Your Nonprofit
From Onboarding to Supervision: How to Use Employee Development Plans for Staff Management
External Resources
Leadership Savvy was created to be your partner in times of decision-making, business improvement, professional growth, or times of change. Whether it’s building teams, strengthening partnerships, reorienting your career, or taking your leadership to the next level, we’re here to help you find clarity and reach your goals.
Consultants for Good is a dynamic, peer-driven collective of mission-driven consultants who are motivated to learn together, share work opportunities, swap business tips, and bond over shared experiences. Through online and in-person community, C4G hosts all of the peer-led education and opportunities to connect that consultants need to thrive.
The monday.com Work OS is a low code- no code platform that democratizes the power of software so organizations can easily build work management tools and software applications to fit their every need. The platform intuitively connects people to processes and systems, empowering teams to excel in every aspect of their work while creating an environment of transparency in business.
Martus is a cloud-based budgeting, forecasting and reporting software tool that allows organizations and businesses to create, execute, and analyze budgets with ease. Martus supports collaboration, is easy to implement and very affordable.
With Aplos, nonprofit groups and faith-based organizations of every shape, size, and mission can seamlessly run their finances and operations, manage their business and bottom line, and proactively engage their communities and donors when it matters most.
Philanthropy + Data + Social Equity and Inclusion = a virtual school where nonprofits can unlearn, learn, and evolve their equity-focused data practices. Offering trainings, workshops, and webinars on topics like inclusive data collection, equitable fundraising surveys, and human-centric AI.
Other Helpful Resources
Continue Learning…
Job Boards
A central hub for national, international, Canadian, and local job boards
Nonprofit Learning Lab Job Board
Featuring jobs posted by our members, all over the U.S.
Browse volunteer job boards and get involved in your local community or in national volunteer leadership opportunities.
Provides high-impact jobs at nonprofits, social enterprises, CSR, B Corps, government, and other mission-focused organizations and positions.
The world's largest social-impact job board, featuring paid & volunteer roles from 150,000+ organizations
Guidebooks
We offer many free downloadable guidebooks to get ideas for fundraising plans, budgeting, board development and more.
Tip Sheets
Download free tip sheets on topics from nonprofit fundraising, board development, nonprofit marketing & volunteer management.
