Segment 1 | About you

Across the dataset, executives and senior managers make up the largest share of respondents in small nonprofits, while dedicated change-management practitioners become more visible as organizations grow.

In organizations with 1–5 staff, nearly three-quarters of respondents were executives. In the largest nonprofits, the picture flips: a third of respondents were change-management specialists and only a small minority were executives. Mid-sized organizations show the highest proportion of programme and project managers involved in driving change.

These patterns show how differently change leadership and implementation roles are distributed depending on scale.

The data show a clear gradient in experience. Executives bring the longest tenures, with almost three-quarters reporting more than 15 years of experience leading change. Specialists and managers show more varied profiles: roughly half of all practitioners have between four and seven years of experience, while project and people managers span the full range from early to mid-career.

In smaller nonprofits this means change is often led by leaders with deep institutional memory. In larger organizations, the work is carried out by professionals who are still building their expertise and formalizing their approaches.

Sector tenure is similarly uneven. Smaller and mid-sized nonprofits are represented mainly by long-tenured nonprofit professionals, while larger organizations include more respondents with shorter sector experience.

Formal certification and training in change management increases sharply with size. In the largest organizations, more than half of respondents report holding a certification compared with fewer than one in five in the smallest nonprofits. Yet this figure almost certainly overstates formal credentials. Many respondents appear to have interpreted the question broadly, including general management, leadership or project management training rather than recognized change management qualifications such as those offered by Prosci, ACMP or CMI. Adjusting for this interpretation and based on the open-ended follow-up question, the true share of respondents with formal training or certification is likely closer to 20–25 percent overall.

Certification remains concentrated among change-management practitioners and some executives but is still rare among HR, communications and people-management roles. Among those who listed a specific certification, the most frequently cited are Prosci and ACMP credentials, followed by internal organizational programmes or academic certificates in management or organizational development. A small number mentioned CMI and APMG certifications, as well as bespoke in-house frameworks. The variety of responses suggests that formal certification is still emerging as a professional norm rather than a sector standard.