The state of nonprofit, government and education research report

Leaders are managing complexity in different ways.

Nonprofit, government and education (NGE) leaders are facing similar strategic tensions: financial pressures, technology integration and talent retention. But their responses often vary.

Wipfli surveyed 299 executive-level leaders across these sectors to identify their top challenges. Across the sectors, we found:

• Financial outlooks vary: Government respondents reported the strongest optimism about their organizations’ financial stability. Nonprofit respondents were moderately optimistic about their own organizations but less so about the sector as a whole. Education respondents expressed the least confidence in both their current and future financial outlooks.
• Technology maturity differs sharply: Only about one-third of nonprofit respondents described their organizations as “advanced” or “cutting-edge.” In contrast, roughly half of government respondents and nearly two-thirds of education respondents reported mature integration levels.
• Cybersecurity concerns are widespread — and warranted: Nearly half of nonprofit and government respondents — and three-quarters of education respondents — reported detecting three or more incidents of unauthorized network access in the past year.
• AI strategies are emerging — but unevenly: While 84% of education respondents say they have a defined AI strategy, nonprofit and government respondents are more evenly split between exploration and focused implementation.

The full report unpacks how the data manifests in real organizations — and how NGE leaders build stronger people strategies, financial resilience and technology readiness in a complex and changing environment.