2025 State of the Sector Survey
ONN’s annual survey is conducted to better understand how nonprofits in Ontario are fairing. It identifies and shares the state of the sector in a given moment of time, and provides organizations, nonprofit workers, volunteers, donors, government, and other groups with access to high-quality data, disaggregated by key demographic profiles. Change is constant, whether that’s political, economic, or social. Our advocacy for the sector’s changing realities needs to be built upon high-quality data; the well-being of our sector, and the communities we serve depends on it.
Without data from ALL nonprofits, including charities, grassroots groups, volunteer-run organizations, nonprofit social enterprises, and nonprofit co-operatives in Ontario with a mission to serve a public benefit – we cannot paint an accurate picture of our shared struggles and opportunities for progress.
Alongside the usual operations, finance, HR, and volunteerism questions, this year we’ll also be asking:
- What advocacy tactics nonprofits are using.
- How various political, social, and economic trends are impacting various operations of organizations.
- If privatization is increasing in subsectors.
- To what extent nonprofits have access to financial levers.
About the survey
ONN has engaged Environics Research to conduct our 2025 State of the Sector survey. A few key details:
- The survey is bilingual:
- The scope is organizational.
- It will take approximately 15 minutes to complete the survey.
- The survey is confidential and anonymous.
- The survey will be available between May 13, 2025 until June 13, 2025 5pm EST.
Who can fill out the survey?
- Any nonprofits, charities, and grassroots groups in Ontario with a mission to serve a public benefit. This includes volunteer-run organizations, nonprofit social enterprises, and nonprofit co-operatives.
- A senior representative from your nonprofit who can best estimate and provide organizational operational, financial, and HR information. If you require accommodations to complete the survey please email ONN Policy Analyst, Javil Joujoute at javil@theonn.ca.
- Organizations that complete the survey can enter a draw to win 1 of 2 gift cards, valued at $100.00.
Data privacy and confidentiality
Privacy and confidentiality is important to ONN and our partners and so below are the steps we are taking to protect respondents’ data.
Environics Research will:
- Host the data collected in servers located in Toronto, Canada.
- Only collect IP addresses to detect fraud and not share IP addresses with ONN.
- Enable password protection and encryption for the data stored.
- Share de-identified individual responses (i.e. raw data) with ONN and de-identified individual responses from Toronto with the Toronto Foundation.
- Raw data will be transmitted using secure file transfer mechanisms.
ONN will:
- Report survey results only in aggregate form with the objective to identify the common experiences of nonprofit organizations during a moment in time. Survey results will sometimes be illustrated with anonymous verbatim comments from opened questions in the survey.
- Work with Environics Research to publish the survey data as an open data set, taking care to ensure that respondents cannot be identified. For example, breakdowns will be provided for regions of Ontario, subsectors (e.g., nonprofit housing or the arts), and for organizational budget size. If the response rate does not ensure confidentiality, the data will not be published.
- Enable password protection for the raw data stored.
Amplification package
Your organization can support the survey by sharing information with your networks. Click here for resources in the survey amplification package.
Past survey resources
- 2024 State of the Sector – Technical report – English and French
- 2024 State of the Sector – Policy report – English and French
- 2023 State of the Sector survey – Policy report
- Datasets 2021-2024 and data tables for 2024
- Pandemic survey data
Survey partners
We are grateful to the following partners for supporting our survey work:
