People & Culture
HR compliance, staff development, and team health, in organizations where one person often holds every one of those responsibilities.
The part nobody prepared you for.
Nonprofits ask a great deal of their people and often have the least infrastructure to support them. Culture is not a values statement on a wall. It is the policies, the hiring process, and the way a transition gets handled when someone good leaves.
- ✦Is our employee handbook compliant in every state we hire in?
- ✦How do we run a hiring process that is fair and defensible?
- ✦What belongs in a supervision conversation?
- ✦Someone is leaving. What do we do in the first week?
Two ways in, depending on what you need.
Ask about your own documents
ēosIQ covers this pillar with guidance grounded in nonprofit law rather than the open web, and it reads your own bylaws, filings, and agreements. The free tier includes the Legal pillar. A subscription covers all six.
Explore ēosIQAsk people who have been there
The People & Culture forum is one of seven in Akademia, open to subscribers and moderated for verified nonprofit professionals. It is where the questions above get answered by people who have already faced them.
Explore AkademiaThere is a course for this pillar.
Creating Cultures That Thrive
16 lessons. 2 hours and 50 minutes of content, 11 downloadable resources.
See the CourseNothing in this work stays in one pillar.
Legal
IRS filings, multi-state registration, and employment questions, in a field where the rules were written for organizations very different from yours.
Governance
Board duties, bylaws, quorum, and conflicts of interest, which is to say the machinery that determines whether decisions hold up.
Finance
Form 990, budgets, restricted funds, and audit readiness, for leaders who are accountable for numbers nobody taught them to read.
Development
Donor strategy, grant agreements, and solicitation rules, where the fundraising question and the compliance question are usually the same question.
Program & Systems
Program design, operations, and the technology behind them, including the AI tools already in use across your organization.