In order for an organization to run efficiently and attract stakeholders, certain legal policies need to be put in place. However, since NGOs and non-profits often work outside the government regulation zone, these organizations often don’t formulate formal policies.
As a result, many NGOs fail to maintain steady support from financial organizations and large stakeholders’ altogether. In order to amend this and protect your organization’s integrity, as well as leadership, you should take time and create adequate policies to reflect your activities. Let’s take a look at several predominant policies that should find their way into your future agenda.
Organizational policy
The organizational policy of your NGO consists of a detailed breakdown of your organization’s vision, mission statements, and long-term goals. It outlines your management structure in broad strokes and allows potential investors and fundraising partners to see who you really are as a brand.
As the organizational policy provides a brief but important rundown of your entire NGO, it is a good starting point for organizations without any concrete policies in place.
Personnel categorization policy
Even though an NGO operates in different principles as opposed to a retail enterprise (for example), they are still required to abide by certain government regulations. When it comes to the personnel of an NGO, a detailed policy should be drafted to reflect the managerial structure and the purpose of each member on it.
This is done to avoid overgrowing your non-profit to a point of unsustainability and to avoid attracting government attention due to an unregulated volunteering structure. Personnel policies effectively limit how many people you can take on board at once. However, they also help the leadership manage the organization or a company much easier as a result. Do your best to outline the titles and job descriptions of everyone on your management structure. Create a network of teams and managers so that you always know who answers to whom.
Privacy policy
Your organization’s privacy policy is one of the most important documents you will ever draft. Privacy policies often find their place on the websites of each respective company or an NGO. They outline the way you treat your clients’ and employees’ information both internally and after their departure.
It is pivotal that you create a privacy policy that reflects any and all concerns people may have in regards to your handling of their data. In order to make the privacy policy as legible as possible, you can use a third-party service to check it before publishing.
Make it so that your privacy policy is the most understandable and predominant document on your website. Without it, you will be hard-pressed to attract any notable projects or clients your way.
Financial policy
Given the nature of non-profit organizations, you will be required to outline your financial loop for the public. How exactly do you fund your projects and what sustains your logistics? What type of fundraising and crowdfunding do you implement in your yearly financial activities?
These questions are important both for the government and any potential clients and investors who may want to pitch in and help you out. Without this information laid out to the public, your NGO may come under suspicion since you are a non-profit with stable and sustainable projects.
Of course, it’s not easy to create an effective financial policy from scratch. There are just too many things to consider for a non-professional to write it the right way. This is where your organization needs assistance from an expert who understands the financial side of running an NGO. Another important aspect is to present these requirements in a written document. An academic writing service that has experts with finance degrees might be just the right fit for this. They should be capable of writing down all the complicated law aspects in a form that NGO’s employees and stakeholders would understand with no problem.
Make sure to avoid any bad publicity or government inspection by drafting a financial policy with your financial activities outlined for the entire calendar year.
Leadership succession policy
Lastly, NGOs go about promotions and succession differently compared to their revenue-oriented counterparts. This is especially true about the management and the CEO of a non-profit since no one stays in one employment position for life. A leadership succession plan should be published in the form of official policy and outline numerous possible leadership change situations.
What happens if a volunteer departs suddenly and without telling anyone? What is the contingency in case half of the managerial staff goes on vacation and isn’t available for daily support? Whenever you work on organizational policies, you should understand the need for more than one document. There are numerous policies including privacy and finance which are essential to the longevity of a brand as a whole. The same applies to management succession policies.
The leadership succession policy resembles a crisis scenario book that should be available for unfortunate events. Regardless of how negative it may seem, this is an important document that will instill employee confidence in their leadership and ensure that they stay with your NGO for quite some time.
Policy iteration (conclusion)
Policies are not a one-and-done affair and you will have to continually upgrade your existing documents. However, make sure to publish at least the first drafts of your policies as soon as possible to re-establish the trust and confidence in your NGO.
Whether you write policies for your clients or full-time volunteers, at the end of the day, it all comes down to the longevity and growth of your NGO as a whole. Don’t wait for anyone to ask you about a certain policy that is missing from your portfolio and make amends for those shortcomings as soon as possible. It’s better to be over-prepared when it comes to questions about money, personal information and other aspects NGOs have often to deal with.
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