Nonprofit organizational values guide an organization’s actions, unite its employees, and define its brand. Without clearly defined core values, an organization lingers in a constant state of identity crisis. The process of determining a nonprofit’s core organizational values is invaluable. In this article, we’ve provided this step-by-step process and supplied three examples of core value statements.
In the ever-changing world of fundraising, defining your nonprofit value statement isn’t just a box to check—it’s the compass guiding every decision, action, and interaction your organization makes.
Your nonprofit is like a ship navigating the vast sea of social impact. Without clear values to steer by, you risk drifting aimlessly, unsure of your destination or purpose. But when you define your values, you hoist your sails with purpose and direction, empowering your team to chart a course toward meaningful change.
These values aren’t just nice-to-haves—they’re the anchor that grounds your mission and propels your impact forward. In this guide, we’ll define organizational values, provide a few great examples of values from leading nonprofits, and talk you through steps to creating your own set of values. Let’s jump in!
Nonprofit organizational values are the highest values that guide an organization’s actions, unite its employees, and define its brand. They are abstract ideas that guide organizational thinking and actions. These guiding principles are typically communicated in writing as core values and statements.
Organizational values are ideally set as part of strategic planning when an organization is just being set up (alongside a mission and a vision). If you have already been running your nonprofit for months or even years without identifying core organizational values, no worries. You can (and should) still determine them!
At times, the concepts of nonprofit missions, visions, values, and goals get mixed up. Here’s how you can differentiate them:
First and foremost, organizational values help you define who you are — to your staff, to your donors, and even to yourself. They shape your culture and create a self-defined standard for you to hold yourself accountable to.
Imagine if you could get all the people in an organization truly rowing in the same direction, success would be guaranteed. Values help with direction.
Nonprofit organizational values help you make decisions – hiring decisions, program expansion decisions, and day-to-day decisions. For example, if one of your values is “being social” or “learning and growing,” you could decide that events will have an important place in your marketing.
Likewise, when something has you stuck, you can refer back to your values and mission to see which of your options holds to your beliefs.
Values help immensely with all things people-related. They make it clear whom you should hire, and for what. They make clear which employees you should reward and promote, and why.
Values make communication easier. They ensure compatibility and fit, set clear expectations of each other, and remain consistent as you scale.
A team with a strong set of values is aligned and empowered to do great work without constant supervision, freeing up time. You can use that time to focus on growing the organization and culture so the organization can make an even bigger contribution to the world.
Finally, great organizational values motivate people to go beyond, step outside of their comfort zone, and accomplish something different.
Here are some of the core values that your nonprofit can imbibe to help motivate your team and empower your organization to accomplish its mission with great vigor:
Let’s take a look at three diverse nonprofit organizations and unpack the beating heart of their missions—their organizational values! These aren’t just words on paper; they’re the guiding principles that help each organization achieve its unique vision for change.
Identifying the most important values for your organization isn’t always easy.
It might be that some organizations have not even set forth their core values. Other organizations determined their core values years ago but they need a refresh.
In most organizations, if you ask five employees to articulate the organization’s core values, you will get five different answers.
Whatever your situation, we hope you find the following process for determining core nonprofit organizational values useful.
Now, let’s work on crafting the backbone of your nonprofit — the organizational values that will shape every decision and action you take. In this step-by-step process, we’ll define the principles that underpin your organization’s identity.
From clarifying your mission to ensuring your values guide your daily operations, we’ll navigate each stage with clear direction and purpose.
Like any project, this one needs some thinking before you dive deep. Think about:
Outline your objective or why you’re doing this. Then, list the exact steps you’ll need to take to accomplish the objective and scope out how much time that would take. Also, note who would need to be involved.
At this stage, it’s valuable to determine how you will go about the process.
Department heads can conduct interviews with employees in their teams to do the following:
Which process you choose will depend on the size and structure of your organization. For example, if your organization is big (or even mid-sized), discussing it with all employees is unrealistic. On the other hand, if your organization is smaller, that might be the best option.
Pro tip: A bottom-up approach is important if you want your values to reflect your organization and if you want your team to feel a sense of ownership and accountability. You cannot just tell someone what they should find meaningful — simply mandating values to employees rarely works.
Read more about nonprofit management here.
Once you decide on the format of your process, it’s time to think of a variety of questions that you might ask during interviews or workshops (or both).
These questions should act as prompts, leading your team to come up with values without asking them: “What are our values?”
Pro tip: Before you start with the interviews or the workshop, give the team time to reflect independently on your existing (and yet unspoken) nonprofit values, and their opinions on the values systems that would be best suited for your organization. This will make the process smoother later on.
An interesting approach to do the initial value brainstorming was suggested by Jim Collins and called “The Mars Group”.
“The “Mars Group” works like this:
Imagine you’ve been asked to recreate the very best attributes of your organization on another planet, but you only have seats on the rocket ship for five to seven people. Who would you send? They are the people who are likely to be exemplars of the organization’s core values and purpose, have the highest level of credibility with their peers, and have the highest levels of competence.
One method is to have people involved in the process nominate a Mars group of five to seven individuals (not all need to come from the assembled group), and those most nominated become members.
Generally, it is best to have the Mars group not include the top officers of the organization. Then, later, those top officers can respond to the output of the Mars group to create a final articulation of the vision.
Once you’ve assembled your “Mars Group,” you would start listing out all of the attributes about each person that made you nominate them. This can start the foundation for defining your values.
A similar exercise would be to ask the participants or interviewees to identify 6-8 people in the organization, but not in the room, that they would like to “clone” or re-hire many times over. For instance; “I would love to clone Amanda, she finds a solution to every problem.”
Now is the time to get input from that brainstorming in one place.
If you’re compiling answers from different interviews, you might do this in a spreadsheet.
If you’re doing this ‘live’, in a workshop, you could start by listing all of the potential values on a whiteboard or putting up all the sticky notes you created during brainstorming in groups or as one big group.
Remove the duplicates/repeated words, start grouping some words that are very similar and close to each other, and finally, ask everyone to select ten values that resonate with them. They would then rank those values in order of importance to them. You could compare the lists and assign a point-based value system to each value – if a value was #1 on a person’s list, it could be given 10 points; if it was #10, it could receive 1 point; and so on.
This could help with creating a shorter list from what would likely be a large list of anywhere between 20-75 values.
Make sure to step back and take a look at your options from a different point of view. Examine anything that jumps out, and consider why it stands out.
This is a great time to chat about what you value as an organization, especially if you have dedicated a day/weekend to this. General themes will ideally emerge from your lists, and you’ll uncover areas of agreement and disagreement.
Pro tip: Choose a setting separate from your everyday work environment, so everyone can clear their minds and focus on the important process at hand.
Distilling is the process of reducing the various phrases into better, more concise, and relevant phrases.
In the previous step, you would have eliminated some values, grouped and merged some values, and started to get a sense of their importance to your team.
It can be hard to decide whether a value is worth capturing (or if it is aligned with your organization’s vibe).
Your vibe comes and goes, and flexes depending on location and who joins and leaves, whereas your values stay consistent.
Continue discussing the values and prioritizing them, and aim to condense the list to 20-30 values.
With each iteration, keep asking:
20-30 values are too many to be actionable and memorable. Your next step is to group these values under related themes. For example, taking initiative and being proactive could be grouped, as could honesty and transparency.
Keep synthesizing the information so it can guide the drafting of your organization’s core values. You’re looking to come to about a list of 10-15 values ideally.
Transcribe individual comments to individual Post-it notes on a whiteboard, or paste them into individual cells in a spreadsheet column. Read the comments and look for connections and patterns. Group comments based on affinities they seem to share.
Pro tip: Don’t get too wrapped up in arguing about what you are true to today, and what you aren’t true to yet. Say you aren’t 100% inclusive, so you might be stuck on if you can make “inclusivity” one of your values. It doesn’t matter, and in fact, values should be aspirational in addition to simply reflecting the current behaviors.
During the meeting, assign responsibility for fine-tuning your values statement offline.
This process needs one person — ideally a founder or a long-standing member of the leadership team, someone with your organization’s core values in their gut — to be an all-absorbing sponge and to take time out alone to reflect and apply a bit of creativity.
The distilling and drafting process is not for multiple people, although some organizations find success by appointing a values team/committee.
If you’re going with a values committee/team approach, ask yourself the following questions when choosing its members:
Create a rough first draft (ideally of both values and value statements). Don’t worry about wordsmithing and refining just yet, as you will go through several rounds of feedback and revision.
Pro tip: Generally, 5 – 8 well-targeted, authentically expressed values give a solid foundation of what is at the heart of an organization. Any more, and you’re watering them down or reaching too far.
It would be impossible to list your values with a single word (e.g. Integrity, Accountability, or Kindness).
While a one-word value might be easier to remember, it is difficult for a single word to become a distinct expression of your unique culture. Once your nonprofit has its list of values, set aside time to discuss what each value means to you and to your team and how each one could and should be applied in your everyday work.
Keep in mind that even the most well-intentioned employee may misunderstand or misapply a value if you don’t discuss it with them in detail. What’s obvious now in the midst of the value-refining process may not be obvious to an employee who joins the team a year later.
Make sure each value includes a value statement, or a few sentences describing what that value means to your organization.
Try to combine your shared understanding into clear, direct explanations of how you will see, experience, and live those specific values in the workplace.
Take the value of “kindness” as an example. What does that look like at your nonprofit? How will your employees demonstrate their kindness? Who will they be kind to?
Pro tip: You can get creative with your values and value statements. Sometimes it takes moving out of the generic to truly bring values to life. Here’s how Atlassian did it. Albeit not a nonprofit, this can serve as an inspiration for your work.
Get wordsmithing help. This is a skill that is difficult to master — if you can, get the help of an expert when it comes to the final stages of refining the language in your values.
You may need to do this process a few times — draft, meet, discuss, modify, redraft, and repeat — before landing on an interpretation that everyone can stand behind.
It’s okay to take time. The more thoughtful and intentional this process, even if it’s slow, the better.
If your values aren’t memorable or concise, they won’t serve any purpose. Values should be easy to communicate and easy to remember.
Once you’re confident with your values list, alongside their descriptions, it’s time to unveil and celebrate.
Pro tip: Use inspiring and unique words and vocabulary. Our brains are quick to delete or ignore the mundane and commonplace. A phrase like “Donor Service Excellence” is not going to inspire you or your employees. “Innovation” is more boring than “Wild Creativity”. However, don’t fall into creating flimsy slogans and taglines that sound sales-y. Those are not core values.
It’s time to unveil the fruits of your labor!
There are many ways in which you can share your newly created values. You can create a slide show or something more creative like the poster by SEOmoz. The acronym for their values is TAGFEE.
In addition to having something easy to grasp (like the acronym and the poster), it’s advisable to create a document (or a blog post if you want to make the details of your values public) that goes more in detail. Moz did a GREAT job of describing exactly what their values mean to them, complete with examples, tenants, and criteria. Doing this eliminates potential confusion, and inconsistency, and makes values clear and tangible.
Be transparent about the process. Let people know why the final values statement looks the way it looks. What decisions have you made, and why?
Whatever you choose to do, try to create a sense of excitement, buzz, and celebration. This should be an uplifting event for the whole organization!
Throw a big party, showcase employees talking about examples of how they lived that value, create a fun video, and constantly reinforce WHY that value matters to everyone in the organization.
Organizational values are a living, breathing thing. They guide how an organization thinks and behaves; they will help you make decisions and form successful relationships. Maintaining your values takes effort, but the rewards are more than worth it.
Your core values should be visible in every aspect of your work: from fundraising and marketing to finance to HR.
Don’t let your values gather dust in a drawer or an employee handbook. Bring them alive. For example, at your quarterly meetings, you can review each core value and give shout-outs to team members who’ve exemplified it.
You can paint them prominently on your office doors or pull them out in blogs, reaffirm them in printed material, such as brochures and annual reports. During goal-setting, frame your goals around values.
It’s critical to identify any changes you’ll make or practices you’ll adopt to support the integration of your values.
For example, to integrate an “innovation” value, you might set up an innovation award given out during the quarterly review process.
To integrate your “people-oriented” value, you might want to introduce a practice of “mental health days off” for your employees.
Draft a plan for integrating your values. Go one by one to determine how they might become a part of your culture, or how you might build a rewards system that better aligns with them.
Your nonprofit organizational values list shouldn’t be static. Perhaps a few months later you might combine two values to more accurately represent your team and your overall purpose. (This can often happen in the first six months after you’ve determined the values).
However, mission and values are typically not an annual editing issue, so they shouldn’t be revisited too frequently either. Values are long-term foundational attributes.
It’s typical to review values and mission during the strategic planning process, which typically happens formally every three to five years. However, this might not work for every organization.
Take these with a grain of salt and decide what frequency is best for your organization.
Pro tip: Although constantly changing values might not be good, frequently ask yourself how you’re living them as an organization!
The process of developing core nonprofit organizational values in the right way is not quick nor easy. However, organizations with strong cultures perform better than those without.
Although creating and leveraging core values may seem daunting, the impact on your company culture can be tremendous.
Thoughtful, well-implemented nonprofit organizational values can serve as the foundation for a positive, high-performance, and high-impact culture.
While the process of defining your organizational values can feel time-consuming and complicated, it’s an important step in setting your nonprofit up for long-term success.
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Ilma Ibrisevic is a content creator and nonprofit writer. She’s passionate about meaningful work, sustainability, and social movements. If she’s not working, she’s obsessing over coffee or cooking. You can connect with her on Linkedin.
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Ilma Ibrisevic