Principles for Good Governance
Effective governance is essential for healthy, trusted, and high-performing organizations. The Principles offer sector-informed practices to help nonprofit and philanthropic boards and leaders strengthen accountability, advance their missions, and navigate their responsibilities with integrity.
First developed with leaders from across the nonprofit and philanthropic community, the Principles for Good Governance and Ethical Practice provide a practical framework for boards, executives, and organizational leaders as they make decisions about governance, financial oversight, legal compliance, fundraising, and organizational responsibility.
The Principles in Practice: Navigating Today’s Questions
Independent Sector is building on the Principles by bringing leaders and organizations from across the charitable sector together in three new Principles Panels to develop guiding questions on three timely issues: advocacy, independence, and artificial intelligence.
Advocacy
How can your organization consider whether and how engaging in advocacy might advance its mission?
Advocacy can be an essential tool for advancing an organization’s mission, representing the interests of communities, and shaping the policies and systems that affect its work. Decisions about whether, when, and how an organization advocates require thoughtful consideration by boards and organizational leaders.
Developed collaboratively with leaders and organizations from across the charitable sector, the Advocacy Principles Guide offers questions organizations can use to consider their goals, responsibilities, opportunities, risks, and approach to advocacy.
Independence
What does independence mean for your organization and how can you protect it?
A fundamental principle of the charitable nonprofit sector is its independence from both government and the marketplace. Yet safeguarding this principle requires moving from the conceptual to the practical – forming a shared understanding of why independence matters, what independence looks like, and how a loss of independence would affect our organizations and the individuals with whom we engage.
Independent Sector is working with leaders and organizations from across the charitable sector to develop guiding questions that can help boards and leadership teams consider what organizational independence means in practice and how it can be protected.
Guide coming soon!
Artificial Intelligence
How can your organization decide whether and how to use AI in ways that reflect its values and builds trust?
Independent Sector is working with leaders and organizations across the charitable sector to develop tools that help boards and leadership teams make decisions about AI that manage the opportunities and risks, reflect their organization’s values, and strengthen public trust.
Guide coming soon!
Developed by the Sector, for the Sector
The resulting guides reflect the knowledge and range of experiences of the sector leaders who served on the Principles Panels. The guides are designed to complement the broader Principles for Good Governance and Ethical Practice — not to prescribe a single approach for every organization, but to support reflection, discussion, and thoughtful, mission-centered decision-making.
Responsibility for tackling these issues cannot rest only with technical experts or individual departments. It requires engagement from boards and organizational leaders and, ultimately, a whole-of-organization approach to implementation.
Put the Guides to Work
Use the guides in board meetings, leadership discussions, strategic planning sessions, staff retreats, and policy and advocacy conversations. The questions can help organizations surface different perspectives, examine assumptions, clarify priorities, and identify areas where additional discussion or action may be needed.
There may not be one right answer for every organization. What matters is creating space for thoughtful, mission-centered decision-making.
Download the guide, bring the questions to your board and leadership team, and use them to begin — or deepen — an important organizational conversation.
The 33 Principles for Good Governance and Ethical Practice
The current Principles outline 33 practices charitable organizations can consider as they work to strengthen governance, effectiveness, accountability, and public trust. They are organized into four areas:
Legal Compliance and Public Disclosure
Charitable organizations should understand and comply with the laws and regulations that apply to their work and maintain policies and practices that promote ethical conduct, transparency, and accountability.
Effective Governance
Boards play a central role in guiding an organization’s mission, resources, strategy, and long-term effectiveness. The Principles address board responsibilities, structure, independence, education, evaluation, governing documents, and oversight.
Strong Financial Oversight
Nonprofit and philanthropic organizations have a responsibility to manage financial resources carefully and transparently. The Principles address financial records, budgeting, investments, expenses, allocation of resources, and other aspects of financial stewardship.
Responsible Fundraising
Organizations that raise charitable contributions have responsibilities to donors and to the public. The Principles address truthful fundraising communications, donor intent, gift acceptance, oversight of fundraising activities, compensation, and donor privacy.
Download the Principles for Good Governance and Ethical Practice
An Evolving Framework
The Principles were created as a framework for sector-led governance and ethical practice rather than as a static set of rules.
The current 33 Principles continue to offer useful guidance for nonprofit and philanthropic organizations, even as the environment in which they operate has changed significantly since the Principles were last updated. The Principles Panels on advocacy, independence, and artificial intelligence are one way Independent Sector is helping boards and leaders address emerging questions now while continuing to build on this broader body of work.
Independent Sector plans to update the full Principles in the future so this foundational resource continues to reflect the realities, responsibilities, and opportunities facing charitable organizations.
We Want to Hear From You!
History of the Principles
Independent Sector developed the Principles for Good Governance and Ethical Practice: A Guide for Charities and Foundations through a broad, sector-led process focused on strengthening governance, accountability, and public trust,
The Principles were first published in 2007 and updated in 2015. Since then, nonprofit and philanthropic boards and leaders have used them as a resource for assessing organizational practices and supporting conversations about effective governance and ethical leadership.
Read more about the history of the Principles:
The Principles were updated in 2015 to reflect new circumstances in which the charitable sector functions, and new relationships within and between the sectors.
Equally committed to developing effective, broadly applicable methods of self-regulation, in October 2007 the Panel issued the Principles for Good Governance and Ethical Practice, A Guide for Charities and Foundations — premised on the belief that the best bulwark against misconduct is always well-informed vigilance by nonprofit community members themselves, including a set of principles they could adopt or adapt, promote sector-wide, and improve over time.
A supplemental report was issued in 2006. The reports offered more than 100 recommendations to improve government oversight, including new rules to prevent unscrupulous abuse of charitable organizations for personal gain. Many of the recommendations were enacted in the Pension Protection Act of 2006.
The Panel issued their “Strengthening the Transparency, Governance, and Accountability of Charitable Organizations” report to Congress in June 2005.
In response to calls by some for government oversight of sector organizations, Senators Grassley (R-IA) and Baucus (D-MT) encouraged Independent Sector to convene an independent panel to develop and recommend actions every charitable organization should consider to strengthen good governance, ethical conduct, and effective practice. In response, Independent Sector convened the Panel on the Nonprofit Sector, comprised of 24 nonprofit and philanthropic leaders whose organizations encompassed diversity in location, mission, perspective, and scope of work.
Additional Resources
Explore tools and resources to help your organization understand and apply the Principles for Good Governance and Ethical Practice.
