This article was originally published in the Standards for Excellence® Institute series, “52 Tips in 52 Weeks” in January 2020. The series provides nonprofit leaders with a brief nonprofit governance and management tip weekly over the course of 2020. Standards for Excellence is a Replication Partner of Sacred Sector.
By amy coates madsen
Back in the mid-1990s, I had the privilege of working with the volunteer taskforce that ultimately developed and released the Standards for Excellence: An Ethics and Accountability Code for the Nonprofit Sector in 1998. The group had all the hallmarks of an exemplary volunteer team—incredibly dedicated, extremely knowledgeable, and willing to roll up their sleeves to get the job done! I learned so much from this group and I’m grateful for their service. Quite a few of these volunteers still support the Standards for Excellence program in various roles.
One of the projects this taskforce completed was a large-scale review of all of the existing codes of ethics that we could find from a variety of professional industries, the government, the private sector, and the nonprofit sector. Volunteers completed a substantial amount of homework to collect these codes. In these pre-internet years, finding such documents took a lot more work than it does today! The volunteers read each one, studied the topics addressed, and completed a matrix to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the various codes It was a terrific undertaking that resulted in one of the most comprehensive code of ethics for nonprofits that exists today.
Having a code of ethics for the entire nonprofit sector is helpful to outline how nonprofit organizations can and should govern and manage their work. It is also important for individual nonprofits to have their own code of ethics to guide its work and decision-making. The Standards for Excellence states that nonprofits should “ensure that they have an explicit and clear set of ethical principles and, as appropriate, operational or program standards that have been discussed by their board and staff and that are transparently clear to all stakeholders.”
About the Standards for Excellence Institute
The Standards for Excellence® originated as a special initiative of Maryland Nonprofits in 1998 and has since expanded into a national program to help nonprofit organizations achieve the highest benchmarks of ethics and accountability in nonprofit governance, management and operations. The program has been formally adopted by twelve state, regional, and national affiliate organizations. It is supported by over 170 Licensed Consultants and over 100 volunteers with professional experience in nonprofit governance and administration. Since its inception, the program has accredited or recognized over 200 individual nonprofit organizations that completed a rigorous application and review process to demonstrate adherence to the Standards for Excellence: An Ethics and Accountability Code for the Nonprofit Sector. www.standardsforexcellence.org.
Amy Coates Madsen is the director of programs for Maryland Nonprofits and the director of the Standards for Excellence Institute, a national initiative to promote the highest standards of ethics and accountability in nonprofit governance, management, and operations, and to facilitate adherence to standards by all organizations. Amy received her Master of Arts in Policy Studies from the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Policy Studies in Baltimore, Maryland, and her bachelor’s degree from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia. Amy is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and was appointed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury to serve on the Internal Revenue Service Advisory Committee on Tax Exempt and Government Entities (ACT), serving one term as the co-chair of the ACT’s Exempt Organizations subcommittee. The Standards for Excellence Institute is a program of the Maryland Association of Nonprofit Organizations where Amy has served for more than twenty-four years. Amy is responsible for coordinating all aspects of the association’s comprehensive ethics and accountability program and efforts to replicate the program nationally. She serves as a frequent trainer and writer in the areas of board conduct, program evaluation, program replication, fundraising ethics, and nonprofit management. She has taught courses on nonprofit ethics and accountability at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies Certificate Program on Nonprofit Management.