About Nonprofit Skills

What this is

Nonprofit Skills is an open collection of 63 skills covering fundraising, governance, finance, programs, communications, advocacy, volunteer and people management, strategy, technology, and retail resale operations.

Each skill is a single SKILL.md file that follows the open Agent Skills specification. When you drop one into an agent that supports the spec — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Perplexity, and others — the agent activates the skill on the right triggers and follows its named frameworks, standard deliverables, numbered steps, and common failure modes.

Why it exists

General-purpose AI assistants give generic advice about nonprofits — the kind of thing you would find in a first-year fundraising textbook. That is not what boards, funders, auditors, and beneficiaries need from the sector.

These skills teach agents the specific things nonprofit practitioners actually use every day: moves management for donor pipelines, SMART objectives for grant proposals, Form 990 schedules and governance disclosures, 501(c)(3)/(c)(4) structuring and lobbying limits, functional expense allocation, dignity-centered storytelling, and dozens more.

Who it is for

• Executive directors and COOs using AI as an operating partner across the whole organization.
• Development, finance, and program staff who want an agent that knows their craft.
• Advisors and consultants guiding multiple nonprofit clients — most skills call out how guidance differs for practitioners versus advisors.

Who built this

Nonprofit Skills is a project of Brendon Connelly, a nonprofit executive and operations leader based in the Pacific Northwest. Brendon designed the library, wrote and edited the skills, and maintains the repository and this site. Contributions from the sector are welcome.

The single-file SKILL.md format was inspired by Marketing Skills by Corey Haines, which showed how well the open Agent Skills spec could work as a shared library for a specific field. Nonprofit Skills adapts that pattern for the frameworks, deliverables, and compliance realities of the nonprofit sector.

License

Everything in this library is MIT licensed. You are free to use, copy, modify, and redistribute any of it. Contributions back are welcome — see Contribute a skill.

Get involved

Open an issue or pull request on the GitHub repository. Missing skills, corrections, and better examples all welcome.