The context
Most nonprofit teams never decide how they work together — they accumulate it. A weekly sync gets added and never removed, response expectations form by accident, and the norms live in the heads of whoever has been there longest. It holds up at three people and quietly breaks at six, usually right when new colleagues arrive and have nothing to read.
These patterns cover the four decisions worth writing down: which meetings you hold, which channel carries what, what nobody has to announce, and what to add as the team grows. Each stands alone. Together they are roughly what a new team member needs in their first week.
The patterns
- Which meetings your team actually needs — fix the format of two meetings, invent the rest on purpose.
- Communication norms: which channel, what for, how fast — one page mapping every channel to a purpose and a response time.
- Async by default: what nobody has to announce — remove presence theatre without losing responsiveness.
- Team infrastructure thresholds: what to add as a team grows — the signals that tell you a team has outgrown its setup.