A nonprofit org chart has to answer a question a company chart never gets asked: where does governance stop and management begin? The board governs and the executive director manages, and a chart that runs a solid line from a board chair to a program coordinator has quietly misdescribed how the organization is run. This page is the chart drawn with that boundary explicit, plus the two other things nonprofit charts routinely get wrong: volunteers drawn as if they were staff, and committees drawn as if they were departments.
On a non profit organizational chart, the board is governance, and the line proves it
One solid line runs from the board to the executive director and nowhere else. Everything below is management. Committees hang off the board rather than off staff, and where a committee works with a staff member the line between them is dotted. Drawing this properly is not pedantry: it is the arrangement the organization's own bylaws describe, and it is the first thing somebody reviewing governance will look for.
Volunteers belong on the chart, marked
A program run by eleven volunteers and one coordinator is not a one-person program, and a chart that shows one box misrepresents both the capacity and the risk. Draw volunteers as a group with their count and their coordinator, marked as volunteers. It also makes the coordinator's real span visible, which is usually far wider than any staff manager's and worth seeing.
The non profit organization chart's three groups and its shared seats
Most nonprofits under a hundred staff have three groups: programs, fundraising and development, and finance and operations. The seats that cause chart trouble are the shared ones, communications and grants, which serve every program. Give them one solid line and dotted lines out, the same rule as any shared service, and the chart stays readable.
Questions people ask about non profit org chart
Should the board chair appear above the executive director?
The board does, as a body. Naming the chair alone above the executive director suggests a management relationship that does not exist.
How do we show a fiscal sponsor or a partner organisation?
As an external box with a dotted line, marked as what it is. Leaving it off makes the chart wrong about who is accountable for the funds.
Do funders ask for an org chart for nonprofit grant applications?
Frequently, in grant applications, which is a good reason for the chart to be a current view of records rather than a slide from last year.