SOPs THAT HOLD
The new staff person is three weeks in. She needs to process a gift acknowledgment, a kind the team handles every week. She opens the shared drive. There is a folder called Processes. Inside there is a 2023 document, a 2024 document, and an undated document with the same title. They contradict each other. She asks the development associate, who tells her to ask the database manager, who tells her this is actually done a different way now. By the time she figures out the answer, it has cost the organization forty-five minutes and her confidence in her first week. The SOP existed. It was the wrong kind of SOP.
This is the most common form of operational debt in the social sector. An organization writes an SOP because someone said it should. The SOP is built by one person, signed off by no one, never tested by a second pair of hands, and never reviewed once the original author leaves. The Bloomerang reporting cited in the 501c Drop conversation puts average development director tenure in the eighteen-month range. The institutional memory leaves with the person. The folder stays.
For a nonprofit, this surfaces as a quality problem at the worst possible time: during onboarding, during an audit, during a leadership transition, during a campaign. The donor gets the wrong acknowledgment. The pledge gets entered into the wrong fund. The grant report is reconstructed from memory because the documentation is six versions out of date. For a consultant working with that nonprofit, the same problem shows up as a scoping problem. The strategic plan calls for a new program, the operating model recommends a new role, and the consultant cannot scope either piece accurately because the underlying processes were never documented in a way that holds up to scrutiny.
What Vivia Studios builds inside SOPs and Processes is the discipline that makes the documentation live. A process owner for every recurring workflow. A quarterly review rhythm so SOPs do not age into folklore. A documentation standard that someone other than the author can follow without help. Tested-by-the-second-pair-of-hands as a non-negotiable. And the cultural piece underneath: the expectation that a process is something the team holds together, not something one person owns.
Early in my career, in my first fundraising role at an independent school, my first boss made me skip a development event to get a mailing out the door because I had set the deadline. I hated her for it. She was right. Discipline is the office expectation, not the personal preference. For consultants layering operational documentation into a client engagement, the same approach: write to a standard, test it before you leave, and build the review rhythm into the engagement so the work outlasts the contract.
If your SOPs are in a folder no one opens, the next move is a thirty-minute conversation about which processes actually need to be documented, which are folklore, and what comes first.
Erin Peshoff is the Chief Curator of Vivia Studios. She has spent thirty years inside nonprofit operations, helped raise over $100 million for institutional missions, and built Vivia around the operating discipline most strategic engagements skip.
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