> 🧩 A Moral Fabric pattern, free for any nonprofit to use and adapt.
Without a written norm, response speed becomes a status game. Everything arrives by direct message, urgent and non-urgent look identical, decisions get made in chat threads nobody can find three weeks later, and new colleagues guess which channel to use — usually by copying whoever they sat next to first. The fix is one page, and it takes an hour to write.
For every channel you use, write down two things: what it is for, and how fast a reply can be expected. A workable default set, with internal replies capped at three business days and external at seven days or an acknowledgement:
- (Asana, Linear, whatever you use) — anything that needs tracking, assigning or a due date. Three business days.
- (Slack, Teams) — quick clarifications and social. Same day for direct messages and mentions, no expectation on channel messages.
- (Slite, Notion) — documentation and decisions that outlive the week. Comment for questions; three business days.
- — anything with people outside the organization. Seven days, or an acknowledgement within seven if the answer takes longer.
- — disagreement, feedback, anything with emotional weight. Not a channel of last resort; the right first choice more often than teams think.
Five rules make the difference between a norms page and a norms page that works:
- Long chat messages are tasks in disguise, and they vanish.
- Don't decide on someone else's behalf that they're too busy to be asked.
- A stated date beats an implied urgency.
- , not in the thread where they happened.
- , not in chat history. If it only exists in a thread, nobody is accountable for it.
Decision test: a colleague in their first week should be able to pick the right channel and know when to expect an answer, without asking anyone which is which.
List your channels, including the ones you wish people didn't use.
Write one purpose and one response time per channel. Promise what you can actually keep — a norm nobody meets is worse than none.
Name the escalation route for genuinely urgent things, and define urgent. If everything qualifies, nothing does.
Publish it on the wiki, link it from onboarding, and mention it once in each channel.
Review after a month. Where reality and the page disagree, change the page.
Personal data about staff, beneficiaries or donors doesn't belong in chat. Keep it in systems with access control and a retention policy — chat history is searchable by everyone in the workspace, indefinitely, and under the GDPR you need to be able to find and delete personal data on request. That is hard to do in a decade of threads.
Record your organization's choices:
- Your channel list, with a purpose and response time each
- What counts as urgent, and the escalation route
- Whether there is any out-of-hours expectation, and for whom
- Where decisions are recorded
- Whether the norms are advice or a policy that changes only by proposal