Contribute a skill

Who should contribute

If you have real, hands-on experience with a nonprofit domain — as a practitioner, a consultant, or a scholar — and you notice a gap in the library, please contribute. The library is small on purpose, and every skill needs to earn its place.

The bar

Contributions must be things a general-purpose model does not already know well. Generic best-practice advice a first-year fundraising textbook covers does not belong here. What belongs here:

• Named frameworks with precise definitions
• Standard deliverables with recognizable structure
• Compliance and regulatory realities with citations
• Failure modes that only experienced practitioners see
• Sector-specific tradeoffs (practitioner vs. advisor, small org vs. large org, urban vs. rural)

The format

Every skill is a single SKILL.md file with YAML frontmatter and a Markdown body. The frontmatter must contain:

---
name: nonprofit-your-skill-name
description: "One long paragraph. Must include: what the skill produces, concrete trigger phrases the agent will match on, and a boundary line naming any sibling skills that overlap and pointing to which one owns which job."
license: MIT
---

The body must contain:

1. When to use this skill — the specific conditions, jobs, and prompts that should activate it.
2. Named frameworks — precise names, not vague concepts.
3. Standard deliverables — the recognizable artifacts this skill produces.
4. Numbered steps — a repeatable sequence, not vague advice.
5. Common failure modes — mistakes to actively steer around.
6. Practitioner vs. advisor guidance — where relevant, how guidance differs.

Study a few existing skills in the repository before drafting.

Naming

All skill names begin with nonprofit-. Use kebab-case. The name in the frontmatter must match the folder name in the repo.

The submission process

1. Fork the repository at nonprofit-skills/nonprofit-skills.
2. Create a new folder at nonprofit-skills-library/skills/<category>/<skill-name>/.
3. Add your SKILL.md file inside that folder.
4. Open a pull request with a short description of the skill, the practitioner experience it is drawn from, and how it differs from any neighboring skills.

Editing an existing skill

Corrections, sharper examples, and better failure-mode lists are all welcome. Open a pull request that changes the specific SKILL.md and, in the PR description, explain what changed and why.

Reporting an issue

If you spot an error, a broken framework, or a category gap and are not ready to draft the fix yourself, open an issue. Include the skill name (or the missing skill you would like to see), the specific problem, and the correct answer if you know it.

License

By contributing, you agree to release your contribution under the MIT license. That means anyone can use, copy, modify, and redistribute your work — including commercially. If that is not acceptable for the material you plan to contribute, please do not submit it.