Charities can pursue their missions more effectively when they have enabling legal structures in place. From setting up governance and employment policies to help manage disputes, to transactional support for creating a social enterprise or renting new facilities, law plays a role in all aspects of charity operations. Unfortunately, most charities do not have the resources to access traditional legal services to meet all their needs. That’s where Nonprofit Law Ontario (NPLO) comes in. We want to share our methods with you in the hopes that you can leverage these insights to meet the needs of nonprofits in your networks.

How Nonprofit Law Ontario meets nonprofits’ legal needs

NPLO was originally created to support the nonprofit sector in Ontario transition to a new corporate law (Ontario’s Not-for-Profit Corporations Act or ONCA for short). We created a website that last year that received over 78,000 annual visitors and over 262,000 page views. In the pyramid of legal need, this information is the foundation. This website also features an app that helps nonprofits create governing documents. This app and the documents created have been user-tested. To our knowledge, the app is the most customizable of its kind, and is extremely user-friendly.

But not all questions can be met by static online information or apps. Many people looking for information, don’t always know how to ask or need a human interaction to feel confident in the answer they are given. When ONCA took effect, we began to deliver workshops with large question periods to meet these needs. Rather than deliver one webinar for hundreds or thousands of participants, we offered smaller workshops hosted by pre-existing networks (e.g. municipal funders and subsector associations). In this way, we’ve reached over 7,000 participants and answered over 2,500 individual questions with only one part-time staff lawyer. This simple change in audience segmentation has many benefits. It allows participants to hear from their peers without us crossing into giving legal advice. It also allows certain issues, that may be too niche to deal with in a wider audience, take priority when common to most participants.

Over time, our workshops have grown to be more hands-on working sessions built around a workbook, called “Bring Your Own Bylaws.” This method of breaking up complex (but common) legal needs into bite size pieces has proven very welcome. Our data suggests that as many as 25% of participants are less likely to use a lawyer and 43% say they plan on giving any lawyer they work with less work. Even conservative estimates suggest that the costs of delivering these educational services result in 6x the savings for the sector.

Furthermore, we systematically record the enquiries received and responses given, and recycle the content back into the website to strengthen the foundation. We call this approach “the circular economy of legal information.” While this does not completely replace the need for traditional legal services, what we’ve observed suggests that up to 70% of enquiries we answer can be effectively answered through web content and somewhat personalized but still general legal information (e.g. through workshops or one-on-one).

Participants come out better able to identify the questions that genuinely need legal advice and are better equipped to ask questions and understand the answers they receive from lawyers. Even in larger organizations, this educational support is necessary for full and effective implementation within the organization.

Finally, we use all this information to inform our advocacy to the Government of Ontario to improve the Ontario Business Registry and ONCA, thereby drawing a direct connection between frontline services and policy advocacy.

The next frontier in legal supports to nonprofits

So how can we grow these supports? We conducted a legal needs study of nonprofits in Ontario between 2021 and 2023. This study painted a detailed picture of what it would look like to ensure that nonprofits had the full benefit of the law in their pursuit of the public good. Consistent with other studies in this area, we found that the top areas of unmet need are:

• Employment and volunteer law
• Privacy law and recordkeeping
• Governance

We believe existing methods could be effectively expanded to these other areas with similar benefits.

We also found that the needs of organizations changed based on their size, location, and funding relationships, and therefore we found that the following convenors are best placed to use these strategies to meet their network’s needs:

• Place-based funders (like municipalities or community foundations)
• Subsector associations
• Volunteer centres

You can meet the legal needs of your network

We are sharing these insights because we believe others can use the same strategies to meet the needs of their networks. If you have any questions, we would love to talk and share some of the more in-depth research on how we do our work and what effect it’s had.

Please reach out to me at benjamin@theonn.ca for more information.

Benjamin Miller (he/him) is a staff lawyer on the Nonprofit Law Ontario project where he focuses on the legal needs of nonprofits and charities. Over the past 7 years, Benjamin has answered thousands of nonprofit law questions, developed and delivered dozens of workshops, and developed online interactive tools, including a bylaw builder for the ONCA. He holds a JD and MPP from the University of Toronto and an MA in political theory from the University of Ottawa. Benjamin is also the author of The 100-Year PR Plan: A Guide for Advocates published by Civil Sector Press.