Setting up LitosFlow for your nonprofit
Playbooks for your organization · 8 min read · Last updated: August 10, 2026
The boards, tags and reminders that fit a nonprofit — grants, programs, events and volunteers — plus a first-30-minutes checklist.
This is the setup walkthrough behind LitosFlow for nonprofits. It assumes nothing technical — if you can keep a to-do list, you can run this. Half an hour and your whole organization has one place for its work.
Start with three boards
A board is a place work lives, shown as columns you drag cards between. Resist the urge to build ten of them on day one. Three covers almost every nonprofit:
| Board | What goes on it | Columns |
|---|---|---|
| Grants & reporting | Applications, reports, renewals, funder check-ins | Researching → Writing → Submitted → Awarded/Closed |
| Programs & events | Everything that happens for the people you serve | Ideas → Planned → In progress → Done |
| Operations | The building, the tech, the admin, the board packet | Requested → In progress → Waiting → Done |
Two rules to keep them useful. Give every board a Waiting column if work in it regularly stalls on somebody else — a funder, a landlord, a vendor — because "stuck on someone outside" is not the same as "in progress", and seeing them separately is half the value. And keep the last column as the finished one: LitosFlow treats one column per board as "done", which is what makes reports and dashboards honest.
Tags: the cross-cutting labels
Boards answer where does this live. Tags answer what is this about, across every board. Six is plenty to start:
grants, events, volunteers, donors, facilities, board-meeting
The test for a good tag is whether you'd ever want to see everything carrying it in one list — "show me everything touching the fall gala" is a real question, so events earns its place. Resist tagging by department; that's what boards and assignees are for.
Priorities without ceremony
There are four: Urgent, High, Medium, Low. Don't hold a meeting about them. Use this shorthand:
- Urgent — someone is blocked or a deadline is today. Should be rare enough that it still means something.
- High — has a real deadline this week.
- Medium — the honest default. Most work.
- Low — would be nice, no date attached.
If everything is High, nothing is. Once a quarter, sort by priority and demote what has drifted.
Mapping the features to your week
Deadlines → due dates and the calendar. Give every grant report, renewal and event milestone a due date the moment it exists. The Calendar page then shows the month at a glance, and anything overdue raises its own hand on the dashboard. This is the single highest-value habit in the whole product.
Requests from anyone → an intake form (paid plans). Publish a request form and share the link with staff, volunteers, or the public — no account needed to file one. Submissions land straight on the board you chose, with the defaults you set. Point one at your Operations board and the "can someone fix the printer" emails stop.
Anything that repeats → a recurring ticket. Monthly funder reports, quarterly board packets, the annual audit, donor thank-yous after every event. Set it up once and it re-creates itself on schedule, already assigned. Every "we forgot again" is a missing recurring ticket.
Staff vs. volunteers → roles. Give staff Member, which lets them run the work: any ticket, plus boards and tags. Give volunteers Agent — they see the work and own what's assigned to them, without being able to rearrange the workspace. Keep Org Admin to one or two people. Roles and permissions has the full ladder.
The board meeting → reports (paid plans). Opened, finished, still outstanding, by program — the numbers your board asks for, without a spreadsheet night before.
Your first 30 minutes
- Create the Grants & reporting board with the columns above. (5 min)
- Add your six tags from the Tags page. (3 min)
- File the next three real deadlines you're carrying in your head as tickets, with due dates and an owner. Real work, not test tickets — this is the moment the app becomes yours. (7 min)
- Invite two people from the Organization page: one staff member as Member, one volunteer as Agent. (3 min)
- Set up one recurring ticket for something monthly. (4 min)
- Open the Calendar and look at your month. (2 min)
- Create the other two boards when you're ready — or leave them until the work asks for them. (6 min)
That's it. Don't migrate five years of history; start with what's live this month and let the rest stay where it is.
What to read next
- Working with tickets — every field on a ticket, for everyone you invite.
- Roles and permissions — before you invite the whole team.
Haven't started yet? Create your organization — it's free for small teams, and no credit card is involved.