Integrity Nexus, charity compliance consultancy
Compliance, advice, board strategy and technology for Scottish charities, from one place.
We start with the foundation of policies you need, then support your board with whatever comes next, backed by our own Charity Compliance Engine.
Four ways we work with charities
Most boards start with the compliance foundation, because that is where the gaps usually are. From there, take whatever you need. Board strategy and technology do not need a foundation first.
Compliance foundation
The policies your charity actually needs, worked out with your board and drafted in the session rather than sent afterwards. Most boards start here, because it is where the gaps usually are and because everything else sits better on top of it. How the foundation works
A fixed fee, usually two focused sessions.
Ongoing advice
Once your foundation is in place, you keep an adviser who already knows your charity, for the questions that arrive between meetings. Whether a trustee can be paid for work they do, what to do about a conflict nobody wants to name, what a funder’s new condition actually requires of you, whether your reserves position would stand up. You ask, and the answer accounts for your charity rather than charities in general.
Questions about your own documents are included. New work is agreed with you, and priced, before it starts.
Board strategy sessions
Facilitated board sessions and awaydays, on strategy, structure, a possible merger, or the difficult decision the board keeps carrying forward. Grounded in Scottish charity law, so the conversation stays inside what your board can actually do and what it would have to tell OSCR.
Available on its own. Quoted per session or awayday.
Technology and AI
Microsoft 365 for nonprofits, set up so that it is genuinely used rather than paid for and ignored, and an honest view of where AI helps a charity of your size and where it does not. The same principle as everything else here: proportionate to you, and explained.
Available on its own. Quoted as a fixed-scope project.
More than policies
Start with the foundation. Build the advice on top.
The foundation comes first. Ongoing advice sits on top of it, from an adviser who already knows your charity.
What it actually is
An adviser, not a template library
Most compliance support for charities is a filing cabinet. Somebody hands you templates, or a website full of guidance, and the work of deciding what applies to you is left exactly where it started: with you.
We also tell you where else to look. Where your local TSI, SCVO or the regulator already has something useful on a question, you are pointed at it by name rather than left to find it.
This works the other way round. You bring the question, and the documents are a by-product of the conversation rather than the point of it. The point is having somewhere to take the question.
Two things it does that a template pack cannot
It answers the question you actually asked
Governance questions are rarely generic. They involve your trustees, your activities, your funding and your circumstances, which is exactly why searching online so often fails: the guidance is written for a charity that is not yours. Ask here and the answer accounts for your size, your structure, whether you employ anyone, whether any of your roles are regulated and what you actually do. One charity raised a confidential governance matter mid-session and got a considered, practical basis for the board to work from.
It raises what you did not know to ask
This is the harder one, and it is the reason the framework exists. You cannot search for an obligation you have never heard of. The engine works from the legal baseline for a charity like yours, so it surfaces the gap nobody in the room knew was there. One charity found out during its session that it should have been registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office and was not, and had been in that position for years.
That charity was not unusual. See the sector ICO analysis for how widespread the gap is.
How the foundation works
Usually two focused sessions of around two hours, online, or in person if you are in the central belt. We build a picture of your charity, work through what applies and what does not, draft the documents that are missing while you watch, and finish with a board plan that places each document into your board’s meetings. You keep everything, including the reasons behind every decision.
What makes it different
It explains why, every time
Every recommendation carries the reason the policy exists and what it protects you against. Trustees who understand why something matters actually use it, and can defend the decision to a funder or a regulator. A policy adopted without understanding is a document nobody follows.
It is proportionate to you
A charity with two volunteers does not get the same document as one with forty staff and a care registration. Guidance is calibrated to your scale and complexity, because an oversized policy nobody can follow protects nobody, and an undersized one leaves you exposed.
Bring us your hardest question
There is no preparation to do and no prior knowledge assumed. If your board has been going round in circles on something, that is the ideal thing to arrive with.
Three charities have written about what they got out of it, under their own names. Read what charities say.