“All submissions must be exclusive to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.” That single sentence on the publication’s opinion submission page tells you more about how to approach it than any list of tips. The Chronicle is the trade publication of the nonprofit sector, read by executive directors, development officers, foundation program staff and board members, and it wants ideas it can own. It is not a place to recycle the op-ed your local paper turned down.
If you lead a nonprofit, run a foundation, consult for either, or sell services into the sector, a piece in the Chronicle puts your thinking in front of the people who make funding and hiring decisions. Below is how to get featured in Chronicle of Philanthropy, built around four rules drawn from the publication’s own guidance and from what consistently separates the pieces that run from the ones that do not.
Rule one: argue for the field, not for your organization
The Chronicle’s tips for opinion writers warn against pieces that mainly promote the author’s organization. If you draw on your own group’s experience, the editors want examples or research from other groups too. This is the single most common reason sector leaders get turned down, and it is easy to see why it happens.
Executive directors spend their days making the case for their own organization. Grant proposals, donor letters, board decks and annual reports all have the same job: show that this nonprofit deserves support. When those same leaders sit down to write an op-ed, the habit carries over, and what comes out is a case statement wearing an argument’s clothes.
I use a test with clients that I call Field, Not Flag. Read your draft and count every paragraph that is mainly about your organization. Then count every paragraph about a problem, practice or policy that affects many organizations. If the first number is larger, rewrite. Your organization can appear as one example among several. It cannot be the subject.
Here is what that looks like in practice. A food bank director who wants to write about rising demand should not write “Our food bank served 40% more families this year.” She should write about why food banks across her region are seeing the same surge, cite data from a regional network or a national body like Feeding America, explain what that means for how funders structure grants, and use her own organization’s numbers as one supporting detail. The second version is useful to every food bank director and every foundation that funds food security. The first is useful only to her board.
The paradox is that the field-first piece does more for your organization. Readers notice who wrote the smartest analysis of a shared problem, and they remember where that person works.
Consultants and vendors who serve nonprofits face a sharper version of this rule. A fundraising software company or a capital campaign firm can write a strong Chronicle piece, but only if the argument would hold up coming from someone with no product to sell. Disclose your business in your bio, draw your examples from a range of organizations rather than your client list, and resist any line that points readers toward what you sell. The readers you want to reach are experienced professionals. They will trust you more for writing about the problem honestly than for writing about your solution.
Board members and major donors can write too, and their perspective is less common in the opinion pages than staff voices. A trustee explaining how a board changed its approach to executive pay, or a donor explaining why they stopped restricting gifts, offers something few other writers can.
Rule two: say something that invites disagreement
The Chronicle says it wants pieces that offer new insights or innovative thinking on leadership, fundraising, grant-making policy and related topics. It also says it values provocative arguments that encourage debate and question conventional wisdom. Read those two lines together and the bar is clear. An essay that tells readers what they already believe will not run.
Conventional wisdom in philanthropy is easy to find. Overhead should be low. Multiyear general operating grants are always better. Donor-advised funds are a problem. Boards should give or get. Every one of these has a credible counterargument from someone with experience, and a well-argued challenge to any of them is the kind of piece the Chronicle’s editors describe wanting.
You do not need to be contrarian for its own sake. You need a claim that a reasonable sector professional could disagree with, and then the evidence to defend it. “Funders should simplify reporting requirements” is a position nearly everyone holds. “Funders should stop asking for outcome data from grantees under $1 million in budget, because the data is mostly unusable and costs more to produce than the grant is worth” is an argument, and one a program officer might push back on. That pushback is the point.
Timeliness strengthens the case. The Chronicle says it wants timely topics, so tie your argument to something happening now: a new tax rule, a shift in a big foundation’s strategy, a sector report released this month, a wave of layoffs or a new giving trend. Name it in your first few paragraphs.
Rule three: back every claim and drop the jargon
The Chronicle asks for claims backed by solid facts, with links to research or other articles. That means every statistic in your piece should link to its original source, not to a blog post summarizing it. Giving USA’s annual report, the Foundation Center’s successor Candid, the Urban Institute’s research on nonprofits and the Fundraising Effectiveness Project are all standard sources in the sector, and an editor will recognize them.
The publication also asks for language accessible to a general audience and warns against unexplained jargon from a specific field. This catches more writers than you might expect, because the nonprofit world has its own dense vocabulary. “Capacity building,” “theory of change,” “trust-based philanthropy,” “collective impact” and “BIPOC-led” all have specific meanings to some readers and vague meanings to others. If a term is central to your argument, define it in a clause the first time. If it is not central, replace it with plain words.
A useful exercise is to explain your argument out loud to someone who works outside the sector, a friend in finance or a cousin who teaches high school. Every time they ask “what does that mean?”, write down the term. That list is your jargon audit.
Keep the piece in the length range the Chronicle prefers. Most published opinion pieces run about 1,000 to 1,200 words, and somewhat longer pieces may be considered. If you are at 1,800 words, cut the background section first. Editors rarely miss it.
Rule four: send it clean, send it once, and wait
The Chronicle accepts a finished article as a Word attachment or in the body of an email, with a short pitch summarizing the key points. You can also pitch by email first and write the piece after you get interest. Either route works. If you have never written for the publication, sending the finished piece usually helps, because it shows the editors exactly what they would be getting.
Keep the pitch short. Three or four sentences: the argument, why it matters now, and why you are positioned to make it. Your title and organization belong in your signature, not in a paragraph of biography.
A pitch that works might read like this: “I’d like to submit a 1,100-word piece arguing that community foundations should stop running separate grant cycles for small nonprofits and move them to a single annual application with general operating support. Two large community foundations announced reviews of their small-grant programs this fall. I ran grantmaking at a regional community foundation for seven years and have compared application costs across 40 local grantees. The draft is attached.” Four sentences, one argument, one reason it is timely, one reason the writer is credible.
Because submissions must be exclusive, do not send the same piece to Stanford Social Innovation Review, Nonprofit Quarterly or Inside Philanthropy at the same time. The Chronicle says it typically responds within a week, which is fast for a trade publication. Wait for the answer. If it is a no, you are free to try elsewhere, and if it is a yes, you have avoided the awkward email withdrawing it from another outlet.
Accepted pieces are edited, and you will review the changes before they publish online. Select online pieces also run in the monthly print edition. Read the edits closely, push back on anything that changes your meaning, and accept the rest gracefully. Editors remember writers who are easy to work with, and a smooth first piece makes the second pitch much easier.
Once the piece runs, the work is not finished. Share it with your board, your funders and your peer network. Add it to your organization’s press page and your own bio. Pieces in established trade publications also tend to become the sources that search engines and AI assistants reach for when someone asks about a topic or a person, so a single strong essay can shape how you are described for a long time.
What about the news pages?
An opinion piece is the most direct route into the Chronicle, but it is not the only one. The publication also runs reported news and features on fundraising, foundations, nonprofit management and the policy issues that shape the sector. Getting your organization into that coverage works differently, because you are not writing anything. You are giving a reporter a reason to call you.
Reporters at sector trade publications look for the same things reporters everywhere do: news that affects many readers, data nobody else has, and sources who can explain a trend clearly. A large gift, a merger between two nonprofits, a foundation changing its grant-making strategy, or a fresh survey of your members can all be news. A new logo or a gala recap is not.
Data is the most reliable way in. If your organization collects information across a network, such as giving trends among your member groups or salary data from the nonprofits you serve, a well-run survey with a clear finding can earn coverage on its own. Release it with a short summary, the methodology and a person who can talk about what it means. Trade reporters often cite this kind of data for months.
The second route is becoming a reliable source. Reporters keep lists of people who return calls quickly, speak plainly and know the details. If you write a strong opinion piece, you have also introduced yourself to the newsroom as someone with views and expertise. That is often how the first reporter call happens.
Then start on the next argument. The sector leaders whose names readers recognize in the Chronicle rarely got there with a single essay. They got there by writing one useful, well-argued, field-first piece, and then doing it again a few months later.