Organizational Assessment

Understand How Your Organization is Doing and Where It's Going

Nonprofits of all types, from large foundations, to small grassroots groups, to multi-organization collaboratives, are under tremendous stress these days. Demands for change, shifts in funding, and new opportunities assault organizations continually from both internal and external sources. Just as people need to occasionally step back from their busy lives to take stock of how they’re doing and where they’re going, so do organizations.

Assessment can be scary or exciting. Done right, organization assessment reinvigorates an organization, giving it a new understanding of how it is functioning and how to build its capacity for the future.

Fieldstone Alliance offers several assessment processes:

Comprehensive Organization Assessment
The Fieldstone Alliance Organization Assessment lays the groundwork for building the capacity of an organization to better accomplish its mission. The assessment provides an overview of an organization's current capabilities and identifies areas where changes will yield the greatest benefit. The assessment process considers many interdependent factors that contribute to the health and performance of a nonprofit organization, including mission, vision, and strategy; governance and leadership; program delivery and impact; strategic relationships; finance; and internal operations. The assessment also considers the relationship of the organization to its external environment. This assessment can be done prior to capacity building to help focus that work, or as part of a strategic planning effort. read more»

Combo Assessment
Fieldstone Alliance teams with Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF) to offer a "Combo Assessment." The Combo Assessment combines NFF’s Nonprofit Business Analysis, which analyses an organization’s capital structure, with Fieldstone Alliance’s Organization Assessment. Together these two assessments offer a unique understanding of the interplay between an organization’s capacity and capital structure and how those affect mission delivery.

Related resources

Articles
Organization Assessment: Stepping Back...Taking Stock
Organization assessment is a data gathering and diagnostic process in which you step back from the day to day details of life in the organization and try to see the bigger picture, the trends, patterns and dynamics that have made the organization what it is today. This article gives an overview.

Six Components of Organizational Capacity
Six components of organizational capacity that are critical for high performance.

Six Keys to Successful Organizational Assessment
These factors have implications for the approach you choose and the resources you will need to do assessment well.

Books

For more information, please contact Gordon Goodwin at 651-556-4502 or email him at ggoodwin@fieldstonealliance.org.