The Nonprofit Life Stage Assessment

Resource
The Five Life Stages of Nonprofit Organizations

View the book's bibliography

From Vince Hyman, former Publishing Director, Fieldstone Alliance:

About the Life Stage Assessment
While developing our award-winning book, The Five Life Stages of Nonprofit Organizations, by Judy Sharken Simon, we also developed and tested The Fieldstone Nonprofit Life Stage Assessment.

The Life Stage Assessment gives you a detailed evaluation of your organization and its life stage. It places your organization within one of five distinct stages (from Stage One, the early, inspired days, to Stage Five, the days of review and renewal). That’s useful in and of itself, because knowing where you sit now, you can anticipate some of the challenges you face, and plan for some of the changes you’d better make.

But beyond that, the inventory has some great diagnostic uses. It actually examines seven arenas of organizational performance: 1) staff leadership, 2) financing, 3) administrative systems, 4) products and services, 5) staffing, 6) marketing, and 7) governance. It helps you place your organization along a “life stage” within any one of these arenas. So, your organization may, in general, be performing in the early phases of Stage Four—Produce and Sustain. But within this broad stage, a close-knit founding board that served the organization well in its early days may be laboring in Stage Two, Ground and Grow, inadvertently restraining mission growth. Meanwhile, a talented, aggressive marketing staff may have buzzed on by the rest of the organization and be performing like that of a much more mature organization—and risk burning themselves out and angering the board. The potential strains are obvious; putting a name to them may get you started on a solution.

I’m a skeptic at heart, as Judy (the author of this book) can tell you (we had many editorial battles during its development—and yes, I’m one of those who tends to lump assessment tools in the same bin with astrology.) I find inventories helpful in shaping my thinking, but I don’t bank on them. The reason I’m pleased with this inventory is that it doesn’t “peg” the organization to one area with a prescriptive set of expectations. It helps you gain a big picture look at the organization, even as you take a magnifying lens to certain performance zones.

This inventory is also included in The Five Life Stages of Nonprofit Organizations: Where You Are, Where You’re Going, and What to Expect When You Get There. The inventory is also available in pamphlet form for those who wish to use the tool with their board and staff as part of a group process.

If you would like to be in touch with author Judy Sharken Simon about her work, she has invited your contact at: sharkmon@tcq.net.

More Life Stages Resources
If you find the topic of organizational life stages fascinating, there are some other great resources besides our book noted above. While our book notes five life stages (and a sixth, separate phase for those organizations that go into dissolution), others label and divide the stages differently.

Some of the groundbreaking work on this topic was done by KARL MATTHIASEN, in Three Key Stages in a Nonprofit Board's Life Cycle. A reprint of this famous work is available at http://www.managementassistance.org/page4b.html.

SUSAN KENNY STEVENS is another groundbreaker; she’s been teaching on the topic since the mid-80s. Her work, Nonprofit Lifecycles: Stage-Based Wisdom for Nonprofit Capacity, is available at http://www.larsonallen.com/publicservice/lifecycle.asp. It was the winner of the 2002 McAdam award, given annually to the best nonprofit book.

MICHAEL BURNS, of Brody-Weiser-Burns, has created a concise, four-page guide in "Act Your Age! The Organization Lifecycle and How It Affects Your Board: The First in a Three Part Series." This is available at http://216.65.35.60/pdf/actyourage.pdf.

And PAUL CONNOLLY and LAURA COLIN KLEIN authored a brief work on the topic, available at the TCC Group’s website at http://www.tccgrp.com/pdfs/per_art_organiz.pdf. (By the way, Paul is co-author of our work, Strengthening Nonprofit Performance: A Funder’s Guide to Capacity Building.)

Wherever your organization is in its life stage, good luck to you in the new year!

Sincerely,

Vince Hyman
Publishing Director
Fieldstone Alliance

January 10, 2005

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