
A Guide to Organizational Capacity Assessment Tools
Finding—and Using—the Right Tool for the Job
The findings in this memo are drawn from a landscape scan of organizational assessment tools, user experience interviews, and Informing Change’s study of the tools in the database, as well as our own consulting experience supporting capacity development for a range of nonprofit clients.
The key functions of an organizational assessment tool are to:
- Provide a framework that facilitates individual reflections about an organization’s trajectory
- Help stakeholders identify shared concerns and priority actions
- A tool provides common language to discuss difficult organizational issues and focuses the conversation on the questions within a tool rather than opinions of specific individuals.
Prepared for William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
Prepared by Informing Change