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