Fundamentals of Nonprofit Organizational Effectiveness
Welcome to our collection of articles, tools, and templates designed to improve your organization's overall effectiveness. The content below offers insight and best practices to ensure your organization’s ongoing success on topics ranging from operating models and decision making to measurement and innovation. You can also use the links above to jump to our other foundational content around strategy, leadership, and financial sustainability.
The RAPID Decision-Making Tool for Nonprofits
How can your organization make better decisions? Thinking through a decision-making process can’t guarantee wisdom, but it can set you up for success by answering critical questions that are on everyone’s mind
This article focuses on a tool for addressing one of those questions: who should be involved and what role should they play?
Operating Models: How Nonprofits Get from Strategy to Results
A nonprofit’s operating model is the blueprint for how to organize and deploy people and resources. It serves as a bridge between strategy into results. Forging this bridge well requires tailoring a nonprofit’s model to deliver its specific strategy and equity priorities, looking across four major operating model elements.
How Nonprofits Can Incorporate Equity into Their Measurement, Evaluation, and Learning
How do you know if your organization or programs are achieving the impact you seek? How do you figure out how to get better at what you do? Performance measurement isn’t solely a yardstick for success—it’s also a tool for learning and decision making that helps you improve. And for nonprofits, doing evaluation well includes using methods that engage, respect, and benefit the constituents and communities with whom you work.
How to Build a Nonprofit Dashboard for Your Leadership Team
An effective nonprofit performance dashboard can help your leadership team ensure the organization is making progress towards its goals. This article walks leaders through three steps for getting started: aligning on priorities, assessing progress, and acting and following up.
Building the Capacity to Innovate
A nonprofit executive team's effectiveness is essential for an organization's success. Yet often these teams underperform for a variety of reasons. The five steps laid out here can help nonprofit executive teams move from underperforming to high-performing in their work to advance their organizations' missions.
Five Ways that Nonprofits Can Make Decision Making More Inclusive—and More Effective
A nonprofit executive team's effectiveness is essential for an organization's success. Yet often these teams underperform for a variety of reasons. The five steps laid out here can help nonprofit executive teams move from underperforming to high-performing in their work to advance their organizations' missions.