Candid (formerly GrantSpace) outlines the process and steps to create a business plan, which can help a nonprofit organization describe how it intends to implement its mission and achieve its set of goals. Additionally, the National Council for Nonprofits offers administration guides about Business Planning for Nonprofits.
Whether it’s a consultant to facilitate organizational planning, develop a capital fundraising campaign, or help the board and staff navigate an organizational merger, professionals can often provide the expertise we all need from time to time to better manage our nonprofits. There are many considerations when hiring and engaging consultants. This guide is meant to provide you with some basic tips for hiring, interviewing, and working with consultants to ensure that your experience is productive and worthwhile.
Stage-based Nonprofit Lifecycles (based on Dr. Susan Kenny Stevens' book Nonprofit Lifecycles: Stage-based Wisdom for Nonprofit Capacity) walks through the various stages of a nonprofit lifecyle and helps organizations determine where they fall.
An organizational climate survey measures an organization's strengths and areas for improvement on several levels: pertaining to the organization, each work department, and specific jobs/roles. Adapt this sample to conduct a survey of your organization.
Innovation Network provides program planning and evaluation consulting, training, and web-based tools to nonprofits and funders across geographic and programmatic boundaries. The organization works to make evaluation accessible to all nonprofits, so they have the knowledge and skills to manage and improve their work.
A commonly-used tool, the logic model graphically depicts your program, initiative, project, or even the sum total of all of your nonprofit's work. It also serves as a foundation for program planning and evaluation.
Impact is the difference your nonprofit makes: there's the work you do and the results that flow from it.
Measuring economic impact is an often overlooked way to define, measure, and communicate your nonprofit's value. Economic Impact: A New Approach for Proving Outcomes (Stanford Social Innovative Review, 2015) explores how nonprofits can analyze the full scope of their economic contributions to better understand their impact and more successfully communicate their success to build on it moving forwa
Basic Guide to Outcomes-Based Evaluation for Nonprofit Organizations with Very Limited Resources from Free Management Library provides guidance for basic planning and implementation of an outcomes-based evaluation process (also called outcomes evaluation) for nonprofits, especially small organizations with limited resources.
Cultural competence in the workplace between a diverse staff or for the design and evaluation of programs serving diverse populations can make or break an organization.