A capacity assessment tells you where the gaps are. It does not tell you which one to touch first, who owns it, what it costs, or which of them cannot be fixed until something else is fixed. That sequencing is the work.
The assessment is free, takes thirty to forty-five minutes, and asks for nothing. It is also the best first conversation we can have — I would rather read your report than your enquiry.
These are not the same product at two prices. They are different in kind, and the difference is the whole reason the second one exists.
The real instrument, not a teaser: twenty-seven capacity areas, the full rubric, a complete report with an action plan sequenced by dependency. Run it as often as you like. Nobody sees it unless you show them.
What it cannot be is independent. Its own cover says so: a funder should read this as the organisation’s own account of where it stands — because that is exactly what it is.
Take it now →Externally assessed rather than self-scored. Scoped with you in advance — and with your funder too, where they are the reason you are doing it. Evidence tested rather than asserted, and the instrument adapted where a donor has asked for something specific.
The difference is whose voice it is in. Donors discount self-assessment, and they are right to. They do not discount an assessor who has no stake in the answer.
Scope this with me →Not a package. These are sequential, and the honest answer is usually that you need the first or the second, not all three.
We run the assessment again with your board and senior staff in one room, scoring together rather than separately. Disagreement about a score is where the useful conversation lives, and it needs someone independent holding the pen. You leave with an agreed baseline nobody can dispute later.
Best when you scored it alone and suspect colleagues would answer differently.
We turn the report into a costed, sequenced plan — named owners, dates, what gets trained, what gets hired, what gets bought in — in a form you can put straight into a board paper or the organisational development section of a funding bid.
Best when you agree with the diagnosis and need it turned into something the board can approve.
We re-run the assessment, load the first one as the baseline, and report the movement — what shifted, what did not, and what that says about where the next year of effort should go. Funders read direction of travel more closely than absolute scores.
Best when you have worked a plan for a year and need to show a funder it worked.
Concept notes, full proposals, logframes, budget narratives, and the evidence sections that decide whether the rest gets read.
Designing the measurement before the project starts, so that in three years you can show what changed rather than what you delivered.
Training for people who have to run an organisation as well as deliver its work — delegation, governance, and the conversations everyone avoids.
Recruiting for the gaps you actually have, building a board calendar that survives contact with a busy year, and making minutes an auditor would accept.
There are no fixed prices here, and that is deliberate. What an engagement costs depends on the size of the organisation, what the funder has asked for, whether it is in person, and how far anyone travels. So we write the scope of work first — what you need, what I will produce, when — and the budget follows from it. That is also the form a funder wants to see when this sits in a capacity-building line.
Five lines is plenty. It saves us both a discovery call.
If your organisation has no budget line for this at all, say so in the email. Some of this work I do anyway, and I would rather you asked than assumed.
I work on organisational capacity in the nonprofit and development sector. Most of my work is with organisations that are good at their programmes and under-built everywhere else — which is the ordinary condition of a growing nonprofit, not a failing one.