Path to Impact: Finding Our Common Strengths and Challenges

The Community Foundation believes that strong communities need a strong nonprofit sector to support them. The health of the businesses that nurture our children, feed the hungry, treat the sick, teach citizens to be more engaged in civic life, encourage creativity and artistic endeavors, and so much more is an important piece of making our community a great place. We also believe that good decisions are based on data.

On March 5, John Brothers of QuiDoo Consulting, met with nearly 100 representatives of local organizations to look at preliminary data from their recent work to assess their own internal capacity, and to talk about the best ways to interpret and use the reports of the CCAT assessments recently completed. John highlighted the strong coordination and collaborative work going on here, and common challenges in outreach, marketing and fundraising. Click here to see the early results for the group as a whole (scroll down to the final two pages of the presentation).

Our Path to Impact project began 6 months ago with a presentation by John Brothers to a group of 140 nonprofit executives and board members. At that meeting, John presented the project’s outline and explained the rationale for using the CCAT (Core Capacity Assessment Tool) developed by the TCC Group. More information about that meeting including a recording of the presentation’s important points is available here. Fifty organizations signed on to use the CCAT, a standardized self-assessment of an organization’s internal capacity and place on the life cycle. Of the initial group, 47 completed the assessment process, received their reports – and are moving forward to develop action plans.

In the coming months, the Community Foundation and Quidoo will be looking into the aggregate data from all of the participants in more detail to identify common strengths and challenges, and to design how the Community Foundation can continue to help. We will share what we learn so that the whole community can be part of the conversation on how we help move our sector forward.