Thanks for drawing attention to the issue of capacity building Jared. In my work with nonprofits and the funders funding them I have often been perplexed by the reluctance to invest in strengthening nonprofit’s capacity to deliver the outcomes they aim for. It is important for the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors to cultivate a culture of greater comfort with, and dialogue about, the learning needs of both sectors. We continue to be overly cautious about that dialogue.
Thanks for your comment, Cheryl! While I would say there are some great examples out there of funders committed to the dialogue (like the Packard Foundation, Deaconness Foundation, Rapides Foundation, Weingart Foundation, just to name a few), it is a conversation that needs to be further developed. I particularly appreciate your emphasis on the need for the dialogue to be about learning the needs of both the nonprofits AND the philanthropic actors. I believe GEO and CEP are advancing that conversation, but the direct dialogue between funders and their grantees seems to be far too rare.
Thank you for this excellent resource! Do you have any suggestions for new non-profits looking to tap into capacity building resources that might be available? Perhaps good places to look to find grant makers interested in funding capacity building? I am currently working on fund development for an international NGO that is looking to build capacity of its newest partner branch in the US.
Excellent article and insights, Jared. I want to emphasize two points in particular.
1) The who: Totally agree that we need to think about the capacity of all members of the sector, including intermediary organizations (like evaluators) who work with and support both nonprofits and funders. Intermediaries touch a lot of organizations, and it’s not always clear that we are thinking enough about our capacity and whether we are growing and adapting our knowledge, skills, thinking, etc. to support the social sector as it continuously evolves.
2) I like your framing of this as 3.0. As you say, “This phase builds on existing work, rather than supplanting it.” Like the concepts of Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, it signals that the field is learning and getting better and more dynamic, but not abandoning prior concepts and approaches that are still relevant and important.
Thanks for the work that TCC has done historically in this space, and continues to do.
Thanks, Julia, for your kind words and always insightful comments! You emphasize two points that I think are particularly important—the second acknowledging that there is great work that has gone on and continued to go on in capacity building. On the first, I have been thinking a lot about the role of evaluators in the sense of capacity building. There has been a lot of emphasis in the last 5 to 10 years about building the evaluative capacity of organizations, be they foundations or nonprofits and even in some cases intermediaries. I think we miss the other capacity-building roles of evaluation. I have a blog post written on that topic if I can find a venue! Interested in hearing from other evaluators about what capacity-building 3.0 means in the evaluation arena.
Thanks for this great piece on capacity building, Jared. GEO has even more good news to share about the growth of support for capacity building. Just last week, we released our 2014 field survey (http://www.geofunders.org/smarter-grantmaking/field-study), which again found that a significant number of grantmakers (27%) are giving more money to capacity building support than they were three years ago. Another trend we’ve noticed that could fall under “the how”, is that more funders are looking at capacity building through the lens of networks and collaboration. For example, many capacity building approaches targeted at supporting leadership take a collective leadership approach, working to engage multiple levels within organizations and networks, thereby building the bench strength of nonprofits. Another thing we heard from focus groups with nonprofit leaders and grantmakers on capacity building is an increased attention to how grantmakers can support nonprofits capacity to collaborate, recognizing that there are skills and organizational capacities required to do this well. Finally, we’ve also seen many examples of grantmakers who are looking across a group of organizations at the collective capacity of a community or field to determine capacity-building priorities. GEO recently published new examples of and guidelines on capacity building in our Smarter Grantmaking Playbook. http://www.geofunders.org/smarter-grantmaking
Great information, Lori! Very exciting to see increase in capacity-building giving. Also appreciate calling out the capacity to collaborate as something that folks need help with—our experience is that those capacities include the ability to understand the collaborative system, an assessment of the strategic value of the collaboration to the organization, and a careful consideration of the resources that can be brought to the collaborative. Thanks for posting.
Andrew, as a starting place for information on capacity building, you might look at some of the resources that Lori posted as well as at the Packard Foundation’s organizational effectiveness wiki site: http://packard-foundation-oe.wikispaces.com/
In terms of finding specific funders, I recommend looking to funders that are most interested in your issue area to see if they support capacity building. Good luck!
Great work as always, Jared. After overseeing nearly 1000 capacity building consulting engagements when I was VP Programs at Taproot, our impact data clearly showed that the work we were doing in leadership development and strategic HR was having the greatest impact, even though this type of work was not well understood by nonprofits or funders. That appears to be changing. What we are seeing at AchieveMission is a shift of capacity building focus by both nonprofits and foundations towards those approaches and practices that are most able to create systemic, long-term improvements in nonprofit’s capacity, particularly in organization centric leadership and human capital management.
Thanks for the comment, James. I"m glad you raised the leadership development and strategic HR issues—things that are hard for a lot of people to understand what an effective intervention (or even assessment) might look like. Glad there are organizations like AchieveMission that are doing good work in these areas. From my perspective, these are particularly important capacities in order for effective change management to happen, something that we highlight in the capacity building 3.0 paper as critical to effective capacity building.
COMMENTS
BY Cheryl Gooding
ON November 19, 2014 12:56 PM
Thanks for drawing attention to the issue of capacity building Jared. In my work with nonprofits and the funders funding them I have often been perplexed by the reluctance to invest in strengthening nonprofit’s capacity to deliver the outcomes they aim for. It is important for the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors to cultivate a culture of greater comfort with, and dialogue about, the learning needs of both sectors. We continue to be overly cautious about that dialogue.
BY Jared Raynor
ON November 20, 2014 08:10 AM
Thanks for your comment, Cheryl! While I would say there are some great examples out there of funders committed to the dialogue (like the Packard Foundation, Deaconness Foundation, Rapides Foundation, Weingart Foundation, just to name a few), it is a conversation that needs to be further developed. I particularly appreciate your emphasis on the need for the dialogue to be about learning the needs of both the nonprofits AND the philanthropic actors. I believe GEO and CEP are advancing that conversation, but the direct dialogue between funders and their grantees seems to be far too rare.
BY Andrew Knott
ON November 20, 2014 10:49 AM
Thank you for this excellent resource! Do you have any suggestions for new non-profits looking to tap into capacity building resources that might be available? Perhaps good places to look to find grant makers interested in funding capacity building? I am currently working on fund development for an international NGO that is looking to build capacity of its newest partner branch in the US.
BY Julia Coffma
ON November 21, 2014 09:42 AM
Excellent article and insights, Jared. I want to emphasize two points in particular.
1) The who: Totally agree that we need to think about the capacity of all members of the sector, including intermediary organizations (like evaluators) who work with and support both nonprofits and funders. Intermediaries touch a lot of organizations, and it’s not always clear that we are thinking enough about our capacity and whether we are growing and adapting our knowledge, skills, thinking, etc. to support the social sector as it continuously evolves.
2) I like your framing of this as 3.0. As you say, “This phase builds on existing work, rather than supplanting it.” Like the concepts of Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, it signals that the field is learning and getting better and more dynamic, but not abandoning prior concepts and approaches that are still relevant and important.
Thanks for the work that TCC has done historically in this space, and continues to do.
BY Jared Raynor
ON November 23, 2014 06:15 PM
Thanks, Julia, for your kind words and always insightful comments! You emphasize two points that I think are particularly important—the second acknowledging that there is great work that has gone on and continued to go on in capacity building. On the first, I have been thinking a lot about the role of evaluators in the sense of capacity building. There has been a lot of emphasis in the last 5 to 10 years about building the evaluative capacity of organizations, be they foundations or nonprofits and even in some cases intermediaries. I think we miss the other capacity-building roles of evaluation. I have a blog post written on that topic if I can find a venue! Interested in hearing from other evaluators about what capacity-building 3.0 means in the evaluation arena.
BY Lori Bartczak
ON November 25, 2014 12:01 PM
Thanks for this great piece on capacity building, Jared. GEO has even more good news to share about the growth of support for capacity building. Just last week, we released our 2014 field survey (http://www.geofunders.org/smarter-grantmaking/field-study), which again found that a significant number of grantmakers (27%) are giving more money to capacity building support than they were three years ago. Another trend we’ve noticed that could fall under “the how”, is that more funders are looking at capacity building through the lens of networks and collaboration. For example, many capacity building approaches targeted at supporting leadership take a collective leadership approach, working to engage multiple levels within organizations and networks, thereby building the bench strength of nonprofits. Another thing we heard from focus groups with nonprofit leaders and grantmakers on capacity building is an increased attention to how grantmakers can support nonprofits capacity to collaborate, recognizing that there are skills and organizational capacities required to do this well. Finally, we’ve also seen many examples of grantmakers who are looking across a group of organizations at the collective capacity of a community or field to determine capacity-building priorities. GEO recently published new examples of and guidelines on capacity building in our Smarter Grantmaking Playbook. http://www.geofunders.org/smarter-grantmaking
BY Jared Raynor
ON December 10, 2014 11:31 AM
Great information, Lori! Very exciting to see increase in capacity-building giving. Also appreciate calling out the capacity to collaborate as something that folks need help with—our experience is that those capacities include the ability to understand the collaborative system, an assessment of the strategic value of the collaboration to the organization, and a careful consideration of the resources that can be brought to the collaborative. Thanks for posting.
BY Jared Raynor
ON December 10, 2014 11:35 AM
Andrew, as a starting place for information on capacity building, you might look at some of the resources that Lori posted as well as at the Packard Foundation’s organizational effectiveness wiki site: http://packard-foundation-oe.wikispaces.com/
In terms of finding specific funders, I recommend looking to funders that are most interested in your issue area to see if they support capacity building. Good luck!
BY Andrew Knott
ON December 10, 2014 11:47 AM
Thanks!
BY James W. Shepard, Jr
ON December 18, 2014 09:15 AM
Great work as always, Jared. After overseeing nearly 1000 capacity building consulting engagements when I was VP Programs at Taproot, our impact data clearly showed that the work we were doing in leadership development and strategic HR was having the greatest impact, even though this type of work was not well understood by nonprofits or funders. That appears to be changing. What we are seeing at AchieveMission is a shift of capacity building focus by both nonprofits and foundations towards those approaches and practices that are most able to create systemic, long-term improvements in nonprofit’s capacity, particularly in organization centric leadership and human capital management.
BY Jared Raynor
ON January 5, 2015 12:21 PM
Thanks for the comment, James. I"m glad you raised the leadership development and strategic HR issues—things that are hard for a lot of people to understand what an effective intervention (or even assessment) might look like. Glad there are organizations like AchieveMission that are doing good work in these areas. From my perspective, these are particularly important capacities in order for effective change management to happen, something that we highlight in the capacity building 3.0 paper as critical to effective capacity building.