Groundwork is a five-dimension organizational diagnostic that tells you not just where the gaps are, but which one to close first and why that order matters.
See how the diagnostic works →Four in five organizations that completed the assessment came back the following year. Not because they had to. Because it changed how they made decisions.
Most nonprofit leaders don't lack awareness of their organizational problems. They lack a precise enough read to know which problem to solve first. The result is predictable: investment goes where the pressure is loudest, not where the leverage is highest.
The sector has access to plenty of frameworks that score organizational health. Most produce a report. The report gets filed. The recommendations don't come with a sequence. And a year later, the same conversation is happening at the board table.
The problem isn't that organizations don't know they have gaps. It's that no diagnostic has been precise enough to tell them which gap to close first.
Most capacity assessments treat organizations as a collection of separate domains: governance, finance, programs, each scored independently. Groundwork treats your organization as a system. The five dimensions interact.
A governance gap means something different when an organization is in early growth than when it's in mature operations. A financial risk reads differently when staff motivation is high than when the culture is fracturing. Groundwork doesn't just score each dimension. It reads how they interact, and surfaces the highest-leverage intervention given your specific configuration.
The numbers are behavioral, not attitudinal. Organizations returned because the assessment changed how they made decisions. Not because we asked them to.
Four in five organizations that completed the assessment came back the following year. Not because they had to. Because it changed how they made decisions.
Every assessment produces seven diagnostic outputs and one ranked roadmap. The seven outputs read your organization across five dimensions simultaneously, each one surfacing a different pattern in the data. The roadmap is what they produce together: the highest-leverage next move, sequenced by what to address first and why.
The output that ties everything together. Not a scored report. A ranked sequence of interventions, ordered by leverage: what to address first, why that order matters, and what the evidence says about where your organization's highest-leverage move actually is.
Two instruments, one framework. The full assessment delivers comprehensive diagnostic coverage. The rapid diagnostic gives a clear directional read in 30–35 minutes.
The complete 188-question assessment across all five dimensions of organizational capacity. Designed for Executive Directors and Board Chairs, with sections for program and operations leads.
The highest-priority indicators across each domain, designed for initial scoping, board conversations, or a directional read before committing to the full assessment.
The assessment takes 30–70 minutes. Responses are exported as a tagged CSV and emailed to the assessment team. No account needed.
See how the diagnostic works →