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Built for organizations that build communities

Shared learning across the organizations you support

Give the organizations you support the assessment and the planning tools that follow it. Each one gets a private assessment it owns, a half-day retreat built from its own results, and Board Development through the year. You learn from the pattern across the group (where it is collectively strong, and where support would go furthest), never from any one organization's answers.

For community foundations, United Ways, private and family foundations, and corporate giving programs.

See how it worksContact us
Each organization gets
The whole of KindTru: its own confidential assessment and report, the Facilitation Kit and Action Plan, the Planning Room, and Board Development and check-ins through the year. It owns all of it.
You see
The combined pattern across the group, for the categories organizations chose to share, once at least 5 of them have.
It costs
$249 an organization for cohorts of 10 or more.

How it works

Four steps, built around willing participants

The data comes from organizations that chose to take part, and it is combined without compromising any one organization's privacy.

  1. You cover the cost

    You pay for KindTru for the organizations in your cohort. Each one runs its own assessment on its own terms (intake, a survey of board and staff, the report, the Action Plan, and the whole planning side including a retreat built from its own results), and owns what it produces.

  2. Organizations choose what to share

    Each organization decides which assessment categories to include in the cohort's combined view. Its full report always stays private. Sharing is affirmative, category by category, and can be changed at any time.

  3. Patterns come into view

    As assessments finish, patterns across the group come into view: where the organizations are collectively strong, where support for building capacity could help most, and how different kinds of organizations in the group compare.

  4. Everyone learns together

    Organizations see the same combined view you do, plus where their own scores sit within it. That gives everyone a shared vocabulary for capacity-building conversations, grounded in what the organizations themselves reported.

Privacy

Why privacy comes first

Whether you are a community foundation, a United Way, a private or family foundation, or a corporate giving program, a request from you carries a weight that the same request from a peer organization would not, however kindly it is meant. When you invite an organization to take an organizational health assessment, its executive director may hear “capacity building opportunity” and think “compliance requirement.” They may worry that honest answers about tight finances or unsettled governance could shape their next grant decision.

I do not think that worry is irrational. Many of us have seen evaluation data used in ways that punish rather than support: future grants tied to assessment scores, funding withdrawn after an organization honestly reported a challenge, or “capacity building” used as a polite word for watching. If KindTru's shared-learning reporting reproduced that, it would produce artificially rosy answers from anxious organizations, which seems to me worse than no answers at all.

So I built KindTru's shared learning around a simple principle: the people whose answers are being combined should have more control over them than the people asking for the combined view. I would call that pragmatism more than altruism. Assessment data is only worth having if people answer honestly, and in my experience people answer honestly when they feel safe.

It means you will sometimes have incomplete data. Not every organization will share every category, and some may take time to opt in as trust builds. Financial Health may have fewer participants than program design, and that gap is itself useful information about where your group feels exposed. In my experience, incomplete data from willing participants is worth far more than complete data from anxious ones.

How organizations stay in control

  • Per-category consent

    Organizations choose exactly which assessment categories to include in your cohort's combined data. An organization that is proud of its program design but nervous about its finances can share the first and hold back the second. You never see which categories any one organization shared, or even how many, because that alone could identify it.

  • Built into the software

    Each organization's privacy is part of how the system works, rather than a promise we ask funders to sign. An organization's own scores are never shown to a funder, and every response is checked before it is sent so that no single organization's figures slip through.

  • Shared access

    Organizations see the same combined cohort data you see, plus where their own scores sit within it. That gives them a shared vocabulary for the patterns that cut across the whole group, and not only their own organization.

  • Self-identified groupings

    You can suggest how organizations are grouped for comparison (by budget size, mission area, region or age), but each organization confirms or corrects its own classification. It knows its context better than anyone.

  • Penalty-free exit

    Any organization can leave the cohort at any time. Its answers drop out of every group result from then on, and its own assessment, report and the access you funded are unaffected. You still see its name, marked Withdrawn; the date and the reason stay private. Being free to leave without consequence is what makes taking part truly voluntary.

  • Minimum group sizes

    A category appears in your view only when at least 5 organizations share it. A comparison group (by budget, mission area, region or age) shows a category only when at least 10 organizations in that group shared it: 10 unless you raise it, never lower, because slicing a group is what makes a small one identifiable. The figures you see are distributions and averages, and no chart or figure lists or ranks organizations. In a small group no system can make working back to one organization impossible, and our confidentiality page says plainly where the protection stops.

What you'll see

A cohort dashboard built around distributions

Every number you see comes only from organizations that chose to share it, and only when enough of them did to keep each one private.

Cohort-wide
For each category: the average, where the middle half of organizations fall, and how many shared it (never which ones).
Comparison groups
Comparisons by budget, mission, region and age, as each organization describes itself, for each category that at least 10 organizations in the group shared (10 unless you raise it, never lower).
Narrative insights
Plain-language patterns and capacity areas worth supporting, strengths first, written about the group and never about any one organization.

Want to hold the deliverable before the conversation? Download a sample Cohort Capacity Profile, made from a demonstration cohort of fictional organizations.

Or start with what's already public: run a free Portfolio Pre-Flight on your current grantee list and see the whole group the way the IRS record shows it.

Volume pricing

What it costs, and what it takes

You pay for KindTru for the organizations in your cohort, and each organization gets the whole of it: its own assessment and report, and the planning tools that follow.

Cohorts of 10 or more

$249

per organization, one time

Smaller cohorts are supported at the standard nonprofit price ($299).

Worked examples

  • 10 organizations: $2,490
  • 12 organizations: $2,988
  • 15 organizations: $3,735
  • 20 organizations: $4,980

Your staff time

About an hour per organization across a 90-day cycle: a kickoff, reminder check-ins and a cohort debrief.

When an organization asks whether this is surveillance (and a good one will), send them the grantee explainer, written to be forwarded.

Built for organizations that build communities

Ready to bring this to the organizations you fund?

Every cohort starts with a conversation. Tell me about the organizations you support and what you hope to learn together.

Contact us

Questions? jeff@kindtru.org