For Community Foundations
Shared Learning Across Your Nonprofit Cohort
Fund organizational health assessments and strategic planning for the organizations in your cohort. Each one gets a full, private assessment it owns, along with the planning tools to act on it. You see aggregated patterns showing where the cohort collectively has strengths and where capacity-building would go furthest, without ever seeing an individual organization's data.
How it works
Four steps, designed so that assessment data comes from willing participants and is aggregated without compromising anyone's individual privacy.
You fund the assessments
Fund assessments on behalf of the organizations in your cohort. Each one runs its own assessment on its own terms (intake, a survey of board and staff, the report, an action plan, and the whole planning side including a retreat built from its own results). They own their data.
Organizations choose what to share
Each grantee decides which assessment categories to include in the cohort's aggregated view. Their full report is always private. Sharing is affirmative, per-category, and changeable anytime.
Patterns emerge from the aggregate
As assessments complete, cohort-level insights surface: where collective strengths lie, where capacity-building investment could have the most impact, and how different segments of your cohort compare.
Everyone learns together
Grantees see the same aggregated insights you do, plus where they stand relative to the cohort. This creates a shared vocabulary for capacity-building conversations grounded in data, not assumptions.
About Privacy and Power Dynamics
Community foundations occupy a unique position in the nonprofit ecosystem. You are simultaneously a supporter, a funder, and — whether you intend it or not — a power holder. When you ask a grantee to complete an organizational health assessment, that request carries weight that a peer organization's wouldn't. A grantee's executive director may hear “capacity building opportunity” and think “compliance requirement.” They may worry that honest answers about financial struggles or governance gaps could influence their next grant decision.
This concern is not hypothetical or irrational. The nonprofit sector has a long history of funders using evaluation data in ways that punish rather than support — conditioning future grants on assessment scores, withdrawing funding when organizations honestly report challenges, or using “capacity building” as a euphemism for surveillance. If KindTru's shared-learning reporting reproduced this dynamic, it would produce artificially positive data from anxious grantees, which is worse than no data at all.
We built KindTru's shared-learning architecture around a simple principle: the people whose data is being aggregated should have more control over it than the people requesting the aggregation. I would not call that altruism so much as pragmatism. Assessment data is only worth having if people answer honestly, and in my experience people answer honestly when they feel safe.
How we protect grantee agency
Per-Category Consent
Organizations choose exactly which assessment categories to include in your cohort's aggregated data. An org that's proud of its program design but nervous about its finances can share the former and withhold the latter. You never see which categories any specific organization shared — not even a count. Per-grantee consent signal would itself be identifying, so we don't show it.
Privacy by Design
Individual organization privacy is a property of the system rather than a promise we ask foundations to sign. Two floors are enforced in the code: a category is computed only once at least 5 organizations have opted into it, and a comparison group (by budget, mission area, region or age) appears only once it holds at least 10, because slicing a cohort is what makes a small group identifiable. Individual scores never leave the organization's own account, and a defense-in-depth check scans every response before it is sent to make sure no per-org field slips through.
Shared Access
Grantees see the same aggregated cohort data you see, plus where their own scores sit relative to the distribution. This isn't a one-way mirror — it gives grantees a shared vocabulary to name systemic patterns that cut across the cohort, not just their own organization.
Self-Identified Groupings
You can suggest how organizations are grouped for cohort analysis (by budget size, mission area, geography), but each organization confirms or corrects their own classification. They know their context better than anyone.
Penalty-Free Exit
Any organization can leave the cohort at any time. Their data is immediately removed from all future aggregation. Their individual assessment is unaffected. The withdrawal date and reason stay private — you simply see their status change to Withdrawn. The right to exit without consequence is what makes voluntary participation meaningful.
Confidentiality Floor
No aggregated data is shown when fewer than five organizations have shared a given category. Distributions, not lists. Averages, not rankings. The system is designed so that even if you tried, you could not reverse-engineer an individual organization's scores from the aggregate.
This architecture means you will sometimes have incomplete data. Not every organization will share every category. Some may take time to opt in as trust builds. Financial Health may have fewer participants than Program Design — and that gap itself is useful information about where your cohort feels vulnerable. We believe incomplete data from willing participants is infinitely more valuable than complete data from anxious ones.
If this approach resonates with how you want to relate to the organizations you fund, we'd welcome a conversation about what a shared learning cohort could look like for the organizations you fund.
What you'll see
A cohort dashboard designed around distributions, not rankings. Every number you see has passed through the confidentiality floor and reflects consent-gated participation.
Cohort-wide
Cohort distributions per category — means, interquartile ranges, participation counts. You'll see how many organizations shared each category, never which ones.
Cohort comparison
Breakdowns by self-identified segments — budget range, mission domain, geography, org age. Groups below the confidentiality floor are suppressed automatically.
Narrative insights
Plain-language patterns and capacity-area suggestions, written asset-first and framed around shared learning rather than as findings about any one organization.
Want to hold the deliverable before the conversation? Download a sample Cohort Capacity Profile — generated 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 portfolio the way the IRS record shows it.
Volume Pricing
What it costs. What it takes.
Fund assessments for organizations in your cohort. Each organization gets their own full assessment. You see aggregated patterns that reveal where the cohort collectively has strengths and capacity-building needs — without compromising any individual organization's data.
Learning cohorts pair every grantee assessment with a shared cohort layer whose privacy protections are built into the system, not promised: per-category consent so organizations choose what to share, self-reported cohort groupings (budget, mission, geography, age) confirmed by each participant, and an n ≥ 5 confidentiality floorapplied per category so small segments are never exposed. Foundations see aggregated cohort data only — never any individual organization's scores, and never a signal of which categories any specific grantee shared. Grantees see the same cohort data you see, compare their own scores against the distribution, and can update sharing choices or leave the cohort at any time. Cohort views include longitudinal comparison, plain-language narrative insights, and a downloadable Cohort Capacity Profile PDF.
Volume rate applies to cohorts of 10+ organizations. Smaller cohorts are supported at the standard nonprofit price ($299).
Expected foundation staff time: ~1 hour per grantee across a 90-day cycle (kickoff, reminder check-ins, cohort debrief).
Ready to bring this to your grantees?
Every cohort starts with a conversation. Tell us about your grantees and what you're hoping to learn together.
Questions? jeff@kindtru.org