Free guide from KindTru
Building a Thriving Nonprofit
Questions worth asking about the health of your organization
Key Categories · Questions Worth Asking
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Why this guide
No organization excels at everything
Every nonprofit has areas of strength and areas that need attention. The useful work is knowing where you stand, so you can make deliberate choices about where to spend your limited time and resources; nobody needs to be excellent at everything at once.
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This guide walks through the key categories of organizational health. Each topic offers questions you can use right away, a picture of what stronger practice can look like, and one small thing to try.
Your organization has a context
Its size, purpose, community, funding and people all shape what good practice looks like. A volunteer-run organization and one with several staff teams may need different arrangements to do equally responsible work.
An invitation to look more closely
The guide assigns no scores. Its questions help your board and staff notice where you agree, where you differ, and where nobody is sure, so you can decide together what is worth understanding better.
What the guide covers
The key categories of organizational health
The guide’s topics, in order. The first two are previewed below, and each of the others has a page of its own in the free guide.
- Mission and Purpose, previewed below
- Governance, previewed below
- Leadership and Talent, in the free guide, with questions worth asking and one small thing to try
- Strategy and Planning, in the free guide, with questions worth asking and one small thing to try
- Financial Health, in the free guide, with questions worth asking and one small thing to try
- Fundraising, in the free guide, with questions worth asking and one small thing to try
- Programs and Quality, in the free guide, with questions worth asking and one small thing to try
- Evaluation and Learning, in the free guide, with questions worth asking and one small thing to try
- Community Engagement, in the free guide, with questions worth asking and one small thing to try
- Equity and Inclusion, in the free guide, with questions worth asking and one small thing to try
- Culture and Communication, in the free guide, with questions worth asking and one small thing to try
- Risk and Compliance, in the free guide, with questions worth asking and one small thing to try
- Operations and Infrastructure, in the free guide, with questions worth asking and one small thing to try
- Technology and Data, in the free guide, with questions worth asking and one small thing to try
- Digital Capacity, in the free guide, with questions worth asking and one small thing to try
- Communications and Brand, in the free guide, with questions worth asking and one small thing to try
- Advocacy and Policy, in the free guide, with questions worth asking and one small thing to try
- Growth and Scaling, in the free guide, with questions worth asking and one small thing to try
A look inside
A look inside the guide
Category 01
Mission and Purpose
Does the mission help you make choices?
Having a clear mission is different from using it to make choices.
Questions worth asking
- How would board members, staff and volunteers each explain what this organization exists to do, and would their answers sound compatible?
- Think of a recent funding, partnership or program opportunity. How did mission fit shape the decision to take it on, reshape it or let it go?
- Could you explain to a community member how each of your current programs connects to the mission?
Read the whole page
A mission statement can be clear and still have little influence on everyday decisions. The useful moment to look is when an opportunity, a request or a funding offer arrives, and people have to decide whether it belongs in the work.
What helps is enough shared understanding that people notice when the organization is being pulled in a different direction, and can explain their choices to the community they serve. The wording can vary from person to person.
What stronger practice can look like
People describe the organization's purpose in compatible terms, and it comes up when real choices are made. A brief written account of that purpose is easy to find and revisited on an agreed rhythm, with room to ask whether it still fits what the community needs. Confirming the direction is as useful an outcome of that conversation as changing it.
Try this
Pick one recent decision about a program, grant or partnership. Write down the reasons it was made, then look at whether the mission shows up among them.
Category 02
Governance
Is the board doing the work only the board can do?
Receiving information is different from having time to question it and decide.
Questions worth asking
- At your last two board meetings, which decisions received enough time for a useful discussion?
- Where are the board's responsibilities clear, and where do board members and staff understand them differently?
- When the board makes a decision, is it clear who will act, by when, and how the board will hear what happened?
Read the whole page
Boards need information to carry their responsibilities, and they need time to question it, weigh choices and decide. A full agenda can leave very little room for that. Reports fill the meeting, questions get squeezed in, and the most consequential decision arrives as people are getting ready to leave.
Clear responsibilities help, and so does an agenda that shows the purpose of each item (is the board receiving information, offering advice, or deciding something?). The arrangements can be simple, as long as people understand their responsibilities and follow through on them.
What stronger practice can look like
Board and staff share an understanding of who decides what. The board receives information suited to what it oversees, records its decisions and the follow-up it agreed, and from time to time looks at how well its own ways of working are serving the organization.
Try this
Before adding another meeting, look at the agenda for your next one. Mark each item as information, advice or decision, and see whether the decisions have the time they need.
The full guide gives each of the other topics listed above a page like the two shown here.
Built for organizations that build communities
What comes after the questions
This guide introduces the questions. KindTru helps with what comes after them: a confidential survey of your board and staff and a plain-language report on where you stand; a one-hour board meeting, or a half-day retreat built from your own results, to decide where you are going; and an Action Plan, check-ins and Board Development to keep that decision alive through the year.