We think of a nonprofit as an organizational ecosystem.
Your board, your staff, your money, your culture and your plan all move each other. Strengthen one and the others feel it. Let one slip and the others end up carrying it.
Every nonprofit is its own ecosystem.
Yours runs on the same six capacities every nonprofit runs on. What makes it yours is how they sit together.
You can work these six in silos, or you can work them toward one purpose.
Where is your ecosystem slowing down impact?
Four passes. Start anywhere.
Some organizations need the whole process. Others need us for one part of it.
Start wherever it would help most. We’ll meet you there.
- 01
Read the room
We come to you.
We spend time with your team, walk through your programs, sit in on a meeting or two, and get a feel for how the organization actually works, beyond how it looks on paper.
We want to understand what you’ve built, what’s working well, where people are carrying too much, and what the organization is asking of you right now.
- 02
Survey your people
Your staff and board each take the Health Scan. It takes about seven minutes.
It gives everyone a voice, including the people who don’t always get asked. Just as important, it shows us where people see things the same way, and where they don’t.
Those differences are often where the most useful conversations begin.
- 03
Bring back what we found
We sit down with your leadership team, often for a day away from the office, and walk through what we heard.
We’ll name what’s working and worth protecting. We’ll be honest about where the organization is stretched or getting in its own way. And then we’ll listen.
Because the point isn’t for us to tell you what your organization needs.
It’s to help you see it clearly enough to decide what comes next.
- 04
Build the plan with you
Together, we turn what we’ve learned into a small number of priorities and a plan for moving them forward.
We put real owners and dates around the work: enough structure to keep things moving, without creating another system your team has to manage.
Some organizations take the plan and run with it.
Others want us alongside them for the year: checking in, helping work through what gets stuck, adjusting when circumstances change, and noticing the wins along the way.
Either way, the goal is the same: to help you move from knowing what matters to actually doing something about it.
The tools
You will meet four tools along the way, each with a page of its own. They exist so the work keeps moving between conversations.
- SCORE
SCORE measures your organization's health across six capacities: mission clarity, governance, leadership, culture, execution, and resources. You come away with the two or three risks to work on first, on your own or as the start of a Rumo plan.
Take the free snapshot - Rumo
Rumo is your strategic planning engine. It starts with your SCORE report and a review of your guiding documents. What follows is a leadership retreat to identify your organization's heading. It lands with a one to three year execution plan.
See how Rumo works - Mission Signal
Mission Signal is Nonprofit Dugout's project management tool, personalized to your plan. Update it by voice to text, or by replying to your daily email. It connects to Rumo, and to your existing Asana or Monday.com project.
Explore Mission Signal - Capacity Coaching
Coaching puts an experienced nonprofit leader alongside your team for a season, working with them to carry the plan forward and strengthen the capacities every nonprofit is built on.
Ask about coaching
We use AI where it earns its keep.
The tools are how a small nonprofit gets benchmarked insight and a plan it can act on without paying full consultant rates for the analysis. AI does the document review, the benchmarking against organizations your size, and a good deal of the drafting. That is a large share of the hours in this kind of work, and taking those hours out is what brings the price down to a number a small board can approve.
The rest stays with people, because the rest only works with people. Trust gets built in a room. Hearing what a board is careful about, or what a staff meeting goes quiet around, takes someone who has sat in those chairs. Your team executes the mission, and inviting the right person into leadership is a judgment somebody has to make and then stand behind. We are a consulting practice that uses software, and the software never talks to your board.
