Capacity-building money is among the hardest spending to evaluate. Most funders cannot say, with evidence, whether a grantee is stronger than it was two years ago.
We assess organizations on a consistent instrument, surface institutional risk before it becomes a write-off, and remeasure so improvement is demonstrable rather than reported.
Capable local organizations stay underfunded — not because the work is weak, but because they cannot demonstrate readiness in the specific forms institutional funders require.
Funders face the mirror of that problem. They struggle to identify credible partners, compare capacity across a portfolio, price institutional risk, and determine whether capacity-building money changed anything at all.
Both sides are trying to answer the same question from opposite directions: is this organization ready? Almost nobody measures it consistently.
Organizations and funders need different things from the same underlying measurement.
Assessing grantees one at a time, with different questions each time, produces impressions rather than comparison. A single instrument applied consistently produces a portfolio you can actually reason about.
The instrument runs at two depths. A six-minute index scores six layers and is enough to triage. The full diagnostic covers nineteen layers across fifty-seven statements, adds 360s on governance, donor development and communications, and takes about 45 minutes — or roughly 20 at express depth, with sections you do not need switched off. Both are free to the organization.
For vetting specifically, two things matter more than the score. Several instruments carry pass–fail gates that are reported above the total, because a strong average does not compensate for a missing safeguarding reporting mechanism. And when several leaders in the same organization complete it independently, the disagreement between them is usually more informative than the result.
We have no proprietary dataset and no benchmark library drawn from thousands of organizations, so we will not tell you how a grantee compares to the sector. What we have is a consistent instrument, senior practitioners who have run organizations at scale, and comparison against each organization’s own baseline over time.
Engagements begin as a scoped pilot — typically a small number of organizations — so you can judge the output before committing a portfolio to it.
In sector terms this is an organizational capacity assessment (OCA), usable as pre-award due diligence or as ongoing sub-recipient monitoring. A general capacity score tells you whether an organization is sound. Due diligence asks whether it meets your criteria for award. Only the second question is configurable, so we configure it.
Your eligibility criteria, your thresholds and the items you treat as disqualifying are built into the instrument and reported above the composite score. An organization can score well overall and still fail a gate. In pre-award terms that is the finding that matters.
As is standard in OCA practice, several leaders complete the instrument independently. Variance between the chief executive and the board chair on decision rights is itself a governance finding, and it is far harder to manage than a score.
The party conducting due diligence should not be the party contracted to remediate what it finds. Where we do both, we separate them in writing before the engagement begins, so the assessment survives scrutiny from your board, your auditors and your own funders.
An assessment commissioned by a funder and experienced by a grantee as an audit produces defensive answers and useless data. We are explicit with every organization about who commissioned the work, what will be shared, and what will not.
Organizations receive their own results. Capacity plans are built with them, not for them. And the goal is an organization that needs less from everyone — including us.