Tools

To achieve significant impact, a nonprofit organization must build, tune, and fuel an “engine of impact”—a system that encompasses seven essential areas of strategic leadership. This diagnostic tool enables nonprofit stakeholders to assess how well their organization performs in each of those areas and how ready that organization is to scale its impact.

“A cardinal principle of fund raising is to start with your board,” Bill Meehan and Kim Starkey Jonker write in Engine of Impact. With this tool, nonprofit leaders can gather and present vital data on their board’s contribution to funding their organization.

Often the best way for people in an organization to turn ideas into action is to engage with those ideas together. Here is a set of questions, organized by book chapter, that people can explore in a group discussion of Engine of Impact.

Organizational performance in the essential elements of strategic leadership varies widely across the nonprofit sector. This report—based on a survey of more than 3,000 stakeholders in the sector—highlights key challenges and opportunities for nonprofit leaders.

Should a philanthropic organization aim for perpetuity, or should it plan to spend down its assets? To answer this question, philanthropists and foundations need a solid understanding of the relationship between annual payout, market performance and volatility, and the anticipated longevity of their endowment. Here is a tool to help them develop that understanding.

A one-page PDF summary of the seven essential elements of strategic leadership, adapted from Engine of Impact.