Programs & Impact
Design programs from logic model to outcomes measurement, and make honest, useful cases for scale.
Needs Assessment
Plans and conducts community needs assessments and landscape/gap scans to justify launching, continuing, or discontinuing a nonprofit program, including secondary data review, primary data collection (surveys, focus groups, key informant interviews), asset mapping, and gap analysis against existing providers. Use when a user asks to assess community need before starting a program, prove there is unmet demand for a funder or board, conduct a landscape scan of who else serves this population, run a gap analysis, plan community listening sessions or focus groups, or decide whether to sunset a program because the need has shifted. Covers the pre-program research phase, not the causal design of the program itself once need is established (nonprofit-program-design) and not measuring outcomes once the program is running (nonprofit-outcomes-measurement).
Outcomes Measurement
Designs KPIs, indicators, and evaluation plans for nonprofit programs, selects data collection methods and instruments, and structures outcomes reporting to funders and the board. Use when a user asks to define what to measure for a program, build an outcomes/evaluation plan or measurement framework, choose between pre/post surveys vs. administrative data vs. validated scales, set up a data collection calendar or dashboard, calculate outcome or completion rates, write the outcomes/results section of a funder or annual report, or figure out why current metrics don't show real impact. Covers measuring and reporting whether a program's stated outcomes actually occurred, not designing the logic model those outcomes came from (nonprofit-program-design) and not the community research that justifies starting a program (nonprofit-needs-assessment).
Program Design
Builds logic models and theory-of-change frameworks that connect a nonprofit program's inputs, activities, and outputs to short-, mid-, and long-term outcomes. Use when a user asks to design a new program, articulate a theory of change, build or revise a logic model, map program assumptions and external factors, define a program's causal chain before writing a grant proposal, or diagnose why a program's activities aren't producing the outcomes leadership expects. Covers the design and structuring of the model itself, not writing it into a funder narrative (nonprofit-grant-writing) and not measuring whether the outcomes actually occurred (nonprofit-outcomes-measurement).
Program Scaling
Provides frameworks for scaling, replicating, or expanding a proven nonprofit program to new sites, geographies, or populations, including readiness-to-scale assessment, fidelity-vs-adaptation tradeoffs, replication models (direct site expansion, licensing/affiliate, open-source toolkit), and the operational/staffing/funding infrastructure scaling requires. Use when a user asks whether a program is ready to scale or replicate, how to expand a program to a new city or population, how to adapt a program for a new context without losing what made it work, how to build a replication toolkit or affiliate model, or how to plan the staffing/systems needed to grow program capacity. Covers growth of an already-proven program specifically, not initial program design (nonprofit-program-design), not evaluation methodology used to prove the program works in the first place (nonprofit-outcomes-measurement), and not organization-wide revenue or business-model diversification (nonprofit-revenue-diversification).