What we found

2024 study

Twelve high-level takeaways

The sector is strong — mission-driven, culturally healthy, adaptable — and it needs support in specific places: resources, people, evaluation, and leadership development.

  • Nonprofits of the Northwest are driven by a clear cause. They are focused on their mission and aligned in their core work to their mission. The strength of organizational and team culture they create is, in the perceptions of the respondents, exemplary. The data reveal the organizational clarity and health of culture to energize and advance their cause.

  • There is a gap between how nonprofits rate the strength of their mission, strategy, and culture effectiveness and the challenges they report in resource and people capacity. They see their organizations as being focused, healthy, and effective, but they also struggle having the funding and people they need to function well.

  • Evaluating and communicating sector and subsector impact is challenging. Organizations are not adequately evaluating the impact of their programs beyond outputs and activities. Evaluation is the lowest rated capacity of the survey. Building expertise and developing habits to prove and improve their impact using evaluative data of all kinds is an obvious need for capacity-building.

  • The long-predicted leadership deficit is here. The survey reveals succession planning is a continued, if not growing, challenge for nonprofits. The capacity to develop staff into leaders is also a need for nonprofits. If nonprofits in the Northwest are to thrive into the future, capacity for developing current and future leaders will need to be a focus for capacity-building.

  • One of the greatest needs for nonprofits in the Northwest continues to be the sufficiency and diversity of funding. Whereas the capacity for financial management is rated relatively strong, the capacity for fund development is lagging. Nonprofit leaders see a need for strengthening their fund development competencies and funder relationships. In open-ended questions about the greatest barriers and greatest needs for capacity in all 10 domains, leaders commonly cited the need for sufficient financial resources. Leaders of nonprofits see capacity funding as the critical key to strengthening capacities of all kinds.

  • Nonprofits that are small, early stage, and culturally specific report the greatest needs for capacity-building across many of the ten domains represented in the survey. All nonprofits have the opportunity to develop in areas of capacity to be more effective. To uplevel all nonprofits, investment will need to be offered to small, early stage, and culturally specific organizations.

  • Involvement with the nonprofit state associations corresponds to a higher capacity across all domains. Nonprofits that engage with the programs and services of the nonprofit state associations demonstrate a higher level of capacity than average. This finding suggests that the community, content, camaraderie, and support of the nonprofit state association aligns with capacity.

  • Culturally specific organizations rate substantially higher than the average in (a) engaging communities that have been historically underserved and underrepresented, (b) applying policies and practices that advance inclusion and belonging with historically marginalized communities, and (c) using the lens of power and privilege to examine and advance the work. There is an opportunity for the sector to learn from the expertise of these organizations.

  • Amidst the relative strengths of partnership capacity, the data reveal possibilities for improvements in cross-sectoral work. There is yet untapped potential for nonprofits to work together with public and private sector organizations and agencies to achieve significant and durable impact in and for communities.

  • The survey reveals an opportunity for nonprofits to be better mobilized to make a difference in public policy by exercising strategic influence. Mobilizing the collective influence of nonprofits to influence societal systems, structures, and policies is an area for capacity-building consideration.

  • The survey demonstrates strength of capacity in each of the ten domains. The survey shows Northwest nonprofits as competent, resourceful, skilled, and able. They have developed capacity in critical areas of nonprofit effectiveness that explain the scale, scope, and depth of impact they are having in communities throughout the Northwest.

  • There is remarkable consistency in the data across all five states. In very few instances, there are small differences in the ratings between the states. Mostly, however, the data show similarities in the perceived strengths and areas of need in capacity.

How you can increase your capacity for evaluating impact.

    • Invest in training and resources for effective fund development

    • Support initiatives to diversify revenue streams for nonprofits

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    • Provide funding and training for robust impact measurement

    • Facilitate sharing of best practices in evaluation across the sector

    • Provide targeted capacity-building resources for small and under-resourced organizations

    • Partner with early-stage organizations to strengthen their health and effectiveness 

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    • Invest in leadership and professional development programs

    • Support succession planning initiatives across the sector

    • Learn from the expertise in community engagement of culturally specific and community-based organizations

    • Amplify the policies of community engagement

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    • Create platforms for nonprofits to partner with public and private sectors

    • Fund collaborative initiatives that address complex community issues

    • Benefit from capacity-building offered through your nonprofit state association, since nonprofits that are more involved demonstrate higher levels of capacity

    • Support the work of your nonprofit state association to build the capacity of the sector 

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2026 Deep Dive into Capacity for Evaluating Impact

Recommendations

Nonprofit leaders, capacity-builders, and funders are working together to build organizations that are strong enough to know whether their work is making a difference and well supported enough to act on what they learn. The recommendations below follow from the findings and are grouped by these three audiences, each holding distinct leverage to improve the culture and habits of evaluating nonprofit impact. Each list gathers the actions that recurred most across the five state studies.

    • Build a reflection rhythm you can sustain. Short post-program debriefs, a quarterly look at key metrics, and a standing data question in staff meetings all count as evaluation. A simple habit the team will keep does more than an elaborate strategy no one will follow.

    • Use the data you already have. Before collecting anything new, protect the time to interpret and act on what is already in hand, and develop staff to make sense of data, not just collect it. Interpretation and strategic response, not collection, is often the point of failure.

    • Share evaluation across the team, the board, participants, and the community. Involve people in parts of the process, including data collection, sensemaking, and shaping recommendations. Without participation, there is little ownership; involving people enhances value for everyone.

    • Seek out voices that are usually missed. Evaluation is stronger when it includes people whose perspectives are easy to overlook. Build the relationships and methods that let participants and community members shape what gets asked and how.

    • Shift from counting outputs to evaluating impact. Ask about what has changed for people or places, not only what was delivered. Question whether you are treating compliance as evaluation, and build the capacity to gather and make sense of evidence about the difference you make.

    • Convene peer cohorts and communities of practice. Many leaders named structured time with others doing similar work as the support they most need. Leaders learn as much from peers as from formal training. Build cohorts that can learn together over time.

    • Teach the move from data to case-making. Most leaders can collect data; far fewer can turn it into a case that donors, funders, and legislators actually hear. Turning data into a compelling case is a skill many leaders would benefit from developing.

    • Offer right-sized tools and design guidance. Provide simple, tiered guidance matched to an organization's size, mission, and stage, including methods for arts, advocacy, and other relational work that standard program frameworks handle badly, and help leaders choose the few indicators that matter most to their organizations and communities.

    • Focus on sensemaking and mental models, not just tools. Support reviewing data together, legitimize qualitative and mixedmethods work, and challenge unhelpful assumptions about evaluation and learning.

    • Support sustained, culturally grounded learning. Favor multi-year capacity-building over one-time training, make evaluation as visible and accessible as fundraising or strategy training, and ensure support for tribal and rural communities is grounded in culture, lived experience, and relationships, not only technical expertise from the profession of program evaluation.

    • Fund evaluation itself. Treat evaluation as a fundable line item, including staff time, training, data systems, and support for making sense of what is collected. This includes funding the coalitions, networks, and shared infrastructure that help organizations evaluate together.

    • Coordinate and simplify reporting. Move toward shared core metrics, common applications, and fewer, more substantive reports, so grantees can focus on learning from evaluation rather than producing accountability documents.

    • Close the feedback loop. Share aggregated findings back with the organizations that did the data collecting to make reporting a two-way exchange that helps grantees learn from themselves and from one another rather than a one-way submission.

    • Broaden what counts as evidence. Accept qualitative, relational, and community-defined evidence alongside required metrics, especially for arts, advocacy, relational, and long-horizon work whose outcomes a standard annual report cannot capture readily.

    • Make funding relationships trust-based and long-horizon. Co-design metrics with grantees, extend grant terms to match how long outcomes take to unfold, and create space for low-stakes evaluation decoupled from funding decisions. In the current climate, do not penalize organizations that limit data collection to protect vulnerable people.

Read the full report →