Any time an organization delivers a program, we all know how important it is for them to understand the needs of the people they serve. The same is true for foundations and grantmakers offering capacity building support—understanding the needs of your local nonprofit community is just as critical.
Hedges had the opportunity to conduct Nonprofit Needs Assessments in Indiana Counties, to help funders more clearly understand the needs of the nonprofits in their community —because when those needs are known, support becomes more strategic, responsive, and effective.
As a funder, knowing the needs of your nonprofit community can help you decide the following:
- What training and workshop topics will be most helpful to your nonprofit leaders. It also allows you to explore if you should be providing learning opportunities for staff leaders, board members, or both! For example, in both communities, fundraising was the top request staff executives named when asked about their highest professional development or training needs. Digging deeper, in one county, volunteer management, grant writing, and board recruitment and onboarding rose to the top of the needs list, while in the other county, the highest needs were trainings in marketing, human resources, and board governance.
- If there is a common challenge affecting several organizations that can be addressed through a shared grant or community initiative. For example, in one county, we learned that the volunteer population is aging, and there was a shared concern that organizations wouldn’t have the volunteers needed to deliver programs or lead on the board. In this scenario, a funder could host or fund a volunteer fair, attracting younger audiences to begin filling the volunteer pipeline.
- How to make funding decisions for operational grants. Funding requests for operational support often total two to three times the amount of funding available, leaving grantmaking committees and leaders with difficult decisions about what gets funded and what doesn’t. In one county, board and staff leaders identified five main themes for how they would use unrestricted funding; staffing and benefit improvement to better support staff, infrastructure for building and equipment needs, program development and expansion, financial sustainability efforts such as endowment establishment or debt reduction, and increasing community awareness about the organization.
- How to improve your grantmaking program. A nonprofit needs assessment is a great opportunity to hear from your current or potential grantees—removing any assumptions we have about the ease of the grant application, access to offered trainings, and barriers to engaging with capacity building offerings.
Some funders may have success gathering this information in-house through annual surveys or ongoing conversations but having a third-party partner like Hedges conduct the research can lead to more candid responses, resulting in high-quality data and more confident decision making. Our team of nonprofit professionals at Hedges not only brings the ability to benchmark across nonprofits communities, but we also bring firsthand experience in developing, implementing, and analyzing this kind of research.
Using a combination of surveys, interviews, focus groups, and town halls, we gather comprehensive qualitative and quantitative data from a variety of voices including staff, board members, volunteers, and community members. Using Hedges’ Four Pillars of Organizational Health, our Nonprofit Needs Assessments include information about:
- The County’s Nonprofit Ecosystem: how leaders feel about system-wide collaboration and communication, availability of community resources, and overall community’s awareness of nonprofits.
- Vision, Mission, Values and Strategic Planning Usage: how organizations are using these important guideposts to align and guide their organization.
- Assessing Programs & Impact: how assessing how impactful programs are, what would be most helpful in strengthening programs, and how program data is being collected and used.
- Assessing Leadership & Culture: staff experience and satisfaction, staffing needs, team culture and structures, board governance efforts, and volunteer experiences.
- Assessing Finance & Development: board engagement in fundraising, funding challenges, donor experiences, and needed development support.
- Assessing Marketing & Communications: reflection on reputation identity, communicating impact, and marketing support needed.
- Assessing Grantees’ Experience with your Foundation, like learning what barriers nonprofits experience in attending trainings or applying to grant applications.
Ready to hear from your nonprofits so you can determine how to best build the capacity of your nonprofit community in 2026? We’d love to partner with you. Contact Kara Harrison at kara@hellohedges.com to learn more about our process.
