Giving Compass' Take:

• Vimmi Malhotra and Hisham Mundol explain how building capacity and strengthening organizations is an effective way for donors to increase impact. 

• What are the organizational needs of nonprofits you work with? What capacity building would allow them to go beyond the work they are capable of now? 

• Learn about effective capacity building practices. 

It is the fundamentals of an organization—arguably more so than great program design or execution—that are key to delivering high impact. This insight drove a recent decision by Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), where we work, to set up an Organisational Development (OD) team to support our nonprofit partners with their capacity building needs. This new direction represents an important shift away from focusing predominantly on programmatic funding.

It took us a long time to realize that individual program funding could be myopic; that such funding could put a strain on the program itself, because the rest of the organization would often be unable to keep pace, adapt, and deliver to what the program was trying to achieve.

Today, we realize that at times our partners may not have the time, capacity, or funding to develop strategies, build internal systems, cultivate good governance, and foster leadership—all of which are critical to creating impact on ground. Restrictive funding practices that limit non-programmatic or core support also contribute to this problem.

Moreover, oftentimes funder and partner conversations on capacity building do not happen, or when they do, they do not connect the dots between capacity building and impact, or arrive at common priorities and measures of success. This could happen due to the lack of an organization building mindset and/or due to the difficulty of measuring the impact of an OD grant.

This situation limits the effectiveness of partners themselves but also sometimes diminishes the potential of programs.

Read the full article about strengthening organizations to increase impact by Vimmi Malhotra and Hisham Mundol at India Development Review.