The Organizational Capacity Assessment Tool (OCAT) is a framework designed for Non-profits and Civil Society Organizations to establish their organizational setup, which includes assessing all those components used by an organization to achieve its mission, from physical resources to people to ideas. The organizational capacity can also be considered as an output of basic organizational activities like managing budgets, recruiting board members, raising funds, serving constituents and their policies including, Human Resource policy, Administrative policy, Financial Policy and so forth. Thus, the Organizational Capacity Assessment exercise serve as a baseline measure of how an organization is currently doing in terms of its existing capacities and also provide a starting point for those areas on which to focus capacity building efforts.
Though the Non-profits come in variety of different shapes and sizes. They have different program and geographic areas, staff and budget sizes, research methodologies, approaches to their work and adapt to emerging needs. But what is the best way to gauge whether an organization is healthy or not? How does an organization build and obtain the resources and skills necessary to attain the maximum impact? What factors and components affects an organization to accomplish its stated goals? In the non-profit arena, Organizational Capacity Assessment Tool designed by ‘Trust Cradle’ can answer these questions. The reason then for an Organization to engage in assessing their components generates or demands out more capacity to achieve any program impact.
In a broader sense, Donors and Funders have traditionally been more interested in supporting innovative ideas rather than to build an organization. Civil Society Organizations are the only and important medium that can effectively carry out such ideas and strategize them to constructively implement it.
Indeed, Donors have also struggled to account for the various factors that make the organizations they support succeed or fail in meeting their goals. In an era of what some have harshly termed ‘bungled aid efforts’, it is essential that the donor take appropriate steps at the planning phase to ensure that an organization has the capacity to operate effectively and to manage their aid.
We ‘Trust Cradle’ has created such entity for the Donors/Government/Research Agencies, as our Organizational Capacity Assessment Tool & Process will assist them in recognizing the excellence of Non-profit organizations in their strength, programmatic innovations and implementations. On the other side, Non-Profit Organizations will also get benefit from ‘OCAT’ as they are always interested in their own organizational development towards organizational competence and sustainability to present themselves as a worthy partner.
OCAT designed by Trust Cradle is categorized in two parts which consists of Self-assessment and Facilitator-led subjective based assessment. Results from both the categories provide a practical approach to beginning or enhancing an organization’s understanding of its capacity strength and areas where its capacity might be enhanced.