In 2016, the Social Sector Accelerator, the innovation-focused subsidiary of Counterpart International, partnered with IO Sustainability to conduct a landscape analysis of existing research regarding the organizational and social impacts of capacity building. In the process, we reviewed research from nearly 60 academic, think-tank, and thought leader sources published after 1990. The research was not limited to those sources that explicitly reference "capacity building," but instead included any materials related to strategies for strengthening non-profit organizations.
For more information on this research and our work on the Capacity Dividend please contact:
Teresa Crawford
Executive Director
Social Sector Accelerator A member of the Counterpart International Net work
Twitter: @capdividend
e-mail:
phone: 571-447-5748
Capacity Dividend Research Bibliography
Birdsall, Nancy. (2014) “Memo to Aid World: Drop “Capacity Building”. Center for Global Development.
I have always chafed at the idea of "capacity building" - a donor fallback in developing countries whenever progress on a donor-financed project is slow. Too much of what donors mean by capacity building has turned out to be training sessions, workshops, and nice trips of mid-level technical staff from low-income countries to Paris, London and Washington.
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Boren, Ashley. (2016) Why Resiliency? A Grantee Story. S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation.
Sustainable Conservation partners with some of California's most vital industries - including the $4.5 billion dairy and $2.6 billion horticultural industries - to make clean air and water, thriving wildlife, and a healthy climate business as usual. The organization works with private-sector leaders, scientists and academics, government agencies, and other nonprofits to develop and expand promising solutions that can be implemented across entire industries. The S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation has supported Sustainable Conservation programs since 1999, and in recent years, has made grants to build its capacity to expand impact - developing staff and financial resources to design, launch, and conduct the Making Big Ideas Work campaign.
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Bridgespan Group (2011). Building Leadership Capacity: Reframing the Succession Challenge
Successful succession planning is a proactive and systematic investment in building a pipeline of leaders within an organization. To better understand what it takes to get that investment right, The Bridgespan Group has launched a long-term research project in which it will explore effective leadership development and succession planning processes. This article shares Bridgespan’s preliminary findings.
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Celep, Amy, et al. (2016). Internal Culture, External Impact: How a Change-Making Culture Positions Foundations to Achieve Transformational Change. The FoundationReview 8(1): 116-129.
This article argues that a foundation's internal culture is critical to achieving large-scale social change, but that efforts to build a change-making culture too often are left out of strategy conversations.
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Chandler, Jennifer, and Scott Kennedy, Kristen (2016). Building Capacity Through Networks. Stanford Social Innovation Review.
In an article last fall, TCC Group's Jared Raynor suggested that nonprofit capacity building is evolving, introduced the idea of "Capacity Building 3.0," and called for others to engage in a dialogue about its future. While the sector's response seemed relatively muted, we observed aspects of the evolution described in Capacity Building 3.0 right under our noses and decided to examine our own experience of building capacity through a network of state associations of nonprofits.
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Connolly, Paul. (2001) Building to Last: A Grantmaker's Guide to Strengthening Nonprofit Organizations. TCC.
Today, as society relies more and more on nonprofit organizations to provide critical services, grantmakers and their nonprofit grantees share common concerns: how to make better use of limited resources in the face of growing need, and how to stay the course and reach established goals in a volatile, changing environment. Increasingly, grantmakers and nonprofits alike are turning to the same strategy to address these concerns: enhancing organizational effectiveness.
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Connolly, Paul, and York, Peter (2002). Evaluating Capacity-Building Efforts for Nonprofit Organizations. Strengthening Nonprofit Performance: A Funder’s Guide to Capacity Building 34(4): 33-39
As society relies more on nonprofit organizations to provide critical services, advocate for public policy, and stimulate innovation, leaders in the nonprofit sector share common concerns: how to make better use of limited resources in the face of growing need; how to increase the accountability of nonprofits to donors and regulators; and how to stay the course and reach established goals in a volatile world. Increasingly, nonprofits and funders alike are turning to the same strategy to address these concerns - enhancing organizational effectiveness. Growing numbers of grantmakers believe that investing in organizational capacity building helps leverage the impact of their philanthropic resources.
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Cornforth, Chris, and Mordaunt, Jill (2011). Organisational Capacity Building: Understanding the Dilemmas for Foundations in Small-and-Medium-Size Charities. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary Nonprofit Organizations 22(3): 428-449
There has been a growing trend for foundations to invest in capacity building to improve the effectiveness of third sector organisations (TSOs). However, understanding of what makes for effective capacity building is not well developed. This article contributes to the development of theory in this area through an in-depth examination of aninnovative foundation, which has a longstanding history of capacity building with small- and medium-sized charities in the UK. The findings from this research are related to the developing literature in this field to extend an existing typology of approaches to capacity building and to develop and refine a number of factors that have previously been associated with successful capacity building initiatives by foundations. In particular, it argues that current prescriptions are too simple and that foundations face a number of tensions when pursuing capacity building programmes, which have to be managed and call for difficult judgements to be made.
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De Vita, Carol J., and Fleming, Cory (2001). Building Capacity in Nonprofit Organizations. The Urban Institute.
This report aims to advance the ongoing conversation about capacity building, intending to push toward the intersection where research informs practice. This transfer must occur for the work to benefit the field. The final section of this report discusses how each stakeholder—nonprofit practice, foundation, and research—might work to turn knowledge into action. Each of these groups has responsibilities for strengthening the health, not only of individual nonprofit organizations, but of the local nonprofit sector and the overall community as well. By examining capacity building from a new perspective and agreeing to work collaboratively, each group can reinforce the other’s efforts. In the end, they will know more about what works, what does not work, and why.
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Duthie, Roger (2009). Building Trust and Capacity: Civil Society and Transitional Justice from a Development Perspective. Research Unit at the International Center for Transitional Justice.
Research suggests that transitional justice can make important contributions to processes of development in a number of different ways, both directly and indirectly. If that is the case, then there are legitimate reasons to support transitional justice efforts as part of a comprehensive approach to development in post-conflict and transitional societies. Starting from this premise, I argue in this paper that civil society represents one avenue through which this support can and should be provided.
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Eade, Deborah (2010). Capacity Building: Who Builds Whose Capacity? From Deconstructing Development Discourse: Buzzwords and Fuzzwords, Practical Action Publishing Ltd.
This chapter focuses on the role that development NGOs play in capacity building, arguing that many conventional NGO practices are ultimately about retaining power, rather than empowering their partners. This leads to tunnel vision and to upward rather than downward or horizontal accountability, based on the assumption that the transfer of resources is a one-way process. At worst this undermines rather than strengthens the capacities of the organizations that NGOs are attempting to assist. Sharing responsibilities and risks, mutual accountability, and committing to the long term rather than to short-term projects are more likely to create partnerships that can withstand vicissitudes and contribute to lasting change.
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Eisenger, Peter (2002). Organizational Capacity and Organizational Effectiveness Among Street-Level Food Assistance Programs. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 31(1)
Organizational capacity is a critical issue for street-level charitable organizations, such as food pantries and soup kitchens, which are increasingly involved as partners with government in the provision of social services. Capacity refers to a set of attributes assumed in the literature to bear on organizational effectiveness. This survey of food programs in the Detroit metropolitan area not only attempts to develop a capacity profile, but it empirically seeks to link the notion of capacityto effectiveness, that is, to mission fulfillment. The key attributes of organizational capacity that bear on mission fulfillment among this sample of organizations are the presence of a paid staff person and computerization of records. Institutionalization and seeking technical assistance from other organizations, other aspects of capacity, seem to do little to increase organizational effectiveness.
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Ferreira, Marisa and Proença, João (2015). Strategic Planning and Organizational Effectiveness in Social Service Organizational in Portugal. Management: Journal of Contemporary Management Issues 20(2): 1-21.
This study aims to understand the reality of social service organizations, the level of implementation of strategic planning as well as the impact of its application on organizational effectiveness. Firstly, we will group organizations in clusters according to the level of strategic planning implementation and its degree of effectiveness. Secondly, we will conduct the analysis of those groups. Given the growing number of social service organizations and the consequent complexity of their structures, there is a need for these organisations to adopt formal management techniques. Strategic planning is one of such - a valuable strategic management tool and one of its main objectives is to make organizations more effective. Therefore, the research has been conducted in order to determine if strategic planning is implemented in social service organizations and what effects has its application had on organizational effectiveness. The survey, applied to 220 social service organizations, allowed us to group them into different clusters, showing that different levels of strategic planning determine distinct degrees of organizational effectiveness. We believe that the findings of this research may be relevant to decision makers in such organizations, since the research has shown that the adoption of strategic planning has a positive influence on organizational effectiveness of social service organizations.
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Ferris, James. M. and Williams, Nicholas (2014). A Scan of Foundation Grantmaking in Greater Los Angeles. The Center on Philanthropy and Public Policy, University of Southern California. Los Angeles, California
Five years after the largest and longest recession in a generation, foundations across the country are still feeling its impact. Even as overall foundation giving and assets have risen from their precipitous declines immediately following the economic collapse, they have yet to reach the record highs of 2007. This is also true for foundations that call Los Angeles home. There is little doubt of the recession's negative impact on the finances and giving of foundations, but it is less clear what the consequences have been for foundation grantmaking strategies and practices over the past five years and possible changes in the years ahead.
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Foster, William, and Fine, Gail (2007). How Nonprofits Get Really Big. Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Since 1970, more than 200,000 nonprofits have opened in the U.S., but only 144 of them have reached $50 million in annual revenue. Most of the members of this elite group got big by doing two things. They raised the bulk of their money from a single type of funder such as corporations or government – and not, as conventional wisdom would recommend, by going after diverse sources of funding. Just as importantly, these nonprofits created professional organizations that were tailored to the needs of their primary funding sources.
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Garner, Paul, et al. (2016) The Impact of Non-Profits? Responses to Caroline Fiennes and Ken Berger. Alliance Magazine Online.
The non-profit impact revolution has taken a wrong turn. The job of examining their impact should be done by independent specialists rather than non-profits themselves: this is what Caroline Fiennes and Ken Berger argue in the March 2016 issue of Alliance magazine. As self-styled ‘veterans and cheerleaders’ of that revolution, their article constitutes both a change of direction and a major mea culpa. But are they right? Alliance asked three experts from different vantage points to offer their perspective…
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Gordon, Jenny, and Chadwick, Kevin (2007). Impact Assessment of Capacity Building and Training: Assessment Framework and Two Case Studies. Centre for International Economics, Canberra, Australia.
Capacity building and training have long been recognized as an important component of most research-for-development activities. Right from its establishment in 1982, ACIAR placed considerable emphasis on this area, and quickly found that, to ensure longer-term sustainability and impact of the outcomes of the research projects it funded, it was important that all those involved in the projects improved their skills and understanding of all aspects of the research projects it funded, it was important that all those involved in the projects improved their skills and understanding of all aspects of the research undertaken. In similar recognition of the importance of capacity building, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) established the Crawford Fund in 1987, in part to promote and facilitate training that complemented research activities, in particular those funded by ACIAR
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Giannopoulou, Christina (2011). Leading for Impact: Learning, Innovation, and Effectiveness in Greek Nonprofit Organizations. Athens University of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece.
This is an exploratory study of leadership behaviors, organizational learning, innovation, and effectiveness in a sample of Greek nonprofit organizations operating at national and / or international levels. The examination of the relationships among four distinct leadership behaviors (transformational, strategic, transactional, passive / avoidant) and the certain organizational level outcome variables contributes to a better understanding of the processes that influence organizational effectiveness in the Greek nonprofit sector, by indicating that the adoption of strategic and transactional leadership behaviors by the nonprofit managers is the most effective approach. Furthermore, this study provides the validation that organizational learning constitutes a pathway to nonprofit organizational effectiveness, but this is not the case for organizational innovation. These findings suggest that leadership matters in the nonprofit sector but it also depends on the developmental phase of the sector and the organizations. Therefore, the relatively underdeveloped nature of the Greek nonprofit sector makes more effective the adoption of more basic leadership styles by the nonprofit managers and results also to diminished organizational innovation capability that has no effect on nonprofit organizational effectiveness.
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Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (2015). Strengthening Nonprofit Capacity.
Capacity building enables nonprofit leaders and organizations to develop the skills and resources they need to improve their work. Since each situation is unique and circumstances are always changing, effective capacity-building support is tailored to best suit the needs of grantees. This publication offers practical guidance and considerations to help grantmakers design an impactful approach.
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Hackler, Darrene, and Saxton, Gregory (2007). The Strategic Use of Information Technology by Nonprofit Organizations: Increasing Capacity and Untapped Potential. Public Administration Review 67(3): 474-487.
How are nonprofits using information technology (IT) to enhance mission-related outcomes and boost organizational performance? In this paper we examine large-scale survey data of nonprofits' technology planning, acquisition, and implementation to assess the strategic use of IT in these organizations. We further evaluate their strategic technology-use potential through an examination of those IT-related competencies and practices that the literature deems critical for the successful strategic employment of technology resources. We find several promising developments alongside significant deficits in the strategic utilization of IT, especially in the areas of financial sustainability, strategiccommunications and relationship-building, and collaborations and partnerships. To boost IT's mission-related impact, nonprofits will have to enhance their organizational capacities in long-term IT planning; budgeting, staffing, and training; performance measurement; Internet and website capabilities; and the vision, support, and involvement of senior management. Accordingly, we end with recommendations for overcoming some of the most pressing challenges.
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Hagelsteen, Magnus and Burke, Joanne (2016). Practical Aspects of Capacity Development in the Context of Disaster Risk Reduction. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 16: 43-52.
Capacity development for disaster risk reduction (DRR) has been identified as one of the main ways of substantially reducing disaster losses. In previous research, several elements have been identified that are important in capacity development for DRR. For this study, documentation from nine international capacity development projects for DRR has been analysed. The projects were undertaken by a Swedish civil governmental agency, during the period 2007–2013. The documentation analysis was complemented with seven interviews with the organisation's project managers. The purpose was to understand to what extent the previously identified elements are reflected and dealt with in DRR projects conducted by the organisation. The analysis further sought to understand whether any developments can be observed during the period studied, and if additional challenges or opportunities were identified by the professionals running these projects.