Tools for success self-assessment toolkit

Our Tools for success self-assessment toolkit enables you to celebrate what your charity already does well, and to clarify what you need to do to strengthen all aspects of your organisational capacity.

This Tools for success self-assessment toolkit:

• Helps you identify those areas where your organisation already meet the basics, and those where you need to do more work
• Points you towards the Tools for success guides most relevant to your charity's needs
• Offers an approach to prioritising what happens next
• Gives guidance on how to draw up an action plan.

Before you begin, think about who needs to offer their views on the self-assessment. It may be helpful to pull together a small team of people from different parts of the organisation and with different perspectives, so that you get a more rounded and realistic view.

The two-step self-assessment process:

Step one: Questions that will help you to prioritise and identify the right place to start

This self-assessment tool sets out some important questions for any nonprofit organisation to consider, to determine your areas of strength and to prioritise the areas you need to invest more time in developing.

Before you start, download our template to record your responses as you work through the questions in the self-assessment tool.

When you've done that, you’ll be ready to move on to Step two: action planning.

Step two: Action planning to help you build some realistic next steps

Using the list you've created in Step one - of things for your organisation to celebrate, and things to invest more time in developing - you're now ready to create an action plan.

You can use our action plan template, or create your own using similar headings.

Things to do once you've created your action plan:

• For each of the aspects that you already do well and need to celebrate, start collecting evidence of performance and try to build on them and keep improving - see the relevant Tools for success guides for help
• For the areas where you need to do more work, take a look at the relevant Tools for success guide, to get further advice and ideas
• Make a short list of bullet points for each area you need to work on; state your ideas about possible actions for each area and who should help you
• Share it with more colleagues to see what they think
• Decide the priority order for the activities: number each, starting with the most important
• Be realistic and ruthless – prioritise those areas that need most attention, or that are most important (for instance 'are we legal?' is a very important consideration!)
• List all the resources and expertise you have at your disposal
• Finally, with your shortlist of priority tasks to hand, go back to the relevant Tools for success guides and start the detailed investment work needed to build and strengthen your organisation's capacity and sustainability.

CCE’s expert consultancy service can offer you more in-depth guidance and support. If you would like further advice please get in touch with us.