The James Irvine Foundation asked The Bridgespan Group to develop an approach to assessing the strengths and needs of a field. The result is a framework for building more robust fields, The Strong Field Framework, a tool designed to help you assess the major elements of a field, revealing in the process areas of particular strength and also areas of weakness.
Using the framework requires gathering objective information about five key components of a given field, via primary research methods such as surveys, interviews, focus groups and organizational profiling, as well as secondary research — gathering and analyzing existing information.