All the best projects start with pen to paper. In 2016, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, a Packard Foundation Local Grantmaking Program grantee, received an Organizational Effectiveness (OE) grant to support a reorganization of their staffing structure. Nina Simon, the museum’s executive director and author of her own highly engaging Museum 2.0…

The Organizational Effectiveness (OE) team is often asked where nonprofits can find resources for capacity building projects. Grant funding in this area can be hard to find, and unfortunately, we are not able to provide support for all of the worthy projects that come our way, even for Packard Foundation grantees. In some circumstances, it…

Capacity building is notoriously tricky to evaluate. Here in the Packard Foundation’s Organizational Effectiveness (OE) team we evaluate our work several ways, and we are always trying to improve so we can increase our impact.  This post provides a brief overview of our monitoring, evaluation, and learning approach over the last three years. We wanted…

Organizational Effectiveness (OE) at the Packard Foundation has long invested in building the capacity of leaders. In recent years we have seen increased demand for leadership investments from our grantee partners and our program colleagues, who see this kind of support in a given sector or movement as a critical piece of creating lasting impact….

Over the past several years, our sector has been debating the design, relevancy and role of strategic planning as a core capacity building tool. Some say it is too time intensive and the final product too often ends up “sitting on a shelf.” Others deem planning to be a distraction from critical daily, operational and…