About KindTru
Every nonprofit deserves to know where it stands, and to decide where it is going.
A basic organizational assessment from a consulting firm runs somewhere between $5,000 and $15,000, and a strategic planning engagement often costs more. That puts both of them out of reach for most community-based nonprofits (the domestic violence shelters, the youth programs, the affordable housing groups and food banks that do the hardest work with the fewest resources), which has always struck me as the wrong way round.
So KindTru does both halves of that work for a one-time fee that is a fraction of either. Knowing where you stand: a confidential survey of your board and staff, scored across 18 categories, read back to you in plain language with a plan attached. Deciding where you are going: a check that names which kind of planning you actually need, a retreat built from your own results, and a printable toolbox for the conversations a plan requires. The savings come from systematizing the interpretive work that used to take dozens of consultant hours, rather than from leaving anything out.
Organized around a mission, not a margin
We built KindTru this way on purpose. We price it at a fraction of market rates because access matters more to us than margin. We built the confidentiality architecture to protect the organizations we serve, in places where weaker protections would have been cheaper and nobody would have noticed. And we will never sell assessment data or use it for anything beyond what we have promised here.
The organizations we serve are mission-driven, and so are we. When a domestic violence shelter trusts us with honest data about its governance challenges, that trust is the foundation of everything we do.
Built on research, not guesswork
The KindTru Framework covers 18 categories of organizational health, drawn from a 20-chapter research framework that runs from governance and financial stewardship through equity, technology, community engagement and advocacy. Every category is grounded in the academic and practitioner literature on what makes nonprofits effective, and every one of the 324 questions carries a written note explaining why we are asking it.
Scoring an organization is the easy part. Reading the score in context is what takes judgment, and it is where a generic benchmark usually goes wrong. A rural food bank with a $200K budget is not facing the same year as an urban workforce development program with $2M in revenue, so we classify organizations across eight contextual dimensions and calibrate what we recommend to the organization actually in front of us.
The survey asks board members and staff separately, then looks at where those two views line up and where they part company. In my experience the parting-company places are the most useful thing in the whole report, so we treat divergence as something to talk about rather than something to correct. And because no group's responses are ever attributed back to them, people can say what they actually think.
18
Categories assessed
8
Contextual dimensions
4
Maturity levels
Targeted assessment questions. Each respondent only sees the questions relevant to their role, drawn from a much larger research-backed bank.
18 categories. Every dimension of organizational health — all included.
Mission & Purpose
Governance
Leadership & Talent
Strategy & Planning
Financial Health
Fundraising
Programs & Quality
Evaluation & Learning
Community Engagement
Equity & Inclusion
Culture & Communication
Risk & Compliance
Operations & Infrastructure
Technology & Data
Digital Capacity
Communications & Brand
Advocacy & Policy
Growth & Scaling
Who's behind this
One of my earliest assignments at Arthur Andersen — my first “grown-up” job — sent me to a network of domestic violence resource centers in Chicago.
It was my first real look at how a nonprofit actually runs, and I wasn't much use at first, but I saw quickly that the real expertise rested with the people doing the work and serving those in need. And this has stayed with me ever since: the people doing the most consequential work I had ever encountered did it with less of everything than any organization I'd been trained to advise. Less money. Less staff. Less time. Less room to be wrong.
The sector that does the most for the world often has the least to do it with.
I've now spent decades trying to be useful to organizations like those. After law school I worked with a community economic development project in Chicago, helping neighborhood nonprofits and small businesses find steadier footing. I keep a small practice of my own so the work never becomes theoretical, and at one point I went back to school myself, for a certificate in nonprofit leadership, because it seemed wrong to keep advising this sector without studying it the way its own leaders do.
I've also sat on the other side of the table, on the boards of community nonprofits. That's where I've learned the most, and in the most challenging ways. It's one thing to advise a board. It's another to be the one deciding at nine in the evening, with people and communities you care about counting on you.
At Duke I taught the Community Enterprise Clinic, where my students and I helped community organizations get formed, governed, and stronger. A university clinic exists because expert help costs more than a community organization can pay, so an institution finds a way to give it away. That was my answer for a long time, and it's a good one. My students and I could reach a few dozen organizations in a year.
KindTru is my attempt to reach many more — so that more organizations can thrive, and serve their communities from steadier ground. The organizations doing the most shouldn't have to spend what they can least afford to find out what they need.
If you're doing this work, I'd like to hear from you — about your motivations for doing what you do, about your experience with KindTru, or simply about your organization and the great work it does.
All the best to you,
Jeff Ward
jeff@kindtru.org
KindTru is an independent project and is not affiliated with Duke University.
What we believe
Access over exclusivity
The organizations doing the most important work in their communities are often the ones least able to afford professional help. I have come to think that says more about how the help is priced than about the organizations, and KindTru is my attempt to price it differently.
Clarity over flattery
An assessment that tells you what you want to hear will not do you much good. So we designed every layer (the survey questions, the way findings are written, the confidentiality protections) to give you an honest picture rather than a comfortable one. Honest, we hope, in the way a colleague is honest with you, which is not the same as harsh.
Action over diagnosis
A report that sits on a shelf helps nobody, and I have written a few of those myself. Everything KindTru produces is meant to end in something specific: a board conversation, a priority chosen, a grant application, a retreat you can run, a check-in ninety days from now.
Yours to carry forward
The point was never for you to need us again next year. You keep everything, the planning tools are built to be run by your own people, and if a year from now you are having better conversations without thinking about KindTru at all, that seems to me like the work going well.
Ready to find out where your organization stands?
The assessment and the planning work, one purchase, everything included.
Select your plan →Questions? hello@kindtru.org