NonprofitDugout

Step one, Health Scan

SCORE is your organization’s health assessment.

SCORE measures your organization’s health through the six capacities that drive a nonprofit’s ecosystem.

Mission Clarity18 of 24

The organization has clearly defined the populations, communities, or stakeholders it exists to serve

Not at all trueSlightly trueModerately trueMostly trueCompletely trueNot applicable or unsure

The six capacities

Everything lives inside these six.

Who you serve, who decides, who leads, what it is like to work there, whether the work gets done, and whether you have what the work needs. Every choice an organization makes sits in one of them, and a reading on one is most useful seen alongside the other five.

Mission Clarity

Mission clarity is the degree to which an organization’s leadership, board, staff, and stakeholders share a single, unambiguous understanding of why the organization exists, who it serves, and what specific outcomes it is accountable for delivering.

It enables

  • Decisions you can trace back to a single primary purpose
  • A short, shared list of priorities that every role understands
  • The same answer from staff, board, and funders when asked what you do
  • A clear, confident filter for turning down distraction funding and mission drift

What it does to the rest

  • GovernanceA board with no agreed direction reviews operational details, because that is the only thing left to review.
  • ResourcesClarity is what makes a budget a set of choices; without it, money simply follows whoever asked most recently.
  • LeadershipAn executive forced to define direction anew every week spends their authority on alignment and has none left for progress.
  • CultureUnclear priorities breed silent silos and competing internal agendas, as teams define success on their own terms.
  • ExecutionWhen nobody can name the top two or three priorities, the team stays busy while the year fills up with work that moves nothing.

This is how SCORE works.

Everyone answers on their own, so the report shows where your leadership, your staff and your board see the organization differently.

One statement from each capacity, on the real five-point scale. Nothing is saved.

Waiting

Answer a question below and the gauge moves with it.

  1. Mission ClarityThe organization has clearly defined the populations, communities, or stakeholders it exists to serve
  2. GovernanceThe board and executive leadership respect role boundaries between governance and management
  3. LeadershipMeeting commitments and leadership decisions have assigned owners and are tracked to completion
  4. CultureTeams share information proactively across the organization
  5. ExecutionThe organization holds structured debriefs after major projects to decide what to change going forward
  6. ResourcesThe annual budget links to strategic priorities and receives regular review by leadership and the board
Take the free snapshot

What comes back

What your report gives you.

A full SCORE report gives you six things. The free snapshot gives you a short version of the first two, and one next step you can take this month.

  • The strengths worth protecting
  • The patterns putting your mission under strain
  • Where your leadership, staff and board see the organization differently
  • Recommendations that fit the stage your organization is actually in
  • The three actions worth your next year
  • A 90-day outline, so the first step has a date on it
Mission Clarity
Governance
Leadership
Culture
Execution
Resources

A capacity climbs. Resources is carrying the most strain here, and it is where the first year’s work would start.

How SCORE Is Built

SCORE is built on field-tested operational best practices drawn from decades of nonprofit leadership experience. While it is a practical diagnostic rather than a peer-reviewed psychometric study, its value lies in uncovering actionable internal consensus and driving immediate organizational clarity.