Preparing for your Funder Ready Assessment

The Funder Ready Assessment is a guided conversation and review of existing materials designed to help your organization understand how it may be seen by an external evaluator.

It is not an audit, compliance review, or pass/fail test. You do not need to gather a perfect set of documents or resolve known gaps before we meet. The assessment is most useful when we can understand your organization as it operates today.

Our goal is to identify:

  • Where your organization already communicates strength and confidence

  • Where information may be missing, outdated, hard to find, or inconsistent

  • What deserves attention first based on your goals

What we look at

The assessment is organized around the six areas of the OPTIC² model:

  • Operations: Do you have the capacity, roles, processes, and information needed to pursue and manage funding responsibly?

  • Public Presence: Does the information people can find about you reinforce a current and coherent story?

  • Trust: Can a funder understand your governance, financial stewardship, organizational stability, and basic safeguards?

  • Identity: Who are you? Is there a clear, shared understanding of your organization, purpose, audiences, and role?

  • Credibility: What do you do, and what demonstrates that your approach is thoughtful, effective, and grounded in evidence or experience?

  • Communications: Can you explain your organization, programs, needs, and impact clearly and consistently?

These areas overlap by design. An evaluator’s confidence is shaped by how information connects across proposals, websites, financial materials, public profiles, and conversations.

What the conversation is like

We typically conduct the assessment as one facilitated conversation with a small group of people who bring different perspectives on the organization — for example, executive leadership, development, communications, or board leadership.

You do not need to arrive with perfectly aligned answers. Different perspectives often help us understand where information is clear, where knowledge is concentrated, and where greater alignment may be useful.

We prefer to conduct the conversation virtually using Microsoft Teams, with each participant joining from their own computer whenever possible. This supports equal participation and makes it easier for us to record individual perspectives. Plan for up to two hours together.

We begin with your organization’s current situation: where you are today, what has changed, what opportunities you are pursuing, and where communicating your work feels difficult or time-consuming.

From there, we move through the six assessment areas. The conversation is structured but flexible, and we may spend more time in some areas depending on your organization and goals.

The point is not to compare every organization against the same idealized standard. It is to understand what is true now and what matters next.

How to prepare

Before we meet, it may be helpful to think about:

  • What funding, partnerships, or opportunities matter most right now?

  • What has changed in recent years — for example, leadership, programs, strategy, staffing, geography, or funding?

  • Where does your organization feel especially strong?

  • Where do you find yourselves reinventing language, searching for documents, or answering the same questions repeatedly?

  • Are there known gaps or frustrations you hope the assessment will help clarify?

You do not need polished answers. These questions simply help us understand your context.

Materials that can help

You do not need to create anything new for the assessment. Existing materials can help us see where information is strong, difficult to find, duplicated, outdated, or inconsistent.

Helpful materials may include:

Organization and leadership

  • mission, vision, and values

  • organizational overview or boilerplate

  • strategic plan

  • board and leadership information

Programs and impact

  • program descriptions;

  • annual reports

  • outcome or evaluation summaries

  • logic models or theories of change

  • participant or community feedback

Funding

  • a recent grant proposal or application

  • case for support

  • common proposal attachments

  • funder reports

Governance and financials

  • organizational and program budgets

  • Form 990

  • bylaws and key policies

  • audited or reviewed financial statements, when applicable

Public presence

  • website

  • Candid or GuideStar profile

  • social media channels

  • newsletters, media coverage, or other public profiles


Please share what already exists. Do not clean it up for us first. We treat the materials you share as confidential and do not share them outside the WDG team.

Multiple versions can be useful. Outdated materials can be useful. If your mission statement appears three different ways in three different places, that is useful information, too. And if something does not exist, that’s okay. A missing document is information — not a failing.

What happens after the assessment

We bring together what we learned from the conversation, the materials you shared, and your organization’s public presence. You receive a written assessment within 5–7 business days that identifies:

  • Areas of strength

  • Important gaps or inconsistencies

  • Issues that may affect funder understanding or confidence

  • A prioritized path forward

The goal is not to give you an overwhelming list of everything your organization could improve. It is to help you see what matters most now, what can wait, and where focused effort is most likely to strengthen your readiness.

The assessment is yours to use for internal planning, board conversations, funding strategy, communications work, or future OPTIC² implementation. It is designed to be useful to whoever helps you address the gaps — your own staff or board, another consultant, or us.

Questions?

We’re available Monday–Friday, 9 a.m.–5 p.m. EST, and other times, too, with a little advanced planning.

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