What are the types of capacity building? The capacity building pyramid

The pyramid at a glance

Read it from the bottom up: each level is harder to work on than the one below it, and changes the organization more deeply.

The 4 levels, bottom to top

Level 1: Fundraising and communications

This level is about how the organization interacts with its external environment: donors, partners, the public, the media.

Here the organization keeps doing what it does and sees the world the same way. What changes is how effectively it interacts with the outside world. That's why it's the easiest level to work on.

Easiest to start with, and often the most fruitful. To write a case for support, a messaging framework or a brand, a team has to say who it is, what it stands for and where it is going. Many organizations find out in those conversations that their strategy is less clear than they thought, or that they don't share the same view of their values and identity.

With the right communications or fundraising consultant, like the ones in our network, a project that starts with a website or a donor pitch can take a team straight to the top of the pyramid. It gets them questioning their identity and values, and reviewing and refreshing their strategic goals, because communications only work when these are clear.

Level 2: Processes and systems

This level is about how well the organization does what it does.

The organization is still doing the same things and sees the world the same way, but it's becoming more effective at doing them. Think human resources policies, financial management, internal processes and systems.

Level 3: Strategy and direction

This level is about where the organization is going, what it does and why it does it.

It covers strategic planning, theory of change, and monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL). Together they set the compass of the organization: the change it wants to get, the levers it's going to use, the activities it needs, and how it will measure success.

Level 4: Culture, leadership and governance

This level is about how the organization thinks and understands the world.

It covers organizational culture and values, leadership and leadership development, and governance: how the organization defines its governance and its accountabilities.

These areas are often the most daunting. An organization may only work on them once it has a certain minimum capacity and is starting to scale, because it needs to address them to scale effectively. It's not necessarily for beginners.

But this level also leads to the most significant change. Once you change how an organization thinks collectively, or how its leaders think and see the world, that's where you can have the deepest change.

How to read the pyramid

You can see the logic between the layers:

1. Level 1 changes how we communicate and raise funds.
2. Level 2 improves our effectiveness: processes, systems, human resource policies, financial management.
3. Level 3 changes the direction: where we go, what we do and why, and how we measure our success.
4. Level 4 changes how we think.

The work gets harder as you go up, and the change gets deeper.

The pyramid sorts the work by the depth of change it aims for. The change a project actually produces can show up at any level, in people, in the organization or in results. We describe it with 8 types of nonprofit capacity building impact.

Related frameworks from management literature

The idea that change comes in layers of depth has a long history in management and psychology. A few models sit close to the pyramid.

• Maslow's hierarchy of needs (1943). Abraham Maslow ordered human needs from basic survival at the base to self-actualization at the top. The pyramid borrows the shape and the logic: each level rests on the ones below.
• Single-loop and double-loop learning (Argyris and Schön). Single-loop learning changes how you act while the underlying values stay the same. Double-loop learning questions and revises those values and assumptions too. Levels 1 and 2 of the pyramid are mostly single-loop. Levels 3 and 4 are double-loop.
• Logical levels (Robert Dilts, building on Gregory Bateson). Dilts describes levels of change running from environment and behavior up through capabilities, beliefs and values, identity and purpose, with each higher level shaping the ones below it. That's close to how the pyramid works.
• Three levels of culture (Edgar Schein). Schein splits culture into visible artifacts, espoused values and, deepest of all, basic underlying assumptions that people rarely say out loud. Level 4 of the pyramid works on those assumptions, which is why it's the hardest.
• The McKinsey Capacity Framework (2001). Written for Venture Philanthropy Partners, it breaks nonprofit capacity into 7 elements, starting with aspirations and strategy, and comes with an assessment grid for scoring each one. It was one of the first attempts to give funders a shared map of nonprofit capacity.