Article: Funders as Learning Organizations - 123
A FIO PARTNERS PERSPECTIVE: Funders of the Nonprofit Sector as Learning Organizations
Funders have the ability to recognize performance gaps in nonprofits that guide areas for improvement. This article explores how this characteristic leads to a responsibility to learn from their practice, including conciously and purposefully look for what has been learned, capturing it, discussing it broadly with other practitioners in the field, and determining how learning should be applied to future practice.
Related Products
Learning Survey for Organizations - $75.00
Organizational learning is a key element in continuous improvement for all aspects of organizational functioning. FIO Partners has created this tool to assess both how an organization obtains new knowledge, and whether it disseminates and uses it. The OLS tool measures organizational performance in these areas: the most common ways that staff learn new information; how and whether that information is shared; whether management has created a context for learning; whether the organization uses new knowledge to improve practice; the near term priority areas as perceived by staff where the organization needs new knowledge. These are key factors critical to an organization’s ability to institute performance improvement. If you are interested in building more of a learning organization, using this assessment periodically can help to measure change in this area. This assessment is of critical importance in pacing major change initiatives since it will reveal whether your organization is open and permeable to the entry of new information or closed and resistant to innovation. This largely depends upon the organization’s track record to date in allowing new information to influence practice, and that is largely the result of the context for learning created by management. This survey can be administered online and interpreted by FIO Partners for an additional fee.

