Helping You Assess Your Human Services Portfolio

Meeting growing needs among your clients while never having enough money to fulfill your mission can be a frustrating experience. Against this backdrop of constrained resources, it’s critical to identify and prioritize the most mission critical programs and services. We help you structure an assessment process to determine where to concentrate your efforts.

How We Help You Assess and Align Your Human Services Portfolio

We help you assemble, analyze, and interpret data to assist your leadership team in making difficult decisions about program priorities. This includes working with your program and finance teams to analyze and understand the actual costs of delivering your programs and services, as well as the impact achieved.

  • Assess Programs and Services: We rigorously analyze and disaggregate your data and costs to help ensure equitable outcomes and so you understand which programs and services have the greatest impact and which ones are most financially sustainable.
  • Develop Portfolio Priorities and Action Plans: We help you make data-driven and equitable decisions about your programs–whether to improve, grow, or wind them down. We also analyze the resources—financial, human, and organizational—needed to pursue your priorities and map out a plan to secure them.
  • Performance Measures: We help you identify the most important quantitative and qualitative milestones that make it possible to measure progress toward intended impact and learn as you go.

Bridgespan Publications About Nonprofit and NGO Program Assessment and Alignment

Bridgespan conducts extensive research about program and services alignment, and we share our findings on our website and in publications like Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Putting Clients at the Center: A Planning Guide for Multi-Service Organizations

A three-step planning guide for multi-service organizations interested in providing integrated services to clients that achieve long-term positive outcomes.

More Bang for the Buck

Lower costs per outcome show that a nonprofit's drive for efficiency and investments in people and processes create more bang for the buck.

Costs are Cool: The Strategic Value of Economic Clarity

Knowing the true cost of any given program or service provides insight into effectiveness and efficiency.

Bridgespan’s Program Portfolio Experts