Nonprofit Capacity Diagnostic

Nonprofit capacity,
measured — not guessed.

Mission statements tell you what an organization wants to do. BoardPulse tells you whether it can, and if not, what it'll take to get there — scoring governance, financial management, fund development, and impact measurement before the board loses key members, the grant report comes in three months late, or the organization can't produce the financials a lender needs when it's go time. Free for nonprofits tracking their own growth, designed for the funders and lenders who need to know what an organization can execute.

For boards & staff
Join the Nonprofit Waitlist
Funders, CDFIs, lenders & TA providers
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The Problem

Capacity is invisible
until it fails.

Lenders underwrite the loan — not the organization's ability to manage it.

Funders fund the program — not the readiness behind it.

Agencies report outcomes — without a capacity baseline.

How It Works

Three steps.
No consultant required.

01
Assessment

A Yes/No diagnostic across all four modules — no consultant required.

02
Scoring

Cumulative gate logic places the org on a 0–10 maturity scale, module by module.

03
Narrative Report

An instant, plain-language capacity report translates the score into clear next steps.

Why BoardPulse

An underwriter's analysis,
not a guess.

BoardPulse was built by Aaron Laramore, drawing on two decades as a CDFI underwriter and community investment professional at leading national financial intermediaries — including the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH) and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) — where he assessed organizational capacity as a component of credit risk and originated a $15M+ loan and grant portfolio. The scoring logic behind each module reflects the same questions an underwriter asks before capital is invested. BoardPulse makes that analysis instant, consistent, and repeatable across an entire portfolio of organizations.

This isn't a survey or a checklist. It's a seasoned underwriter's capacity analysis, captured in an algorithm.

BoardPulse is developed by Consept, a social investment thinktank connecting capital to community capacity.

The Instrument

Four modules.
One capacity score.

MODULE 01
Governance

Board structure, oversight, and succession planning.

MODULE 02
Financial Management

Internal controls, reserves, and reporting discipline.

MODULE 03
Fund Development

Revenue diversification and pipeline health.

MODULE 04
Impact Measurement & Management

Data practice and outcomes tracking.

From Assessment to Insight

One organization, today.
Three years of capacity investment, projected.

An illustration based on an actual BoardPulse deployment — a volunteer board-led housing nonprofit — showing where the organization stands now, and what three years of capacity investment could look like.

View as:
— How your organization's capacity changes over time — What a three-year capacity investment produces

Where Capacity Lives — and Where the Budget Invests to Build It

Each row is a role or investment line. Each column is a phase. The five cells per phase show that row's load across the five capacity domains — darker means higher load. The gold Systems & Infrastructure row shows what the budget actually commits to each domain per phase. Hover any cell for detail.

How Investment Dollars Map to Capacity Domains — Phase by Phase

The heat map shows two things simultaneously: where organizational load lives (role rows, darker = higher load) and where investment dollars go (Systems & Infrastructure row, with dollar ranges per domain). This view makes it possible to see whether the investment strategy matches the capacity gaps — and whether it does so in the right sequence.

Role / Investment
NOWPRE-INVESTMENT
CAPACITY BUILDINGINVESTMENT PERIOD
GOAL STATEPOST-INVESTMENT
Bucket →
Gov
Finance
Fund Dev
Hous+Co-op
Impact
Gov
Finance
Fund Dev
Hous+Co-op
Impact
Gov
Finance
Fund Dev
Hous+Co-op
Impact
Founding PresidentBoard President
Executive DirectorNew hire — investment-funded
Programs CoordinatorPrograms, Comms & Dev
BookkeeperContract
Board of DirectorsActive core + committees
Technical PartnersContract — compliance, underwriting
Resident Co-op BoardDistinct — cooperative governance
Systems & InfrastructureAnnual budget commitment per domain
$0
minimal
$0
$0
$0
$5K–$10K
$10K–$22K
$25K–$35K
$25K–$40K
$3K–$5K
$3K–$5K
$20K–$25K
$25K–$35K
$25K–$35K
$3K–$5K
Load Level
None
Low
Medium
High
Overload
Not yet active
Hover any cell for detail
What the Founding President's row tells you
The investment signal in the Founding President's row
Pre-Investment / Now
Row is dark across all five domains — overload condition
No other row can absorb this load without the ED role
One departure ends the organization's operational capacity
Capacity Building / Post-Investment
Row narrows to Gov only — governance, not operations
ED row lights up across all five — structural transfer, not incremental addition
Organization survives leadership transition without operational collapse
What the Systems & Infrastructure row tells you
What the Systems & Infrastructure row tells funders
Pre-Investment
Fund Dev and Hous+Co-op have zero systems investment
Finance runs on informal bookkeeping — no audit path
Impact has no measurement infrastructure
Investment Period → Goal State
Budget follows the capacity report's priority order — Hous+Co-op and Fund Dev highest, Gov front-loaded, Impact modest by design
Dollar ranges show where operating support actually goes — strategy-aligned, not diffuse
Finance investment ramps mid-period when independent review is feasible — sequenced deliberately
Goal State systems sustained on replacement capital — not grant-dependent
What the Now column reveals: The Founding President's row is the only row that is dark across all five buckets. Every other row is mostly empty. That's a structural condition where most of the organization is reliant on one person.
What the Investment Period column reveals: The ED row lights up across all five domains simultaneously. The Systems & Infrastructure row shows where the operating support budget goes — concentrated in Fund Dev and Hous+Co-op, front-loaded in Gov, deliberately modest in Impact. This is a sequenced investment strategy, not scattered support.
What the Goal State column reveals: No single row dominates. Load is distributed. The Board of Directors Fund Dev cell is the darkest in that column — because board-driven fundraising is the replacement revenue engine. That's not a design accident; it's the investment thesis.
What the Goal State column reveals: The Board of Directors Fund Dev cell is the darkest cell in the entire Goal State column. That's intentional — the investment built the board's capacity to sustain the organization after the grant ends. The Systems & Infrastructure row shows that those systems are now funded on replacement capital, not on your grant.

This is what capacity change looks like when it's tracked instead of assumed.

Cost & Access

Free for the field.
Underwritten by the field's backers.

For Nonprofits
Always Free

The full diagnostic, a plain-language report, and every reassessment over time — at no cost, permanently. No trial period, no paywall on tracking your own progress. You'll also join as a founding member of the BoardPulse Data Cooperative, with a real ownership stake in what this data becomes.

For Funders, CSR Programs & Lenders
Contact for Pricing

Aggregated, de-identified portfolio data, capacity-ROI reporting, and regional or grantee roll-ups for the institutions investing in these organizations.

For Consultants & TA Providers

Use one shared instrument across every engagement instead of building a bespoke one each time. Walk into an engagement with a validated baseline, and show the funders backing your TA work a measurable before-and-after. Reach out through Talk to Us above.

The Data Cooperative

Not just free to use.
Structured so your organization owns a piece of it.

Every assessment your organization completes does more than track its own progress — it adds to a shared asset. BoardPulse is structuring itself as a Data Cooperative, so the nonprofits generating this dataset hold a real, appreciating stake in what it's worth. As the network grows, so does your organization's ownership share — allocated transparently, governed by one member, one vote, and reflected as a real asset on the org's books, not a line in a rewards program.

01
Engage

Every assessment — and every year your organization tracks its progress — builds the organization's ownership stake.

02
Allocate

A share of institutional revenue flows back to member organizations as patronage equity, published on a transparent, annual cycle.

03
Govern

Founding members help write the bylaws. One member, one vote — regardless of size or stake.

Infrastructure the sector owns together.

A cooperative-owned dataset changes the incentive on the nonprofit side of the ledger. Organizations with real equity in the outcome have reason to engage consistently and report honestly — not just satisfy a funder's requirement. That produces a longitudinal signal no purely transactional tool can match, and it keeps the sector's own capacity data a shared asset the field holds together, not one vendor's proprietary product.

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Get Started

Pick your door.

For boards & staff
Join the Nonprofit Waitlist
Funders, CDFIs, lenders & TA providers
Talk to Us