Community stakeholders
38
Needs attention
Welcome
Let's measure how Rivertown is governed.
Your admin invite is active. This takes about 25 minutes. You'll upload a few documents, answer questions across five governance dimensions, and we'll gather anonymous input from your board and the community you serve. Then you get three things back: an alignment score, a heat map of where to focus, and fiscal and fiduciary flags.
What you'll get
A clear, evidence-based read on your governance, comparable over time. Individual board and community answers stay anonymous. You see patterns, never names.
Step 1 · Documents
Upload what you already have.
We pull the numbers so you don't have to retype them. Skip anything you don't have; we work with what you upload.
✓Last 5 annual reportsUploaded
✓5-year budgets + revenue goalsUploaded
✓Strategic + execution plansUploaded
✓Fundraising campaign reportsUploaded
✓Programmatic + governance KPIsUploaded
+ED performance goals (5-yr history)Optional
+Board commitments + philanthropy policyOptional
We read these to extract reserves, spend ratios, budget trends, and goal history. Your files are encrypted and never shared. A stripped, de-identified copy joins the sector benchmark; nothing traces back to Rivertown.
Step 2 · Your perspective
A few questions, five dimensions.
You're answering as the executive director. Your board and community answer their own versions separately. Sample answers are pre-filled so you can move through the demo.
Power — Is the distribution of authority explicit, documented, and understood by all?
Accountability — Does the board have real mechanisms to hold itself, staff, and the org to account?
Community — Do the people you serve hold any formal say over priorities and budgets?
Answer honestly. The community answers this too, and the gap is the point.
Mission execution — Do agendas, committees, and time actually serve the mission?
Staff–board partnership — Is the relationship healthy, with manageable turnover and burnout?
Step 3 · Gathering input
Board and community, sampled fairly.
Governance for Impact draws the community sample so you can't, even accidentally, pick only friendly voices. Links are anonymous and single-use.
Board members responded7 of 9
Community members responded22 of 30 sampled
Confidence levelSufficient for a read
Why we sample, not you: the community sample is drawn by Governance for Impact from your served population, not chosen by staff. That removes the selection bias a self-picked list would carry, and it's what makes the community score credible to a funder.
Your results
Rivertown Youth Services · governance read
Based on staff, 7 board, and 22 community responses, plus five years of your financial documents. This is the first point of your continuous signal.
1 · Alignment across the three perspectives
Alignment score
Moderate. Leadership and board mostly agree. The community sees the organization very differently on two dimensions, which is where your attention pays off most.
Community connection, by group (% who say the community has real say)
Staff
74
Board
68
Community
29
The gap that matters: leadership believes the community has meaningful say. The community reports it does not. A 45-point divergence on the dimension your mission depends on. This is the single most valuable finding on the page.
2 · Dimensions of impact — where to focus
Darker gold means more attention needed. Click a cell to dig in.
Accountability
41
Needs attention
Power
61
Moderate
Mission execution
72
Healthy
Staff–board partnership
58
Moderate
3 · Fiscal efficiency and fiduciary flags
Every flag is a rule with a number behind it, so you can bring it to your board and point to the evidence.
!
Operating reserves below 3 months
Current reserves cover roughly 6 weeks of expenses. The sector guideline is 3 to 6 months.
Rule: reserves ÷ monthly operating expense < 3.0
!
No investment policy on file
No board-approved investment policy was found among your documents. This is a Duty of Care exposure.
Rule: investment_policy = not present
~
Sudden jump in ED revenue target
Next-year revenue goal is 41% above the five-year trend, with no matching change in strategy documents. Worth a board conversation about what changed.
Rule: goal > trend + 2σ, unexplained. Flag only. No inference about cause.
~
Fundraising cost ratio rising
Cost to raise a dollar climbed from $0.18 to $0.29 over three years.
Rule: fundraising_cost_ratio trend > +50%
✓
Administrative spend in range
Admin overhead at 14%, within the healthy band for your size.
Rule: admin_ratio between 0.10 and 0.25
What this is telling you
Rivertown runs its programs well, and staff and board mostly see eye to eye. The organization's real exposure is twofold. First, the people you serve experience far less influence over decisions than leadership believes they have, which is both a mission risk and, over time, a fundraising one. Second, thin reserves and a missing investment policy leave the board carrying fiduciary risk it may not have named out loud. The sharp jump in next year's revenue target sits against both of those and deserves an honest board discussion about what it assumes.
This reading is generated from the findings above. In the live product it is written by the analysis engine and reviewed before release. Sample text shown.
Coming in V2: a continuous governance signal that tracks these scores over time and alerts you to drift, instead of a once-a-year snapshot.