Investing in Organizational Nuts and Bolts

The Nicholson Foundation worked to advance meaningful change in New Jersey’s safety net service systems. Its journey is described in Changing Systems, Changing Lives: Reflecting on 20 Years.

To execute great ideas and realize their potential, organizations need enough of the basics—staff, data analysis capability, equipment, policies and procedures, and management-information infrastructure. The Nicholson Foundation recognized that support for organizational nuts and bolts could be a critical element of its overall systems-change strategy.

Nuts-and-bolts funding is a good approach. It allows grantees to hire staff to carry out specific activities funded by the grant, such as data analyses or care coordination. It also supports essential everyday functions, such as accounting, grants management, administration, advisory board activities, strategic planning, and efforts to pursue new funding opportunities. Infrastructure support also enables organizations to make the best use of their space and resources so they can respond to emerging or urgent needs in the community.

Our experience investing in organizational nuts and bolts generated a few key takeaways that might be useful to others who are engaged in similar work:

• Help grantees build their organizational capacity. Supporting activities such as grant writing, development, and strategic planning strengthens organizations so they can continue their work after grant funding ends.
• Invest creatively. Even a small infusion of funds may provide an essential boost to an organization that already has a stable funding stream and needs just a little extra help to make a new idea blossom.
• Look for opportunities to ensure full implementation of proven models by providing sufficient and directed resources. Under-resourced initiatives may struggle to robustly implement best practices or maintain fidelity to evidence-based models. Sufficient funding can help organizations—from state Medicaid agencies to small service providers—carry out these initiatives successfully.
• Prioritize the development of information technology hardware and software and organizations’ data analytic capability. This includes the ability to collect, analyze, and use data specific to a place and a population as well as to create integrated data sets that cover multiple aspects of health, well-being, and health-related social factors. Local and integrated data have immense value for informing practice because they highlight and explain critical issues affecting communities. They also can point to the multisector efforts that are required to successfully address these issues.
• Engage many community groups and government agencies in collecting data and applying their findings. This information can be invaluable for making decisions and creating programs with durable impact.

Learn More

• Read the other blogs in this Key Takeaways series:
  — Engaging with Government for Systems Change
  — Elevating Best Practices and Building Evidence
  — Finding and Nurturing Effective Partnerships
  — Tackling Complex Problems with Multiple and Complementary Solutions
  — Developing Future Leaders
• Read “A Framework for Creating Systems Change,” a paper by Drs. William Brown and Wynn Rosser. The
  paper presents a model for systems change that adapts and expands the Foundation’s approach, making it easily accessible to a broad audience and grounding it in the growing literature in this area. [Brown W, Rosser W. A Framework for Creating Systems Change. The Foundation Review, 2023;15(4):50-6.
• Receive or download a free copy of Changing Systems, Changing Lives: Reflecting on 20 Years. This book describes the 20-year journey of The Nicholson Foundation. Chapter 5 illustrates what’s possible by investing in
  organizational nuts and bolts. It describes how the Foundation:
  — Helped community-based healthcare coalitions become engines for population-wide systems change and health improvement.over a period of years.