Overhauling Staff Evaluation at ELAN
ELAN is a membership-based nonprofit that operates in a publicly funded environment, serving a diverse set of stakeholders including funders, its board, government partners, grassroots communities, thought leaders, and over 700 members. Like many small-to-mid-sized nonprofits, ELAN faces the structural realities common to the sector:
Limited role mobility for the team members.
Executive reporting lines to a board.
A board that functions as a sounding board rather than a growth partner, and
Staff who must juggle multiple projects against tight deadlines and finite resources.
By 2025, ELAN's leadership recognized that its existing staff evaluation process no longer served the organization. It was inconsistent across roles, disconnected from onboarding, silent on equity, and offered no structured path for mentorship, coaching, or salary progression.
The Issues
1. A one-size-fits-all evaluation in a many-sizes organization
ELAN employs staff across several employment types; full-time, part-time, contract full-time, contract part-time, coordinators, interns, and management, yet used a single evaluation form for all of them.
2. Onboarding was backloaded, not frontloaded
New staff were formally checked in on at 3, 6, and 12 months. Critical, time-sensitive issues surfaced faster than the onboarding structure could absorb them. By the time a new hire's competency and integration were formally assessed, they may have already been navigating high-stakes situations without adequate grounding.
3. No consistent checks, balances, or paths to remediation
Interviews and internal discussion repeatedly returned to three unanswered questions:
Where are the checks and balances?
Where are the supports?
Are there real opportunities to rectify a bad situation before it becomes a bigger one?
4. Equity, diversity, and inclusion were absent from the evaluation design
Performance criteria were not explicitly tied to EDI competencies, evaluation panels were not designed for diversity of input (peer, subordinate, stakeholder), and there was no mechanism to collect or analyze diversity metrics across evaluation outcomes.
5. Mentorship and growth existed informally, with no reporting structure
Salary scale conversations were tied loosely to coaching sessions and "portfolio" development, but nonprofits like ELAN inherently have a salary and role ceiling. Mentors were not required to feed structured reports (challenges, strengths) back into the system, and the executive committee's feedback loop was informal.
The Approach
ELAN scoped the overhaul as a three-part initiative:
1. Complete documentation: Rebuilding the evaluation architecture from the ground up, rather than patching the existing form.
2. Survey: Gathering input from staff and board across multiple evaluation "tracks" to identify what each stakeholder group actually needed from the process.
3. Staff workshop: A collaborative session to test the draft framework against real job descriptions.
The Framework Developed
The redesigned evaluation system organized around eight thematic tracks, each mapped to a distinct evaluation purpose:
Staff/Board Commitments: Tracks task management, follow-through, and meeting preparation
Strategy and Leadership: Assesses alignment between ELAN's strategic plan and its actual trajectory
Activities and Services (External): Reviews external perception of ELAN's programs and sustainability of support mechanisms
Team Resources and Services (Internal): Assesses whether internal team goals align with organizational priorities
Work Alignment and Resource Support: Compares actual work against written job descriptions, with staff self-reporting on gaps
Quality of Work: Evaluates self-assessed work quality and proactive problem-solving
Self-Evaluation: A 1–5 scale self-rating of role and responsibilities, paired with open-ended justification
Exit Interviews: Captures departing staff's advice for successors to smooth transitions
Outcomes and Next Steps
By the close of the initial phase, ELAN had:
A drafted, tier-differentiated evaluation instrument, piloted against a real coordinator/intern job description
A defined set of seven evaluation tracks covering commitments, strategy, external/internal perception, work alignment, quality, self-evaluation, and exit interviews
An EDI-integrated evaluation methodology, including 360-degree input and bias-conscious language
A proposed reporting structure linking mentorship to the executive committee's feedback process
Onboarding checkpoints to occur earlier and more frequently than the 3/6/12-month model
Remaining work included: extending tier-specific instruments to full-time staff and management roles, formalizing the mentor-reporting template, updating the Executive Director's job description to explicitly include HR responsibility, and defining metrics for tracking diversity outcomes across evaluation cycles over time.