About NZ Navigator
NZ Navigator is a free online self-assessment tool to help identify your organisation’s strengths and weaknesses.
Once you complete an assessment, you will have immediate access to a report with charts, scores, feedback, resources and action plan guidance to assist you to further develop your organisation.
NZ Navigator is a free on-line self-assessment tool to help community organisations review aspects of their organisational infrastructure and to identify priority areas for improvement.
The process of internal reflection that is involved in data gathering and the discussion about your results will help your organisation make decisions about how best to improve its effectiveness. Your results form a baseline record which can then be repeated at any stage to monitor the results of the improvements that you put in place. Being able to monitor change over time will help to strengthen and improve the performance of your organisation.
NZ Navigator is completely voluntary - organisations self-assess their own organisational capability.
The tool is focussed on building strong and effective organisations and communities, enabling users to assess the performance of their organisations by rating all the important areas of the organisation's operation - direction, governance, leadership, people, administration, finances, communication, evaluation, and relationships.
NZ Navigator is not in any way linked to contract funding and the tool is a community development initiative that is owned and managed by the NZ Navigator Trust.
The NZ Navigator tool is designed to be used by all small-to-medium sized community organisations, of all levels of complexity.
There is no expectation that every community organisation should score at the highest level in every area - some aspects of organisational performance will be more relevant to particular organisations than others.
It is expected that the ‘viability’ level should be attainable by every community organisation, irrespective of its size or complexity.
NZ Navigator is focused on the provision of better quality of services for service users in Aotearoa New Zealand through the development of more effective and efficient organisations.
We aim to do this by supporting and encouraging:
- Better communication among staff, trustees and volunteers.
- Increased staff motivation.
- Greater credibility and legitimacy with funders.
- Promotion of creativity and organisational learning.
- Enabling new perspectives and ways of working.
- Supporting a process of continuous quality improvement.
NZ Navigator offers a plain-English and targeted review of your organisation’s capability and performance - all done by you.
We support you by providing a tool that:
- Helps you identify your organisation’s areas of strength and opportunity.
- Provides you with best practice information and appropriate resources to assist with organisational improvement.
- Generates a high-quality report for each assessment.
- Gives you with an accessible, free, self-administered way to evaluate your organisation’s performance and improvement.
We will send you a gentle reminder by email twelve months after each assessement is completed - this is a prompt to repeat the NZ Navigator assessment.
Your assessment can be undertaken in a timeframe that suits your organisation.
You can save it and return to it at any time, but each assessment must be fully completed (all of the domain questions answered) to access the assessment report.
The assessment process is most useful when your organisation is self-reflective and open about its strengths and weaknesses.
If you are doing a single assessment, it is important that you consider a wide range of perspectives during your information-gathering phase. This helps mitigate bias and creates a more balanced view of your organisation.
By involving more people in the assessment process you can also foster ownership of the results and increase the likelihood that your improvement plan will be implemented by all stakeholders.
Interested in looking at changes over time? Repeat assessments can be done at any stage, whenever it suits your organisation.
You can compare any two of your completed assessments In the View Assessments section.
For instance, you can compare your most recent assessment against the very first assessment your organisation completed.
These comparative reports provide an easy and clear way of measuring improvements over time.