POET is two concepts rolled into one: a tool, and a process. As an organisational capacity assessment tool, civil society organisations (CSO) and their partners use POET to measure and profile organisational capacities and consensus levels in seven critical areas, and assess, over time, the impact of these activities on organisational capacity (benchmarking). As an organisational development process, CSOs and their partners use POET to build capacity by bringing staff together in cross-functional, cross-hierarchical groups for open exchange; to identify divergent viewpoints to foster growth; to create consensus around future organisational capacity development activities; and, to select, implement and track organisational change and development strategies. Based on a methodology called PROSE (Participatory, Results-Oriented Self-Evaluation), POET focuses on the needs of a very specific user population, Southern CSOs and their partners.

What POET measures
POET produces two kinds of measures:

1. a capacity score, which indicates how an organisation perceives its strengths and weaknesses with respect to the capacity areas
2. a consensus score, which indicates the degree to which assessment team members agree on their assessment of organisational capacity.

These two scores reflect the key concept underlying POET: meaningful organisational development occurs at the intersection of two processes - identifying perceived organisational strengths and weaknesses and exploring differences of opinion regarding these perceptions.

Click here to download a copy of the "POET User’s Manual: Participatory Organizational Evaluation Tool" hosted on The Communication Initiative website.