Home > Services: Customized Support

Organizational Assessment

Most leaders in the IDD field can describe their priorities clearly: person-directed services, an engaged workforce, a culture built on dignity and choice. What’s harder to know is whether those priorities are actually showing up in everyday practice—for the people you serve and for your own team.

The Organizational Priorities and Practices Inventory (OPPI) answers a question every IDD sector leader eventually asks: are we actually doing what we say matters? 

It’s a nationally validated organizational assessment that uses data from your own employees to show you how closely your priorities and your practices line up—and where to focus if they don’t.

Get Started for Your Organization

You Talk the Talk, But Do You Know If You Walk the Walk?

It can be hard to see your own organization’s practices clearly from the inside. You set direction, supervisors interpret that direction through their own teams, and frontline staff live it out in the daily reality of the work—and you don’t always have a clear view of where your staff’s perspectives align or where they don’t.

Without a structured way to compare them, gaps tend to stay invisible until they surface. It could show up as a stalled initiative, an unexpected turnover spike, a strategic plan that doesn’t quite take root, or something else that gets in the way of delivering on your mission.

That’s not a failure of leadership or anyone on your team. You don’t know what you don’t know—and it’s hard to know how to change course when you’re doing the work.

Assess What’s Actually Happening

The OPPI replaces assumptions with a clear, data-driven view. By gathering input directly from your staff at every level, it reveals where your priorities and practices align, and where they’ve diverged. You receive a structured, organization-wide picture: what’s working, where the gaps are, and where to focus first. 

The OPPI measures alignment across six critical areas for effective, human-rights driven IDD sector organizations:

Autonomy Decision Making, & Control

How does your organization give the people you support self-direction over their own lives—from daily decisions to long-term goals? Self-direction is at the center of what it means to respect someone’s rights.

Community Living, Employment, & Engagement

How do the people you support live, work, and participate in their communities because of your organization’s efforts? Do they experience true inclusion, or just proximity to it?

Stakeholder Input to Management & Governance

How does your organization bring people with IDD, their families, your staff, and other relevant stakeholders into the decisions that guide your practices—rather than informing them after? The people closest to the work should have a voice in directing it.

Staff Participation, Value, Impact, & Support

How does your organization include its staff in improving the practices and services they implement every day? Involving your workforce builds a team more capable of delivering on your mission.

Leadership Strength & Skill Development

How does your organization cultivate leadership at every level? Because investing in leaders is what turns your institutional priorities into active practice.

Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

How does your organization foster fairness, belonging, and respect for people of every background and identity? Holding space for people with intersecting identities internally will increase your capacity to fully recognize those you serve.

Get Started for Your Organization

“The OPPI [is] a treasure trove of insightful data that we’re using as a gauge of our transformation. We know of the chaos of change, and we look to the data to look beyond that chaos and give us a glimpse into where we are putting our mouths AND money to good use.” –David Ervin, Makom

Better Decisions, Stronger Organizations

While there are plenty of tools that measure agency practices, the OPPI is unique in its approach to helping your organization connect the dots between intention and action. Once completed:

Your priorities and performance strengthen one another:
Sometimes it can feel like you have to choose between operational efficiency for your organization and centering human rights for people with IDD—that focusing on individualized supports and inclusion means sacrificing a sustainable, well-functioning organization. The OPPI data tell a different story: organizations that most effectively advance the rights of people with IDD tend to be the strongest operationally. The OPPI helps you see that connection clearly in your own organization, instead of treating human rights and performance as trade-offs.

Your team’s perspectives come into focus:
Leadership, supervisors, and frontline staff often experience the same priorities in different ways, which works until it doesn’t—and then the problems are harder to course-correct. The OPPI compares responses across every level of your organization, so your decisions are grounded in the full picture instead of just the view from the top.

Your next steps become clear:
Many leaders like you are juggling more than you can tackle at once. The OPPI uses your own data to give you concrete steps toward the greatest impact, helping you:

  • Prioritize the highest-impact areas first, based on where your data show the biggest gaps and where you have capacity to make real progress toward aligning your priorities with your practices
  • Build on what’s already working, using the programs or teams already succeeding as a model for the rest of your organization
  • Align your team around the plan, using shared data instead of assumptions, so staff at every level are on the same page, working toward the same goals
Get Started for Your Organization

Frequently Asked Questions

Any organization that provides, oversees, supports, funds, or evaluates services for adults with IDD. More responses give you a clearer picture, but there is no minimum size or employee count to participate—agencies large and small use the OPPI.

We spent more than five years developing the OPPI, with input from field experts, grounded in research on organizational alignment and implementation science. It has been statistically validated for accuracy, and organizations have used it to guide strategic planning, change efforts, and quality improvement. Over 1,500 IDD sector professionals have taken the OPPI across North America.

Employees at every level and in every role—leadership, supervisors, frontline staff, and everyone else on your team. Your report compares responses across your organization, so the more people who participate, the more complete your results will be.

The process generally takes about 6–7 weeks: allowing 4–5 weeks for you and your staff to complete the survey and 2 weeks for our team to process and build your report. The survey itself takes about 12–20 minutes per person, with individual reports generated immediately.

You’ll get both individual reports and an organization-wide report comparing perspectives across roles, benchmarked against data from more than 1,500 field professionals nationwide. Beyond the data itself, our team builds an individualized portfolio with specific recommendations for your organization, including relevant resources and a findings deck. We complete the process with two meetings to walk you through everything, so you’re not left interpreting the data alone. From there, we can also provide ongoing tailored support to your organization, which can range from strategic planning to training to technical assistance. 

The cost for OPPI starts at $5,665, which includes facilitation of the assessment, analysis of the results, individual and organizational reports, and two follow up meetings with your team: 

  • The first meeting is a review of the results and a discussion of what these findings mean for your organization
  • The second meeting is a strategic planning meeting to review actionable recommendations and determine next steps to build on your organization’s strengths while addressing its challenges

“This survey broke down the elements within our organization that showed where our weaknesses and strengths were. This is valuable information to strengthen our weaknesses, one topic at a time.” – OPPI User

Ready for your organization to talk the talk and walk the walk?
Get in touch:

Ready to learn more? Get in touch: