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Organizational Priorities and Practices Inventory

Often, organizational leaders feel they must choose between improving operational efficiency and sustainability and advancing the rights of people with disabilities through equitable, disability-led decision-making. The Organizational Priorities and Practices Inventory (OPPI) data show that the strongest organizations in our field prioritize both. 

The OPPI is a nationally validated assessment tool, designed specifically to help disability sector organizations understand how their walk matches their talk, and what to do about it. 

With insights gathered directly from employees at all levels, the OPPI gives agencies a clear, holistic understanding of their strengths, areas of need, and strategic next steps.

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The Problem: Where Do We Start?

In NLCDD’s experience, field leaders tend to bring strong human rights values, ambitious visions, and a whole lot of passion to their work. They strive to lead organizations that promote dignity and where their practices match their priorities. Leaders may have deep insight into where their agencies fall short, but they also may not (don’t know what they don’t know). 

Knowing the next best step for their organization is often the challenge. Do we start with operations or services? Do we focus on building a stronger culture or getting more input from our stakeholders?

The Solution: Follow the Data

The Organizational Priorities and Practices Inventory provides a clear, data-driven starting point that helps organizations consider how aligned their values (priorities) and behaviors (practices) really are, and dives into six key areas that make disability field organizations most effective.

Autonomy Decision Making, & Control

Importance: Critical to maximizing choice, control, and self-direction for people with disabilities

Impact: How people with disabilities make choices about their own lives, including daily decisions and long-term goals

Community Living, Employment, & Engagement

Importance: Necessary to promote true inclusion, competitive employment, and belonging

Impact: How people with disabilities live, work, and participate in their communities in meaningful ways

Stakeholder Input to Management & Governance

Importance: Essential structures that bring people with disabilities, families, and stakeholders into organizational decisions

Impact: How people with disabilities, families, and staff are involved in decisions that guide the organization

Staff Participation, Value, Impact, & Support

Importance: Needed to strengthen workforce capacity and impact through employee input, development, and wellbeing

Impact: How staff are supported, valued, and involved in improving services and organizational practices

Leadership Strength & Skill Development

Importance: Important to ensure effective, aligned, and strategic leadership and investment at every level

Impact: How leaders build skills, support learning, and guide the organization toward its mission and values

Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Importance: Vital to foster equity throughout internal and external organizational structures and work

Impact: How the organization promotes fairness, belonging, and respect for people of all backgrounds and identities

The Impact: Better Decisions, Stronger Organizations

Equity and efficiency are not competing; they are interdependent. OPPI data proves it.

The OPPI guides organizations to make the decisions that matter most, using data and evidence from employees at every level. Three major benefits

Organizations hold themselves to standards of human rights and dignity, and operational efficiency. Extensive analysis of OPPI data shows a clear pattern: organizations that effectively advance the rights of people with IDD also tend to perform more effectively, overall. It’s not a tradeoff. The OPPI helps organizations center core values in how they define and measure success, while also recognizing the structures and accountability needed for sustainability. 

Organizational decision-makers learn from the experiences and perspectives of employees across the organization. To be effective, organizational decisions need to include input from those closest to service delivery. The OPPI gathers insights from employees at every level of an organization, ensuring that decisions are informed by people who are enacting the values and vision in every agency department and role. 

Organizational leaders make evidence-based decisions about the strategies that are right for them. Navigating seemingly competing and conflicting priorities to determine the best place to start or go next is challenging. The OPPI data can guide organizations in the right direction by identifying strengths, areas of need, and alignment between what they strive for and actually do. 

While there are plenty of tools that measure agency practices, the OPPI is unique in its approach to helping organizations connect the dots between intentions (priorities) and actions (practices).

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The Tool

The OPPI was created for disability field agencies that directly provide, oversee, support, fund, evaluate, or otherwise impact services for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. 

Backed by extensive research and expert review, the tool was designed to be thorough and approachable, collecting input from employees in every role via a 12-15 minute online survey and providing individualized and group reports that compare responses across the organization and with field data from more than 1,500 field professionals.

The Follow-Up

Data is only worth collecting if you act on it. 

To maximize the time and effort your agency spends taking the OPPI, you’ll receive both comprehensive, auto-generated reports and an individualized portfolio, developed by our team of analysts and experts, that includes agency-specific recommendations, strategic resources, and a deck of findings. 

The OPPI moves beyond assessment to support implementation, translating data insights into targeted strategies that strengthen alignment, performance, and human rights-driven practice.

We can also provide follow-up support, tailored to your organization, that can include strategic planning, ongoing evaluation, training, or technical support. 

Click the button below to get started by telling us more about your organization’s goals and needs.

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Frequently Asked Questions

To date, more than 1,500 field professionals across North America have taken the OPPI.

There is no set number of employees needed to participate in the OPPI. All employees should be encouraged to take the OPPI, as more responses provide a more accurate insight into your organization’s strengths and direction. Agencies of all sizes, large and small, can benefit from the OPPI!

Employees at all levels and positions in the organization are encouraged to take the OPPI! The report that your organization receives will compare responses across organizational levels, including frontline employees, mid-level managers, directors, executives, and those who fall into the category of ‘other.’

From the first engagement to receiving your organizational report and recommendations, it usually takes about 6-7 weeks: 4 to 5 weeks for data collection and 2 weeks for processing and reporting. We will work with a point person at your organization to engage employees and collect data.

On average, the OPPI takes people 12 minutes to complete, and individual reports are autogenerated and sent right away. Organizational size, culture, and general attitudes toward surveys can affect data collection time. Once we close data collection, you’ll receive an organizational report, an individualized portfolio, and a follow-up meeting with our team of experts within 2 weeks.

The OPPI was developed to help organizations make better, evidence-based decisions using data that matters most to human-rights-driven, equitable, and sustainable IDD field organizations. At NLCDD, we recognized that achieving organizational excellence is complex and requires leaders to first consider a number of interacting factors from many perspectives and, second, take an honest look at what they say they do and what they do across the agency. 

The OPPI was in development for more than five years, incorporating input from field experts, research on best practices in and out of the disability service sector, and our experienced team; it was vital that we get this tool right. Those who have used the OPPI have found it useful to inform strategic direction, change and transformation efforts, operational and structural decisions, and quality improvement efforts. 

When we say the OPPI is a valid tool, we mean that we’ve done the extensive analysis needed to make sure that it measures what it was developed to measure. Essentially, we can say, with statistical confidence, that the tool measures what is useful to organizations dedicated to best practices in the IDD field. 

Grounded in principles of organizational alignment and implementation science, the OPPI systematically examines the relationship between stated priorities and enacted practices across key domains of performance and human rights. By generating multi-level comparative data, it enables organizations to identify patterns of alignment and misalignment, supporting more targeted, evidence-based strategic decision-making.

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