Purpose Built
MASS developed the Purpose Built series to help nonprofits and funders navigate the design and development process. By aligning mission, design, and feasibility with key decisions, the series equips organizations to maximize the impact of their capital projects.
Capital projects often bring lasting benefits to nonprofit organizations and the people they serve. Each project affects an organization’s ability to achieve its mission—signaling its values, shaping interaction with constituents, influencing work processes and culture, and creating new financial realities. While many projects succeed in fulfilling this potential, others fall short. To help nonprofits and funders navigate this complexity, MASS undertook a multi-year global research study, capturing lessons from a diverse set of completed projects.
The result is the Purpose Built Series—a set of core principles and tools designed to untangle the often opaque process of capital projects. The series is grounded in the finding that the best results come when a project is built with purpose: rooted in a clear mission that informs design, and scaled to what the organization can realistically build, operate, and maintain.
Planning for Impact
A comprehensive guide for funders and nonprofits investing in or evaluating capital infrastructure, “Planning for Impact” helps balance mission, design, and feasibility across five phases: Visioning, Planning, Design, Construction, and Occupancy. Beyond design and construction, this tool provides tested methodologies to simplify the inherently complex capital project process.
Capital Project Readiness Assessment
This worksheet helps organizations assess readiness for a capital project. Aligned with the Visioning and Planning phases, it surfaces key questions: Where is the organization in the process? What critical gaps need support? What role should outside professionals play? Designed as an interactive workshop, the CPRA will foster dialogue between organizational leaders and set a course for next steps. An editable spreadsheet version is also available, including evaluation criteria for each question.
Impact-Based Design Methodology
The Impact-Based Design Methodology (IDM) helps organizations clarify and articulate a project’s mission. By engaging diverse stakeholders in a dialogue framed around mission, method, impact, and systemic change, the process fosters a shared language that can guide decision-making even as projects grow more complex.
Design Opportunities
This tool guides organizations in making design choices that advance mission. Beyond program requirements, it emphasizes defining spatial qualities—site, culture, landscape, program, massing, experience, circulation, performance, and materials—that will shape user experience. These insights feed into the Design Brief. There is also a poster-size version for a big workshop setting in digital or physical space.
Design Brief
The Design Brief consolidates goals and requirements into a roadmap for the design team. It captures needs identified through research and engagement, outlines spatial requirements and adjacencies, and includes precedents to communicate design strategies.
Implementation Plan
An Implementation Plan outlines the critical staffing, decision-making, and strategies necessary to see a capital project through. It aligns the project with long-term organizational strategy and includes a project team structure, fundraising plan, financial readiness, growth and evaluation strategies, and logistical frameworks. These elements evolve as the project develops, keeping it aligned with mission and impact. There is also a larger-sized poster template to print big or use on a digital whiteboard.
→ Read more about the development of the Purpose Built Series and access additional resources here