Question 1

Welcome to JustOrg Design (start here)

Accepted Answer

Getting Started with JustOrg Design

What is JustOrg Design?

Welcome to JustOrg Design (JOD). Your organization is using this platform so that everyone can connect their work to organizational strategy, including your organization's strategic plan or theory of change.

You'll work in spaces called Teams and Tables where your real collaborations happen. Each Team and Table has a dedicated space for planning its body of work.

During meetings, Group Leads capture decisions and commitments as they happen while participants focus on the conversation—much like a well-run Zoom meeting where someone guides the process and everyone else brings their best thinking.

Instead of just tracking tasks, JOD shows who you're collaborating with, where decisions get made, and how what you do activates your organization's strategy. This visibility transforms how teams understand their impact and stay aligned to organizational purpose.

This Help Center is designed for you to get the most out of JustOrg Design—whether you're just getting started, looking for answers to specific questions, or diving deep into how to use particular features.

Start Here Based on Your Role

Everyone

Set up your profile - Add your profile image so your teammates can recognize you
**Explore your D

Question 2

How to Write Clear Strategies and Priorities in JOD

Accepted Answer

How to Write Clear Strategies and Priorities in JOD

This article helps you write strategies and priorities that create clarity as your organization moves toward its purpose. The JOD system is designed to connect important work to strategy, enabling alignment and activation—this requires more precision than traditional strategy frameworks. When strategies have clear boundaries and priorities are specific, your teams know exactly where their work fits, reports reveal real patterns, and your organization can see what's actually activating.

|| Whether you're creating strategies from scratch or converting your existing strategic framework into JOD's format, this guide will help you build the precision that makes strategic alignment and strategy activation possible.

Before You Start

If You Already Have Strategies

Many organizations come to JOD with existing strategic plans. That's great—you've already done the hard thinking about direction and priorities. Now you're converting that work into JOD's framework, which is designed specifically to enable real-time strategy activation and learning.

What's different about JOD strategies:

They need clear boundaries so staff can confidently connect their work to the right strategy
They include implementation guidance (Distinct Approaches) that helps staff make critical choices
Priorities should be specific enough that linking work feels obvious

| This added precision isn't busy work—it's what allows JOD to show you

Question 3

How to Use The Meeting Space

Accepted Answer

How to Use the Meeting Space

|| Note for Participants: Are you wondering why your Meeting Space view looks different from your Group Leader's? See: Understanding Your Meeting Space View to learn about the differences between Participant and GL views.

Meeting Space: Your All-in-One Meeting Environment

Think of the Meeting Environment as your complete meeting workspace. Everything you need to plan, run, and follow up on a meeting lives in one place—no more juggling different documents or forgetting what was decided.

What you can do here:

Set up meeting details (when, where, who)
Create your agenda
Link document(s) referenced in your agenda
Take notes during the meeting
Record decisions and action items
Send a summary to everyone afterward

Section 1: Meeting Basics

This section contains the essential information about your meeting.

Group Information (Left Side)

You'll see quick reference information about your group:

Purpose: Why does this group exist?
What it decides, delivers, and recommends: What this group is responsible for
Key roles: Who is the Sponsor (The senior staff person accountable for stewarding the Group's success) and Convener (The person (or people) who plan the Group's work)

Setting Up Your Meeting (GL only)

Step 1: Name your meeting

Give your meeting a clear name based on what you'll be discussing. This name will show up on reports, so make it descriptive.

✅ Good: "Q1 Budget Revie

Question 4

About JustOrg Design Reports

Accepted Answer

Using Your Data to Adapt and Celebrate

JOD gives you real-time visibility into both strategy activation and group success. As your Teams and Tables work, the system captures the data that matters most.

You can see at any moment which strategies are activating, which are stalling, and how your groups are succeeding at their core work. Use these patterns to celebrate wins and make smart adjustments.

Two Views

Stewarding organizational success requires seeing where strategy activates and how groups succeed at their core work.

Strategy Reports show which Teams and Tables connect work to strategic priorities—and where activation stalls.

Group Reports show how each group succeeds at its defined purpose and scope.

Meetings, Actions, and Decisions are the currency of organizational work. They fuel both types of reporting—revealing strategy activation and group success simultaneously.

Same data, different lens: strategy alignment or group success against purpose and scope.

What Gets Captured

As groups meet and work, JOD captures five types of events:

| What's Captured | What It Reveals | | ---- | | Meeting Names | Where Groups are focusing their attention | | Actions - Planned | What Groups have planned to fulfill their group purpose and/or activate strategy | | Actions - Completed | What Groups have done to fulfill their group purpose and/or activate strategy | | Decisions - Proposals | Carefully articulated decisions waiting to be made through your Gr

Question 5

Sponsor and Convener Roles (Group Leads)

Accepted Answer

What is a Group Lead?

Making group work really work—that's what JustOrg Design is all about. Clear scopes for your Teams and Tables matter a lot, but they're only part of the story. You also need people in the right roles—roles that steward the overall success of each group.

Every Group has two essential roles: Sponsor and Convener. When you fill these roles thoughtfully with people who bring the skills and energy they require, your group work thrives. When you don't, even the best-designed Team or Table will struggle.

Jump to: Sponsor • Convener • FAQs

The senior staff person accountable for stewarding the Group's success—providing coaching and course-correction on a continuous basis.

Why This Role Matters

Think of the Sponsor as your Group's guide and advocate. They connect the day-to-day work happening in your Team or Table to the bigger conversations in leadership. They help you stay on course when things get confusing and they help to clear obstacles when you hit them.

What Sponsors Actually Do

The Sponsor meets regularly with the Conveners to:

Track how work is progressing
Help set direction when needed
Translate what's happening in executive leadership discussions
Provide coaching when the Group needs support
Course-correct before small issues become big problems

|| Important: The Sponsor role must be filled by a senior staff person who is genuinely

Question 6

Definition of Purpose, Values, Strategies, and Priorities

Accepted Answer

Definition of Purpose, Values, Strategies, and Priorities

We use four key terms that everyone on staff and board can learn to engage in strategy activation. It's critical that leadership commits to using words hyper-consistently so that everyone can learn and speak the language of strategy across your organization.

The Four Terms

PURPOSE
Our organization's core reason for being

VALUES
The beliefs that inform our analyses and guide our behavior

STRATEGIES
Your organization's big directional commitments toward advancing its purpose

PRIORITIES
What we must do this year to activate our strategies

Why Only Four Terms?

We don't believe that everyone in an organization can, will, or needs to learn more than these four terms to engage confidently in strategy activation from wherever they sit.

When we introduce too many terms that are nearly impossible to distinguish from one another, people, understandably, tune out. Confusion and even cynicism about strategy set in.

|| Key Principle: Simplicity creates engagement. Four clear, consistently-used terms allow everyone—from board members to program staff—to participate meaningfully in strategic conversations.

Cross-Walking Your Existing Strategy Language

If need be, it's very possible to cross-walk other strategy terms from your strategic plan or theory of change to the JustOrg Design system.

In fact, we believe it is necessary to do that if you want everyone on staff

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