MacMillan Matrix
The MacMillan Matrix, built for mission-driven organisations, scores each programme on four criteria, fit with the mission, economic attractiveness, how well other organisations already cover the need, and your competitive position, then sorts it into one of ten cells that tell you whether to grow it, defend it, partner it out, or let it go.
The page is gridded into ten cells, each one carrying a verdict from grow through to divest.
Reach for this when…
- An NGO or charity is running too many programmes to fund any of them properly.
- A programme feels core to the mission but the numbers say cut it.
- You need a shared, defensible reason to stop funding something a founder loves.
How to run it
- List every programme or service the organisation runs.
- Score each programme's fit with the mission: good or poor.
- Score its economic attractiveness: how easily it draws stable funding and demand.
- Score alternative coverage: how well other organisations already meet the same need.
- Score your competitive position against whoever else provides it: strong or weak.
- Place each programme in its matrix cell and act: grow, defend, partner, or divest.
A worked example
Situation. Margarethe Voss ran Lichtblick, a homelessness NGO in Leipzig, Germany, funding six programmes on a budget that only really supported three.
Applied. Scored properly against all four MacMillan criteria, not just mission fit, the emergency shelter programme came out Grow Aggressively: good fit, strong competitive position, easily funded, and few other providers in the city. The job-training course came out Find Partner or Divest: good fit on paper, but two better-funded local charities already ran it better, leaving Lichtblick in a weak competitive position against high alternative coverage.
Result. She redirected the job-training budget into the shelter programme and quietly referred those clients to the charity already doing it well, instead of running a worse, underfunded version herself.
The catch
Most summaries flatten this to a simple two-axis chart, mission fit against alternative coverage, but the real matrix scores four criteria and sorts programmes into ten cells, not four. Drop the economic attractiveness and competitive position criteria and you lose the distinction between a programme worth growing and one worth quietly handing to a stronger competitor. The four scores are also still someone's judgement call, not hard data, so the placement is only as honest as the team doing the scoring.
A programme that's the 'soul of the agency', good fit, low attractiveness, low alternative coverage, is still worth defending; the matrix is there to stop you defending everything on that basis, not to justify cutting the one thing only you can offer.
Origin: Ian C. MacMillan