Organizations come to us for accreditation because becoming accredited benefits everyone who is engaged in or involved with their organization.
Accreditation provides a framework to manage resources, offer best practices, and strive for continuous improvement. This supports an organization’s sustainability, encourages its growth, and helps it to achieve measurable results.
More specifically, accreditation helps you to…
Deliver quality service to your clients.
- Meet best practice standards
- Deliver services with appropriately trained staff
- Ensure that services are culturally competent
- Include clients in the decision-making process
- Provide services in a safe and respectful environment
- Protect clients’ privacy
- Support positive outcomes
Support your staff.
- Protect health and safety
- Minimize risk and liability
- Define professional staff qualifications
- Provide appropriate employee protections
- Ensure a performance evaluation system is in place
- Foster service environments that are efficient, effective, and backed by a culture that embraces quality improvement
Satisfy your board.
- Put sound financial management practices in place
- Ensure practices are ethical
- Maintain a current, relevant, and monitored strategic plan
- Cultivate effective quality improvement and risk management systems
- Uphold policies and procedures addressing conflicts of interest, preferential treatment, accountability, and delegation of authority
Inspire confidence in legislators, donors, funders, and your community.
- Sustain sound financial practices
- Maintain a performance and quality improvement system
- Keep organizational operations efficient
- Demonstrate value to the community and legislators (for public agencies)
Note: Funders can use accreditation as a tool to determine grant recipients.
Demonstrate compliance with regulation, law, or judicial orders.
- Validate that you deliver high-quality services
- Prevent fraud with risk management policies and mechanisms
- Stay current with research-informed best practices
Ensure continuous quality.
- Record critical policies and procedures that facilitate the continuity of agency initiatives
- Implement a framework for continuous quality improvement
Discover what makes COA different 
Learn about COA’s accreditation process
Contact us about becoming accredited