After producing a five-month, multimedia series on the power of client and community feedback, Stanford Social Innovation Review conducted two audience surveys to understand the campaign’s influence. The results reveal that organizations increasingly plan to collect feedback and are devoting more resources to those efforts. Respondents also expressed ongoing challenges to making feedback a norm in program measurement and evaluation. This data can inform the road ahead for feedback in the social sector.

SSIR asked attendees of a webinar about building an organizational culture of curiosity what they were doing now as a result of the Power of Feedback series. Eleven percent of the 235 respondents reported they planned to or already were collecting client feedback for the first time. Sixty-seven percent said they had increased resources dedicated to collecting feedback, including investing in processes or systems to do so.

The Power of Feedback
The Power of Feedback
In this multimedia series, sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, voices from the social sector will offer tactics, tools, and advice gleaned from the grassroots to encourage nonprofits and foundations to make listening to their constituents—and acting on what they hear—a smart norm for any organization committed to improvement.

A larger survey, conducted as part of registration for the webinar, probed the state of organizations’ feedback practices. The 2,000 respondents affirmed some encouraging trends, which were consistent with results from a similar survey completed by participants in the campaign’s opening webinar last October:

  • Thirty-eight percent of respondents said they frequently gather direct client feedback. Fifteen percent went further, noting that they’ve embedded opportunities for soliciting direct feedback throughout their organizational measurement systems.
  • Forty-four percent characterized gathering client feedback as a high priority or primary source of program insight.

However, challenges to making client feedback a measurement norm remain. Last month’s survey of 2,000 echoed the following results from October:

  • Thirty-eight percent of organizations described their feedback efforts as sporadic at best.
  • Sixty percent said they don’t gather feedback more often because of limited staff time and resources.

Larry Kramer, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, says the challenges embedded in these results indicate the need for “a culture shift.”

“Gathering and using beneficiary feedback should not be exceptional,” he says. “It should not be seen as yet another task in addition to one’s ‘real’ work; rather, we should see it as an integral part of that work.”

(Photo by iStock/Travel Wild)

The goal Kramer advocates—and the aspiration gap revealed in the survey data—is indicative of a larger systemic failure within the sector. We have to ask why client feedback isn’t seen as a core element of program measurement and evaluation in the first place. The reasons for this are multifold.

First, nonprofits tend to collect and measure information through the lens of funder priorities, with reports to donors often viewed as the ultimate output. Within this paradigm, social sector measurement has in most cases prioritized data about clients rather than data from clients.

Self-reported outcomes, as well as client perceptions of what works and what doesn’t, strike some measurement experts as “unreliable” or “soft” data. Some of their critique stems from challenges in survey methodology, such as low response rates or poorly worded questions that make survey responses difficult to interpret. But race and class privilege are often also at play—leading service providers and funders to unconsciously act as if they have a better idea of what’s good for clients than the clients themselves, or worse, that client opinions can’t always be trusted.

If we’re genuinely serious about redressing systems so they better serve those we seek to help, then we need to reprioritize the information used to measure impact and inform strategies, and put clients and their communities at the center of our work. We need to make their voices equal to those with more traditional power, whether they’re researchers, funders, or field experts. We need to partner with client communities, ask them what they think of our service quality, and use their perspectives to make our work more effective.

Service providers and funders should be asking community members questions like, “What should I learn about your world to make myself a more effective ally?” It’s about getting proximate, a call to action we first heard from Equal Justice Initiative Executive Director Bryan Stevenson, which means grounding interventions and their measurement in the perspectives of those they’re designed to serve.

To get there, we need real-world examples of how being proximate has helped organizations do better. The Power of Feedback campaign has highlighted examples of the positive change that can come about when clients are at the center:

But raising awareness of the power of feedback is only step one. To achieve a sustained culture shift, we need much more activity, experimentation, and listening, at both the nonprofit and funder levels. We see three main opportunities going forward:

1. Busy nonprofits need tools and resources to help them build high-quality feedback systems easily and efficiently. As we note, historically sporadic and informal feedback collection has bred cynicism because that information hasn’t always generated full value and nonprofits consistently describe barriers to resourcing this work. With access to simple tools that nurture sustainable feedback practices, feedback begins to embed in an organization’s DNA and becomes part of the way they work. Multiple efforts are underway to develop tools and approaches for listening systematically. For example, the plan to take L4G public in 2020 includes an interactive app that will enable any nonprofit to build high-quality sustainable feedback loops. Organizations can apply to participate in beta testing.

2. We need more foundations to do the hard work of putting clients at the center by listening to and connecting with their communities. One tool or listening session here or there will never be enough. It’s about creating systematic approaches for connecting (and staying connected) throughout a strategy’s lifecycle. In his annual letter, Ford Foundation President Darren Walker issued the following challenge to his foundation peers:

“We know that the communities most proximate to the problems possess unique insight into the solutions. That is why, in everything we do, we ought to ensure that the people affected by our work are guaranteed a voice in its design and implementation … this is the philanthropy we need today.”

3. Finally, across the board, we need a significant change in mindset. Put simply, we need to embrace curiosity. As funders and service providers, we can’t allow ourselves, unconsciously or otherwise, to believe we’ve got all the answers. Instead, we need to ask questions of those directly impacted by our work— especially those with different experiences from our own—and listen. Really listen. It’s a skill, discussed in the campaign’s closing webinar, that requires practice. When done right, it will lead to better programs, more connected institutions, and more empowered clients.

As Wilbur Brown, a client of Union Capital Boston observed: “A lot of people have great intentions …but sometimes they [are] off the mark as to what are the real needs of the community.” Client feedback helps nonprofits and their funders get closer to the mark—becoming more responsive to the real needs of the people they want to help.

 

This article is part of a multimedia series that was produced for Stanford Social Innovation Review by Milway Media with the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Support SSIR’s coverage of cross-sector solutions to global challenges. 
Help us further the reach of innovative ideas. Donate today.

Read more stories by Kelley D. Gulley & Valerie Threlfall.