The Mid-Ohio Food Bank, which supplies hundreds of food pantries in the state, noticed that clients were rarely taking any fresh fruits and vegetables in their typical monthly haul of groceries. That had been true for years, but the organization’s officials decided it was finally time to find out why.
After one-on-one interviews with nearly 1,000 clients, the food bank discovered that because many pantries allowed only one visit a month due to high demand, clients were leery of taking produce that would go bad quickly.
Armed with that knowledge, some pantries in Mid-Ohio’s network started allowing clients to make up to four visits a month so they could get fresh produce, bread, and dairy products.
The response has been huge: At one pantry that switched its policy a year ago, clients are taking fresh items 500 times a month, compared with a half dozen times before the change.
“We realized we had been making a lot of assumptions, like that people just weren’t interested in fruits and vegetables, maybe because they didn’t know how to cook them or didn’t have the time to,” says Matt Habash, the food bank’s chief executive.
A Growing Movement
The experience has gotten Mr. Habash hooked on hearing directly from clients, and he is not alone.
A sweeping movement is under way among nonprofits to more regularly collect information and consider the perspectives of the people they serve.
New tools and services, like apps that run text-message surveys, are springing up to aid feedback efforts, and new grant money is trickling in.
What’s more, in 2016 Charity Navigator, a watchdog organization, will start to include in its ratings system an assessment of whether and how well nonprofits collect and publish feedback from the people they serve.
“Momentum is building,” says Fay Twersky, director of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Effective Philanthropy Group, noting mounting evidence, much of it still anecdotal, that listening to clients and making changes in response improves results.
“The more experiences that are shared about the benefits of feedback, the more credible it becomes,” she says. “It’s changing from what seems like just a nice thing to do into a best practice.”
Hewlett and eight other foundations are part of a new $18-million effort to promote such sharing.
Dennis Whittle, co-founder of the online fundraising platform GlobalGiving, which gives its members incentives to gather opinion data from their clients, agrees that all the talk and action focusing on getting feedback is gathering steam in an unprecedented way.
“A lot of this started to take root a decade ago,” he notes, “but two huge historic movements—around openness and transparency and around the availability of data, big and small—have come together now to create a real force behind feedback.”
Getting Involved
A recent survey by the Center for Effective Philanthropy found that most nonprofits recognize the importance of giving voice to their clients and that more and more groups report taking up the challenge.
- Habitat for Humanity International is experimenting with collecting feedback to get residents more involved in the group’s neighborhood-revitalization efforts. “We are working toward a methodology for information to flow back and forth and into the community and through our community partners to engage residents, give residents some ownership and control over their circumstances,” says Jeff Pope, a senior director at Habitat.
One idea, he says, would be to train the organization’s affiliates to run focus groups or door-to-door surveys, evaluate the findings, then share them with residents through emails or at neighborhood meetings.
- The Center for Employment Opportunities, which serves formerly incarcerated people, plans to use client-satisfaction surveys, mostly conducted through text messaging, to make sure participants get the most out of their job training.
- In Liberia, More Than Me, an education charity now working to respond to the Ebola crisis, is adopting feedback mechanisms on the fly.
The group has run town-hall meetings to hear from residents and has given out cellphones to patients, their families, and staff members working in the field to gather data and ensure close communication.
Costs a Concern
Some nonprofit officials worry about the cost of such feedback efforts. Regularly collecting and analyzing data can be expensive, they say, and finding support for such work is tough. Fewer than half of the respondents to the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s survey reported receiving money or any other kind of assistance from foundations for gathering beneficiary feedback, and when they do, it is largely because they asked for it. Only 18 percent reported that grant makers raise the issue of supporting efforts to better understand their clients’ needs and experiences.
That may be starting to change. In September, the Fund for Shared Insight, the new grant-making group co-chaired by leaders at the Ford and Hewlett foundations, pledged to spend at least $18-million over three years to support charities’ feedback collection, along with research and efforts to share what works in getting input from beneficiaries.
The group also aims to pull more grant makers and money into its fund and to encourage other grant makers to support feedback work. Last month the fund announced two new grant-making partners, the James Irvine Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund, bringing to nine the number of participating foundations so far.
Spreading Knowledge
One of the 13 organizations to get a piece of the more than $5-million the Fund for Shared Insight awarded last fall is Feedback Labs, a consortium, started in 2013, of people and organizations working to accelerate what they call “the culture of listening.”
Members of the group, which includes GlobalGiving, are developing projects meant to spread knowledge about collecting and using feedback. Among them:
n The Constituent Feedback App Store is a new, searchable catalog of free and paid tools and services intended to help nonprofits design and implement feedback systems. The site reviews, rates, and lists dozens of vendors and their products, like software to conduct online surveys.
- The Feedback Toolkit, scheduled to be unveiled this month, is an online information hub that will include case studies, how-to guides, and links to other resources. The site will feature a 15-question quiz about the feedback process that nonprofits can take and then, depending on their answers, get customized suggestions about where—on and off the site—they should look for help.
- Feedback Commons, expected to launch in the coming months, is an online data-sharing platform that will enable organizations to compare their feedback with that of similar organizations. Nonprofits will also be able to use the site to design their own client surveys based on what has worked for other groups.
Building a System
To build its feedback system, Feeding America, a national antihunger group, decided to team up with the Urban Institute, a research organization that already works with the charity to produce a demographic study every four years of people seeking food aid around the country and the agencies that respond.
Feeding America officials say that in addition to that national snapshot they get every four years, they want a deeper, more detailed, more timely way to collect information directly from clients.
“Traditionally, food banks measure success in output, how many meals served, pounds of food distributed,” says Elaine Waxman, Feeding America’s vice president for research and analysis. “We want to think in terms of impact, hear right from our clients how their lives are impacted. Was their need to make trade-offs—not buying medicine, other things, so they can buy food—reduced? Did their family get the right kind of food, the right amount, at the right time?”
Feeding America and the Urban Institute together won a three-year, $600,000 grant from the Fund for Shared Insight last fall to find the best ways for the hunger group’s 200 member food banks, which distribute food to thousands of pantries, soup kitchens, and other outlets, to regularly ask those kinds of questions. The two groups will test various collection methods—like online surveys and text-message systems—and different ways to synthesize, analyze, and share the data.
Mr. Habash, the Mid-Ohio Food Bank official on the national panel involved in the study, says he is eager for the feedback work to get started.
“We are all really good at moving food,” he says, “but if we want to move to end hunger, then the best place to start is a conversation with the people who are hungry.”
