To collect feedback from the women served by government-run maternal-health clinics in India, World Vision helped local groups organize community meetings, put up notice boards, and set out suggestion boxes.
Some of the women were so eager to provide their input, says Laura Walker McDonald, who heads Social Impact Lab, the organization that helped World Vision gather the feedback, that they appeared to be teaching themselves to write just so they could offer their opinions.
Ms. McDonald shared the story of these Indian women in a session at last week’s Feedback Summit here, the first gathering of many of the most active thinkers and doers in a growing movement to encourage nonprofits to ask their beneficiaries for suggestions on how they can do better.
The anecdote put a very human face on the message that feedback leaders are trying to promote: Charities have the responsibility to hear and learn from the people they serve.
“We are committed to making three questions front and center,” says Dennis Whittle, head of the conference’s host organization, Feedback Labs. “One: What do people want to make their lives better? Two: Are we helping them get it? And three: If not, what should we do differently.”
Many nonprofits, especially those that work overseas, already seek input from the people they serve, but interest in systematically collecting, analyzing, and responding to feedback has spread and heightened the last few years. Tools and services, such as cellphone-survey technologies, have sprung up, as have coalitions of nonprofits, consultants, and service providers aiming to spread the gospel. Resources, like online seminars and get-started tool kits are now available and so is more grant money, most notably from the year-old Fund for Shared Insight, a group of eight foundations that has pooled roughly $20-million to research and support feedback efforts.
With all that percolating, Feedback Labs invited about 70 people from around the world — charity leaders, grant makers, researchers, and business executives — to come together for two days to figure the best ways to advance the collection and analysis of feedback.
Crackling through many of the meeting’s presentations and discussions were some of the thorny issues that talk about feedback often lay bare. The relative powerlessness of the people, most often the world’s poorest, that many nonprofits serve was one of those hot topics, as were questions such as:
- Are foundations and nonprofits truly willing to give what meeting participants described as “sovereignty” to their beneficiaries?
- Is feedback just an intra-agency call-and-response activity or should giving people a voice also be designed to promote broader social change?
- What are an organization’s responsibilities if input from beneficiaries runs contrary to its mission, plans, and supposed expertise.
Even the language on feedback was up for grabs. For instance, is the word “beneficiaries” demeaning or otherwise unempowering?
Participants were asked to vote on alternatives by placing marbles in jars labeled with other words, including “citizen” and “constituent.”
When it came to creating a call for action before next year’s meeting, however, there was general agreement on a top priority: Identify, analyze, and publicize case studies that demonstrate how nonprofits have successfully used cost-effective feedback loops to measurably improve services and client outcomes.
Riffing off the meeting’s tag line — “the right, smart, feasible thing to do” — Mr. Whittle says, “Making the case that better understanding people’s needs, experiences, and perspectives is the right and smart thing to do may be the easy part. We also have to show that collecting and acting on real feedback is doable and feasible with different approaches, methods, and budgets.”
The Fund for Shared Insight is backing the exploration of one feedback approach that borrows heavily from the way business provides customer service. In December, the fund will announce the first recipients of its “Listen for Good” grants, which will go to 50 nonprofits that agree to try out a customer-loyalty measurement, called the Net Promoter System.
Developed more than a decade ago by business consultants Bain & Company, the system is designed to calculate a net-promoter score based on answers to a single question: What is the likelihood you would recommend X to a friend or colleague?
Researchers at Bain determined that the answers to this question (based on a zero-to-10 scale) strongly correlate with consumers’ future behaviors, such as the likelihood they will make additional purchases or referrals.
While the system has its detractors — critics say, for example, it is vastly oversimplified — it has been adopted in some form by many businesses around the world and has started to catch on among a growing number of nonprofits.
“We believe there are lessons to be learned from the private sector that can offer reliable metrics to nonprofits,” says Emily Meneer, a consultant at Bain. “It’s not the same as an airline figuring out who is likely to buy another ticket from them — there’s definitely more complications — but we do see some real applicability.”
Speaking on behalf of the Fund for Shared Insight at the Feedback Summit, Valerie Threlfall, a strategy consultant, says that while the net-promoter system may not be “the promised land that they claim in the for-profit sector,” the Listen for Good program is meant to draw out, test, and share ideas about the methodology.
The program, she says, has other aims, too. Working with the online survey company, SurveyMonkey, grantees will be able to share data and create benchmarks for performance. And because the grants are structured with a matching-gift component (the fund will offer $40,000 to each grantee to be matched with an additional $20,000 by a nominating foundation), Listen for Good expects to attract more grant makers to support feedback efforts.
Business’s approach to measuring customer happiness is not the only area that offers potential for nonprofits. Journalism might hold important lessons for nonprofits seeking to hear the voices of the people they serve, too.
While many organizations rely heavily on structured surveys to solicit input, the traditional tools of journalism, especially interview techniques that allow for open-ended responses, might hold the key to finding out what people really want or how they really feel.
In a session called “Feedback and the Interview: Using Journalistic Approaches to Gather Feedback,” Amy Costello, a former radio correspondent in Africa who founded Tiny Spark, an independent podcast and news program that often collaborates with The Chronicle of Philanthropy, offered some of the tools of the trade:
- Show up unannounced. Going to a charity site without any prearrangements that might change the typical routine or activities “tells you things you can never figure out from a spreadsheet,” Ms. Costello says.
- Avoid speaking only to top officials. Seek to chat with anyone you can, particularly people who appear off to the side or are not otherwise engaged in the activities.
- Find private spaces to talk candidly. Private one-on-one conversations are the best way to draw out honest responses.
- Maintain eye contact with interviewees and show empathy. Do this even if speaking through a translator.
- Allow for silences, even if it feels awkward in a conversation. Says Ms. Costello: “Undoubtedly something [interesting] will come out.”
Ms. Costello was surrounded by plenty of other experts attending the meeting who offered advice on various aspects of the field. Among their suggestions:
Don’t let time and money be barriers to collecting feedback.
Ken Berger, managing director of Algorhythm, a consulting company specializing in performance measurement, says that with so many free resources available online and low-cost vendors promoting simple tools, starting a feedback system should be relatively simple and affordable.
“There’s no excuse anymore because of what the field has already put out there in terms of shared learning, free tools, and outsourcing options,” Mr. Berger says. “Every organization can start something and then build from there as they are able.”
No feedback is too trivial.
Brad Dudding, chief operating officer at the Center for Employment Opportunities, says nonprofits should be sufficiently nimble and willing to make even small changes that are responsive to client suggestions.
His organization, which helps formerly incarcerated people get jobs, this month changed the start time of one of its training programs from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. to accommodate people who had trouble arriving in time when taking public transportation.
“It wouldn’t seem like a big deal, but it was a small and easy change that may have a big impact,” Mr. Dudding says.
Be on the lookout for innovation.
Deepthi Welaratna, founder of the consulting group Thicket Labs, says that all kinds of data collection and analysis should be on the table. “Sometimes just asking someone for information isn’t the best way to get answers,” she says. A campaign to promote good hygiene, for example, might test compliance by using sensors to monitor hand-washing stations rather than asking people how often they wash their hands.
Consider your feedback system as part of a broader strategy of openness.
Dayna Brown, director of CDA, a nonprofit consulting group focused on helping humanitarian-aid organizations, says that collecting feedback alone is not “the silver bullet” for best serving clients and other constituents. “It’s part of connecting a number of strands — open governance, transparency, accountability — that encourage us to listen to the voices of all people and enable them to play a far greater role in decisions made about improving their lives.”
This article was corrected October 21, 2105, at 5:10 p.m. to more accurately reflect Emily Meneer’s relationship to Fund for Shared Insight. She is a consultant at Bain & Company but does not work in an official capacity with the fund.
This article was corrected October 23, 2105 at 10:50 a.m. An earlier version said the maternal-health clinics were World Vision clients in Somiland and that one of the ways World Vision contacted them was by text message. The clinics were in India, were run by the government, and were not the nonprofit’s clients. World Vision did not use text messages but did help local groups organize community meetings.
