Impact
How Listen4Good Has Made a Difference
We think it’s important to look at the impact we’ve had on organizations in multiple ways.
of Listen4Good organizations make or have plans to make changes in response to feedback within 1 year
of organizations continue to collect feedback one year after graduating from Listen4Good
say L4G helped a lot to elevate feedback as a source of insight alongside outcome data in their organization
Feedback Stories
Check out these stories to get a sense of what it’s like for organizations to experience Listen4Good.
Case Studies
Explore how organizations have used Listen4Good to drive meaningful change for their communities.
Evaluations
During our first five years, Listen4Good was routinely assessed by third-party evaluation firm, ORS Impact, along with a range of other research partners. Read studies from them and other research collaborators below.
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Sharing Insights: Evaluating a Decade of Listening in the Social Sector
As Fund for Shared Insight prepared to sunset after more than a decade, ORS Impact conducted a summative evaluation of its work from 2014 to 2024, examining its contributions to nonprofit feedback practice, philanthropy, and the broader feedback field. The evaluation highlights Listen4Good as one of Shared Insight’s most significant investments, finding that its creation, incubation, and spin-off helped build nonprofit capacity to listen and respond to community voice while strengthening the infrastructure of the feedback field. Sharing_Insights_Evaluating_Fun…
The report highlights several areas of Listen4Good’s impact:
- Listen4Good helped strengthen nonprofit feedback practice at scale. The evaluation found that L4G effectively built nonprofits’ capacity to collect high-quality feedback, make changes in response to what they heard, and improve program effectiveness. Previous evaluations cited in the report found that 83% of L4G partners made changes based on client feedback and 85% said L4G had an impact on program effectiveness. Sharing_Insights_Evaluating_Fun…
- Organizations sustained and expanded their listening practices. L4G participants went on to gather feedback from additional stakeholders and use approaches beyond surveys, including focus groups, advisory groups, committees, and councils. A 2022 follow-up found that 60% maintained their feedback practices after their L4G engagement.
- Listen4Good became a leading contributor to the nonprofit feedback field. Through research, publications, conference presentations, shared definitions and standards of practice, and its resource library, L4G helped build the field’s knowledge base and provided a bridge between nonprofits and funders interested in strengthening feedback practice.
- Feedback can contribute to equity and power shifting when it is intentional. Research with organizations participating in L4G found examples where both feedback insights and the act of listening led to changes in programs, services, organizational culture, and practice. The evaluation emphasizes that shifting power requires intentional focus, effort, and design.
- The evaluation points to opportunities for impact beyond individual organizations. As L4G grew, its work began exploring how feedback could contribute to stronger local and issue-based ecosystems, including aggregating insights across organizations to inform funders and other systems-level actors.
Overall, ORS Impact identifies strengthening nonprofit practice through Listen4Good as one of the areas of particular success across Shared Insight’s decade of work.
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Feedback and Equity: Connecting the Dots
ORS Impact engaged in an open-ended inquiry to clarify the conceptual connection between feedback and equity, aiming to identify examples and patterns of feedback practices to help guide nonprofits and funders in what to look for, what to focus on, and how to create practices that support equity work. ORS interviewed multiple staff members at six nonprofits that participated in Listen4Good, exploring the extent to which feedback contributes to their understanding of the inequities their clients face and how they leverage feedback and listening practices to give clients more control over resources and decisions.- Feedback is contributing to organizations’ equity work in two main ways: insights from feedback inform changes in programs and organizational policies that advance equity, and the act of listening itself is influencing organizational change.
- For clients, feedback is personal; their feedback includes perspectives, personal experiences, and feelings they choose to share to contribute to organizations’ understanding of their lived experience and barriers they face. While most feel heard and valued, there are still opportunities for improvement.
- Organizations are shifting from having power over clients to building power with clients, and feedback and listening contributed to those practices.
- Feedback and listening contributed in different ways to organizations’ equity work; it acted as a catalyst, mirror, or compass, depending on how feedback and listening were leveraged by each organization.
- Collecting client feedback doesn’t automatically make organizations more equitable; organizations must intentionally design processes and create a culture that infuses equity into the way they gather and use feedback to understand and address the inequities clients face.
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Feedback Sustainability
ORS Impact surveyed nonprofits one year after the end of their participation in Listen4Good to learn if they were still implementing high-quality feedback loops and what that work looked like after they were no longer receiving support through Listen4Good. To gauge the quality of feedback, organizations were asked to what extent they continued using practices associated with the five steps identified by Listen4Good as comprising a high-quality feedback loop: design, collection, analysis, response, reporting back to survey takers.- A majority of organizations in the 2017 and 2018 cohorts continued to collect feedback after their participation in Listen4Good ended. The COVID-19 pandemic affected feedback work in different ways, but no organization stopped collecting feedback indefinitely, signaling that feedback work is sustainable, even in challenging times.
- Almost all organizations are engaging high- and medium-quality practices in steps 2 and 3 of the feedback loop, data collection and data analysis. Responding to data and closing the loop continue to be the most difficult steps for organizations.
- There are specific practices within each step of a high-quality feedback loop that can help advance equity, diversity or inclusion (such as by uncovering disparities in services or making the survey process more inclusive). Most organizations are engaging in these practices during data collection and data analysis, but half or less are engaging in these practices in other steps of the loop.
- At least half of the organizations from both cohorts reported that feedback work after Listen4Good was primarily driven by one person tasked with collecting and analyzing data and then sharing it with other staff.
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The Listen4Good Journey So Far
This report by ORS Impact, Fund for Shared Insight’s learning and evaluation partner, looks at the impact of Listen4Good on the funders and nonprofits that participated in the feedback program in its first four years.- L4G has had strong impacts across three cohorts of nonprofits on their capacity to collect feedback, gain insights, take actions, and see organizational effects by the end of the L4G grant. For example, 81 percent of participating nonprofits made at least one change in response to feedback in programming, operations, client-staff interactions, or offering new services.
- L4G has had some impacts on co-funders, despite Shared Insight’s light touch approach to engaging with them. For example, 33 percent of interviewed co-funders reported changes to their foundation practices related to feedback from grantees or communities and mentioned that L4G contributed to that change. (Since Shared Insight began increasing its engagement activities with co-funders beginning with the 2019 cohort, ORS will assess — and include in future reports — whether these increased efforts lead to better outcomes.)
- L4G has made some contributions to meaningfully connecting nonprofits and foundations, but contributions are uneven, and there is opportunity for greater impact.
- There is some progress — and more opportunity — for using feedback to advance equity and inclusion. For example, Shared Insight might further assist more organizations in segmenting data by sub-groups to identify differences in client experience, interpreting findings and developing appropriate responses to those differences.
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Listen4Good Data Analysis
In early 2017, Shared Insight engaged Harder+Company Community Research to analyze the L4G surveys’ aggregate dataset, consisting of more than 29,000 responses; summarize the data and identify patterns and/or differences in respondent feedback; and assess the effectiveness and utility of the Net Promoter System overall and specifically in the nonprofit context.- A majority of respondents provided very positive feedback to the organizations that served them.
- Youth under age 18 and people receiving education-related services gave significantly lower ratings on survey questions than did other respondents.
- The Listen4Good survey tool is understandable to the people participating nonprofits serve.
- This analysis provides some evidence that the Net Promoter System works in the nonprofit context. It also reveals the need for further exploration.
