Among the key findings

• 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.

• 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.

• More than three out of four funders overall reported making changes related to feedback.
• Returning funders, those that nominated nonprofits in more than one Listen4Good cohort, have different experiences than new funders, reporting more concrete changes in feedback practices and being more likely to say that Listen4Good contributed to changes.
• Both new and returning funders mentioned additional benefits of Listen4Good, including their organization’s increased buy-in into the power of feedback; the opportunity to participate in a new/better way of getting feedback;  increased funder knowledge and understanding regarding feedback and the capacity needed to do it well: and more activity around closing the loop with clients.
• Most funders overall reported plans to continue their feedback work internally and with their grantees. Many also reported additional feedback work outside of Listen4Good.
• Most funders overall see a relationship between feedback practice and equity, diversity, and inclusion, with the largest share of those funders pointing to a link between feedback and consciously centering clients and valuing their experiences.

Among the key findings

• Overall, we found that Online Beta organizations are progressing more slowly than prior cohorts, though COVID-19 also likely impacted feedback work.
• Online Beta organizations report significantly increased ability to conduct feedback work, which is comparable to past cohorts.
• Online Beta organizations that progress through the feedback cycle report higher organizational impact than prior cohorts and similar results in terms of learning from and responding to feedback.
• Despite these promising signs of outcomes by participating organizations, this cohort reports a significantly lower Net Promoter Score (NPS) than prior cohorts.
• This version of a more scalable model can clearly work for some organizations, even in a challenging external context. More needs to be learned about which organizations don’t progress or who is not served well by this version of L4G.

• 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.

• 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.

L4G Impact on Nonprofits

• Organizations from both cohorts report improvements in their ability to implement feedback-related tasks, but there may be a ceiling effect to this growth.
• Organizations with higher ability to implement feedback loops are more likely to see impact on program effectiveness.
• L4G provides organizational insights through both new information and data to confirm prior beliefs.
• Organizations that gain more insights are more likely to see impact on program effectiveness.
• Organizations are translating these insights into changes to better serve clients.
• L4G advances organizations’ equity, diversity, and inclusion work by providing clients a seat at the table at various steps in the process and allowing them to shape the services that benefit their communities.
• L4G improves organizations’ ability to serve clients while changing organizational culture and values around listening to the people they seek to help.
• All organizations plan to continue their feedback practice after their L4G grant.
• L4G increases leadership and staff commitment to feedback practice.

L4G’s Support Model

• Organizations find the L4G model effective in supporting their feedback practice.
• The amount of TA provided has remained adequate despite changes in the model, and organizations highly value the SurveyMonkey platform.

Listen4Good 201602017 Cohort Findings by ORS Impact is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License