When we created Listen4Good as a capacity-building initiative of Fund for Shared Insight in 2016, community feedback and listening were still emerging practices in the field. This made our work a bit of an experiment. Among the foundational questions we had were:
Would organizations be willing to dedicate their own time and resources to make listening a consistent part of their work?
Could resources – such as 1:1 coaching, curated instructional content, and external benchmarks – successfully level up organizations’ community survey efforts?
Would funders be willing to support grantees to build feedback capacity and, moreover, join grantees on a listening journey?
Eight years in, as we cross the milestone of serving our 1,000th organization, I would argue the answer to these questions is a decisive yes.
Nonprofits now rarely need convincing about the importance of gathering community opinions to shape service delivery. They want to do it, and growing commitments to equity in the sector have given them new momentum and a critical reason “why.”
Conversations we have with organizations quickly jump to the “how,” as they are already bought into the need to listen, and are ready to face the challenges of gathering and responding to client feedback. Participating in Listen4Good allows them to take advantage of robust resources, tools, and coaching support to systematize their efforts, with the goal of building sustained capacity for listening and community engagement.
Positive shifts in funders’ relationships with community feedback
Among funders, the conversation about stakeholder listening has similarly shifted over the years, albeit at a slower pace. Foundations have risen to the occasion of supporting grantees’ efforts to listen – as demonstrated by the more than 140 funder partners that have engaged with Listen4Good since 2016.
In terms of their own listening efforts, foundations are more likely than before to recognize the need to gather grantee feedback to increase the impact of their work, and many are leveraging tools, such as the Grantee Perception Report by the Center for Effective Philanthropy, to do it. At the same time, a growing number of foundations express a desire to be informed by community feedback (even as we acknowledge that their definition of community can vary widely).
This points to a different landscape than existed in the feedback field circa 2008. At that time, when I launched a first feedback enterprise, YouthTruth, funders would question why anyone would bother asking end clients for input. Now, the conversation is less about “should we” and, much as with nonprofits, more about how to do it and do it right. Because funders are typically at least one step removed from the community, we at Listen4Good often field inquiries about how they can benefit from community data and best engage communities in a way that acknowledges their position, but also honors their commitments to shifting the balance of power through approaches like trust-based philanthropy.
I encourage foundations that are interested in building sustainable listening practices to learn from and, frankly, leverage the nonprofit sector’s experience. And I believe the key to doing that is funders partnering with nonprofits and together learning from the communities both ultimately seek to serve.
By forming collaborative listening efforts, foundations can benefit from nonprofits’ growing experience with listening, inherent predisposition to engage with community, and proximity to communities. How can it work? Nonprofits can take the lead in data collection and community engagement (ideally with funding support), and then share aggregate themes and insights with funders to inform their understanding of community gaps and needs.
By forming collaborative listening efforts, foundations can benefit from nonprofits’ growing experience with listening …
For their part, funders can help co-design the listening efforts, but, even more critically, their role is to respond to the data and make changes as a result of what they hear. In this way, insights that are broadly representative of community needs and perspectives can shape funders’ development of new strategies and inform the prioritization of areas for investment. With this kind of direct community input impacting decisions, we can see power redistributing from funders to nonprofits and communities.
Creating resources for shared nonprofit and funder learning is something we’re increasingly doing at Listen4Good. Through our Learning Communities, funders and the nonprofits they sponsor regularly come together in shared spaces while gathering and responding to feedback. Funders get a window into the experience of gathering feedback, as well as key takeaways from community data. With our newest offering, Community Trends Reports, we go a step further and formally synthesize community insights from across grantees in a given issue area or common portfolio into reports that are then shared with interested funders, participating nonprofits, and their partners.
This can lead to aha moments. For example, when a regional health foundation in Texas learned from its grantees’ feedback data that transportation was a consistent community-cited barrier to accessing services, it started including transportation as an eligible use of funds for its health clinic grantees.
In a scaled example of a foundation-grantee listening partnership, Listen4Good is supporting more than 45 nonprofit family resource centers across the state of Arizona to listen and learn from the families they serve. And we are taking the aggregate feedback data to produce a Community Trends Report for a statewide early childhood funder seeking to identify regional gaps in services and overarching needs among low-income families.
The power of listening in partnership
Why should we advance this type of partnered approach? Because it promotes sustainable listening at all levels. The technical challenges for funder listening are not insignificant, nor are the internal change management requirements to embed listening as a sustained commitment. Given their step-removed position, and the operational lift required to listen well, funders can very easily fall into the practice of listening as a one-off project. I fear this because I have seen it, repeatedly. A foundation can energize itself to do a broad direct listening effort, but its institutional ability to sustain the effort beyond periodic implementation is extremely limited. (These same challenges also affect nonprofits’ efforts, but that is exactly why funder support to bolster nonprofit capacity is so critical. We can systematically solve for that problem!)
I believe listening in a collaborative, systemic way in partnership with grantees must be part of the sector-wide approach to community listening. It’s not the only way, but it has to be one of the approaches pursued. Funders working in collaboration with and through grantees – while providing capacity-building support – will ensure that foundations learn regularly and consistently, resulting in more sustained listening behavior over the long term.
The work we’re doing at Listen4Good demonstrates that nonprofits are willing to dedicate themselves to feedback, and that with the right tools and resources, those efforts can be systematic and lasting. We also see a growing appetite among funders to get involved, and with that, perhaps the next evolution in listening well — the unique opportunity for funders and nonprofits to sit together on the same side of the table and learn from a common source of insight, the community.
Valerie serves as Managing Director, Listen4Good which is a leading capacity building program focused on helping organizations build client-focused feedback practices that lead to meaningful change. Listen4Good was created in 2016 by the Fund for Shared Insight. Follow her on Twitter and LinkedIn.
