From Individual Insight to Collective Impact: How Listen4Good Learning Communities Strengthen the Power of Feedback

Gathering feedback helps nonprofits better understand and respond to the people they serve. When organizations learn from feedback together, they can identify shared challenges, exchange ideas, and uncover opportunities for improvements that extend beyond any one organization.

Listen4Good’s (L4G) Learning Communities bring together a funder’s grantee partners across a shared geography or program focus to collectively move through Listen4Good’s feedback process. Through regular convenings, participants learn from peers, troubleshoot challenges, and explore how community feedback can inform both organizational improvements and collective action. Funders gain a closer look at their grantees’ experiences and a deeper understanding of the needs and perspectives of the communities they support.

How The Tepper Foundation Helped Its Grantee Partners See Shared Regional Patterns

The Tepper Foundation (TTF) was founded in 1996 to promote a future where everyone has their basic needs met and their essential rights protected. Alongside national grantmaking, TTF maintains deep roots in New Jersey, where its Food, Housing and Health portfolio supports organizations to address food and housing insecurity across the state.

Building on its long-standing support for capacity building among individual grantees, TTF saw an opportunity to help organizations gather and learn from community feedback together.

Building A Shared Approach to Gathering Feedback

In 2025, TTF sponsored a Listen4Good Learning Community of 13 grantee partners from its Food Access and Housing portfolios. Across four convenings, participants worked with Listen4Good coaches to develop shared survey questions, gather feedback from the people they serve, and contribute to a Community Trends Report.

The process gave organizations an opportunity to learn from one another before they even began collecting feedback. Participants reviewed each other’s survey questions, discussed how to make them more effective, and shared strategies for reaching their communities. These exchanges helped participants refine their individual feedback approaches while contributing to a shared effort. For example, one organization found that QR codes weren’t effective for the people it served. After discussing the challenge with peers, it shifted to staff- and volunteer-led interviews.

We’re interested in how this data could help all of our organizations, similar to the Point-in-Time Count that’s done across the housing sector.”

Diana Reyna, Bridges Outreach

Community Voice Showed Where to Focus Next

Listen4Good developed a Community Trends Report bringing together findings from across participating organizations. The report helped grantees see how their clients’ experiences aligned and where common patterns emerged.

The results affirmed several strengths. Participating organizations’ Net Promoter Scores (NPS®) exceeded Listen4Good benchmarks for similar organizations, clients reported feeling respected by staff, and more than 90% of respondents reported at least one positive outcome from engaging with services. The report also identified opportunities for improvement. For participating organizations, these findings offered information they could use to improve their programs and better communicate their impact. Hunger relief network MEND described it “a genuinely valuable experience to bring that kind of positive, narrative feedback back to its partners.”

A Systemic Barrier Opened the Door to Collective Problem-Solving

Across both portfolios, transportation was a recurring barrier to accessing services. Individual organizations had heard this from their own clients, but the combined findings showed it was a broader regional problem. Clients described inconsistent bus schedules and Medicaid transportation that required advance booking and wasn’t always reliable.

Participants shared workarounds already in use, like Trenton Area Soup Kitchen (TASK) giving clients access to Circuit, a free regional rideshare, or Lyft credits. St. Joseph Social Service Center began holding community meetings to better understand the transportation help its clients needed. L4G coaches encouraged participants to close the feedback loop by sharing what they heard and next steps, while being honest about limits.

Affirming the Value of Collective Learning: The Tepper Foundation Grantees Weigh in At the End of the Learning Community

At the conclusion of the Learning Community, participants highlighted the value of having a dedicated space to stay on track with implementation, troubleshoot challenges, strengthen their feedback skills, and learn from other organizations.

A majority also reported that the Community Trends Report provided useful data they could incorporate into reporting, fundraising, or advocacy efforts.

For TTF and its grantee partners, the Learning Community created something that individual feedback efforts alone could not: a shared view of community experiences across organizations. By bringing those insights into conversation, participants gained opportunities to learn from one another, recognize common challenges, and explore how they might respond both individually and collectively.

Convening Nonprofits From Diverse Service Areas Strengthened Peer Learning

Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust (Piper Trust) is a place-based philanthropy in Phoenix, Arizona that provides grants across six focus areas: arts and culture, children, education, healthcare and medical research, older adults, and religious organizations, along with a dedicated capacity-building grantmaking portfolio. To date, Piper Trust has sponsored more than 80 organizations to participate in L4G.

In 2024, Piper Trust sponsored a cohort of regional grantee partners spanning human services, legal aid, health, arts, and youth development to join a Learning Community and strengthen feedback practices through peer learning and collaboration.

A Shared Feedback Practice Was Sparked By Finding Common Ground Across Different Organizations

At the first convening, participants were asked to identify five things they had in common with others at their table. For organizations working in very different fields, the exercise helped establish a foundation for relationships they might not otherwise have formed.

As participants began discussing their experiences gathering feedback, they discovered that many were navigating similar challenges.

Some were rebuilding feedback systems that hadn’t worked for their communities, while others were trying to determine which questions to ask, how to reach more people, or how to make feedback collection manageable with limited staff capacity.

Although their missions and populations differed, the organizations faced many of the same questions about how to gather meaningful feedback and put it to use.

Convenings Built A Shared Language For Feedback Across Diverse Organizations

Across five convenings, Listen4Good paired peer discussions with practical activities tied to each stage of the feedback process, from survey design and community engagement to data analysis and action planning.

Participants discussed how to make survey language trauma-informed, help respondents feel comfortable sharing honest feedback, and manage large volumes of open-ended responses.

Working Through the Harder Questions Together

One organization shared its approach to protecting the privacy of paper survey responses by allowing participants to seal completed surveys in envelopes. Others offered strategies for reducing survey fatigue, assigning internal responsibility for feedback collection, and using word clouds to make qualitative data easier to analyze.

Not all challenges had straightforward solutions. Discussions also addressed how to earn community trust, navigate internal disagreements about feedback priorities, and gain leadership support for the process.

“The most valuable part for Child and Family Resources, particularly, has been learning from other organizations that are similar to ours, and kind of troubleshooting as a team with them to actually gather actionable feedback for the people that we serve.”

Tyler Glasser, Data and Impact Manager, Child and Family Resources

Extending the Investment Beyond the Learning Community

For Piper Trust, the Learning Community was part of a broader investment in strengthening the nonprofit sector’s capacity to gather and use community feedback.

Building on this work, Piper Trust co-hosted Listen4Good’s first Feedback Forward, a full-day regional gathering that brought together more than 50 Maricopa County nonprofits to explore the role of feedback in their work.

Piper Trust’s investment reflects a commitment to making community voice part of how nonprofits across the region learn, adapt, and serve their communities.

Listening Alongside Grantees Strengthens Funders’ Approach

The Tepper Foundation and Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust’s experiences demonstrate how Learning Communities can extend the value of feedback beyond individual organizations.

For TTF, a coordinated approach to gathering feedback revealed common needs and barriers across its grantee network, and created opportunities to explore shared solutions. For Piper Trust, bringing together organizations across different service areas created a space to address shared challenges and build feedback capacity across its regional nonprofit ecosystem.

“Feedback isn’t just data collection, it’s a core organizational capacity and muscle that has to be built. Listen4Good gives our grantee partners the tools to build that capacity together, and working with L4G has provided me as a funder a platform to build out the ecosystem in Maricopa County to be more centered on client voice.”

Erin Goodman, Senior Program Officer, Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust

An Opportunity for Philanthropy

Both experiences highlight an important opportunity for philanthropy. By investing in Learning Communities, funders can help organizations move beyond working through challenges independently, while gaining greater visibility into the experiences of their grantees and the communities they serve.

Interested in bringing a Learning Community to your grantee network?

Learn how Listen4Good can help your foundation support meaningful feedback practices and collective learning.