L4G & SurveyMonkey: How Listen4Good uses curiosity to solve the CX gap

Our sector is good at collecting data. How many people went through the training. How much food was distributed. Whether jobs were created.

What we’re less good at is asking the people we serve: how could we make this better for you? And how could we optimize services to increase engagement and outcomes?

Because clients aren’t paying for services, there’s no market signal pushing organizations to ask. But that doesn’t mean people don’t have answers — it just means we haven’t built the habit of asking.

That’s what our founder Valerie Threlfall brought to SurveyMonkey‘s CuriosityCon last month. She shared the story of a Listen4Good participant, a workforce program that was ready to scale but couldn’t figure out why 10-20% of participants kept dropping out. When they finally asked, the answer was simple: the stipend structure felt like uncertain income. One change, and retention rose within weeks.

You don’t know if you don’t ask. That’s the thing about feedback, the answer is often simpler than you expect. But you have to be willing to ask and humble enough to act on what you hear.

Thank you to SurveyMonkey for the platform and for a conversation we hope resonates with nonprofits and funders everywhere.