Listen4Good: Our Year In Review

A Message From L4G’s Executive Director

In the midst of a challenging year for the social sector, Listen4Good (L4G) was able to achieve many exciting milestones.  

Key Highlights for 2025:

We were honored to support hundreds of organizations in 2025 and continue to be inspired by their resilience, compassion and creativity. We’re grateful for organizations’ trust and collaboration, and are indebted to the many funder sponsors who make our work with organizations possible.

Looking Ahead
As 2026 approaches, we’re committed to keeping our feedback model ‘best-in-class’, especially in light of the sector’s ongoing capacity constraints. While it may be understandable to feel that feedback is an “extra” given everything happening in the sector, meaningful feedback data helps organizations be adaptive and respond effectively to shifting external waters: 

• Feedback improves and protects programs by providing ready-to-use impact data that can be shared with funders, community members and partners. 
• Feedback also grounds organizational pivots – ensuring services stay relevant and responsive to community needs. 

The bottom line is organizations are more effective and resilient when they have strong feedback systems. 

We are grateful for your continued support. Read on to learn more about our work in 2025!  

Impact In Action

• Building a strong foundation with L4G core feedback programs

L4G organizations that participate in our core program, L4G Premium, gain relevant data—grounded in client, community or other stakeholder perspectives—to fuel critical pivots, increase engagement, and strengthen their impact. 

• Deepening and amplifying systems through L4G Advanced

Organizations that continue in L4G Advanced achieve sustained organizational change by extending their feedback systems and deepening their practices. 

2025 Outcome Highlights Across 67 Participants

Through Listen4Good Advanced, Kathy’s team at Orion shifted from a feedback process held by one person to a shared organizational practice grounded in listening. Inspired by peers in the program, Orion created a Learning & Evaluation Committee, bringing together managers, leadership, and their data team to collectively guide the work.

L4G helped the team expand surveys across all programs and built feedback directly into Orion’s Apricot360 system, making feedback a seamless part of each client’s journey. As more staff engaged, they saw a cultural shift toward being truly client-centered.

“Cynthia is our champion…but you don’t want it all sitting on one person [or] leaving a lot of other programs out. We really wanted to think about how we do that and reduce the reliance on one person. When we heard about L4G Advanced…that was one of the points of building it as a culture, versus being on one person’s plate.” 

-Kathy Powers, Orion

• Building feedback ecosystems with L4G Learning Communities 

Learning communities are offered as a supplement to our Premium experience and build organizations’ feedback expertise through peer collaboration. We create open spaces where leaders can be candid, vulnerable, and learn from each other. 

“My experience with Listen4Good has affirmed what I’ve always believed: when we truly center community voice, trust deepens, relationships grow stronger and outcomes improve.” 

-Ashley Johnson, Program Officer, The Kresge Foundation

Featured in The Kresge Foundation, Centering student voices: What we learned partnering with Listen4Good. Read the full article here.

Through Listen4Good, Mission of Mercy Arizona gathered meaningful patient feedback for the first time in nearly a decade, giving the organization new insight into how patients experience their services. 

In this video, Community Outreach Manager Shoshana shares how the combination of personalized coaching and the Learning Community experience made the process especially powerful.

• Informing systems change with L4G Community Trends Reporting

By aggregating data across organizations, Community Trends Reports (CTRs) inform systems-level change — engaging funders, intermediaries and nonprofits in developing cross-cutting solutions.  

Philanthropy has a promising opportunity to leverage shared listening solutions that spread responsibility across both foundations and grantees, take into account their respective positioning and incentives, and create actionable systems capable of generating multi-layered insights. -Valerie Threlfall 

A New Opportunity for Funder-Nonprofit Partnership: Advancing Shared Listening Efforts to Learn From Community, The Foundation Review, 2025 

Events

L4G hosted multiple trainings and events for the broader philanthropic and nonprofit sector.

Publications