Sharing Insights: Evaluating a Decade of Listening in the Social Sector

As Fund for Shared Insight prepared to sunset after more than a decade, ORS Impact conducted a summative evaluation of its work from 2014 to 2024, examining its contributions to nonprofit feedback practice, philanthropy, and the broader feedback field. The evaluation highlights Listen4Good as one of Shared Insight’s most significant investments, finding that its creation, incubation, and spin-off helped build nonprofit capacity to listen and respond to community voice while strengthening the infrastructure of the feedback field. Sharing_Insights_Evaluating_Fun…

The report highlights several areas of Listen4Good’s impact:

• Listen4Good helped strengthen nonprofit feedback practice at scale. The evaluation found that L4G effectively built nonprofits’ capacity to collect high-quality feedback, make changes in response to what they heard, and improve program effectiveness. Previous evaluations cited in the report found that 83% of L4G partners made changes based on client feedback and 85% said L4G had an impact on program effectiveness. Sharing_Insights_Evaluating_Fun…
• Organizations sustained and expanded their listening practices. L4G participants went on to gather feedback from additional stakeholders and use approaches beyond surveys, including focus groups, advisory groups, committees, and councils. A 2022 follow-up found that 60% maintained their feedback practices after their L4G engagement.
• Listen4Good became a leading contributor to the nonprofit feedback field. Through research, publications, conference presentations, shared definitions and standards of practice, and its resource library, L4G helped build the field’s knowledge base and provided a bridge between nonprofits and funders interested in strengthening feedback practice.
• Feedback can contribute to equity and power shifting when it is intentional. Research with organizations participating in L4G found examples where both feedback insights and the act of listening led to changes in programs, services, organizational culture, and practice. The evaluation emphasizes that shifting power requires intentional focus, effort, and design.
• The evaluation points to opportunities for impact beyond individual organizations. As L4G grew, its work began exploring how feedback could contribute to stronger local and issue-based ecosystems, including aggregating insights across organizations to inform funders and other systems-level actors.

Overall, ORS Impact identifies strengthening nonprofit practice through Listen4Good as one of the areas of particular success across Shared Insight’s decade of work.