Listen4Good: 2016 – 2017 Cross-Cohort Findings

Listen4Good 2016-2017 cross cohort findings

Listen4Good (L4G) is an initiative of Fund for Shared Insight, a funding collaborative working to improve philanthropy by promoting listening and feedback. L4G supports nonprofit partners in implementing a five-step feedback process designed to ensure high-quality feedback loops that lead to meaningful change. The process includes designing the survey; collecting, interpreting, and responding to the data; and closing the loop with clients. L4G nonprofit partners use a semi-standard survey instrument, including the Net Promoter System NPS®, as a simple, systematic way of listening to the people at the heart of their work.

Since 2016, Shared Insight has made a total of 158 L4G grants to nonprofits, nominated by 69 co-funders over three grantmaking rounds. These nonprofits have administered more than 60,000 client surveys so far through July 2018. In addition to the grants, L4G support includes a subscription to SurveyMonkey, access to a set of semi-standard survey questionsand sector-specific performance benchmarks, and technical assistance (TA) through 1:1 coaching, group learning, and a resource website.

Over the past three years, ORS Impact has served as learning and evaluation partner to Shared Insight and L4G. This report analyzes data collected from 104 out of the 112 nonprofit partners from the 2016 and 2017 cohorts, providing a high-level view of how L4G has worked across the two grantmaking periods, and identifying key lessons and implications for new L4G partners under the current program model, for planned changes to the program, and for evaluation efforts moving forward.

L4G Impact on Nonprofits

  • Organizations from both cohorts report improvements in their ability to implement feedback-related tasks, but there may be a ceiling effect to this growth.
  • Organizations with higher ability to implement feedback loops are more likely to see impact on program effectiveness.
  • L4G provides organizational insights through both new information and data to confirm prior beliefs.
  • Organizations that gain more insights are more likely to see impact on program effectiveness.
  • Organizations are translating these insights into changes to better serve clients.
  • L4G advances organizations’ equity, diversity, and inclusion work by providing clients a seat at the table at various steps in the process and allowing them to shape the services that benefit their communities.
  • L4G improves organizations’ ability to serve clients while changing organizational culture and values around listening to the people they seek to help.
  • All organizations plan to continue their feedback practice after their L4G grant.
  • L4G increases leadership and staff commitment to feedback practice.

L4G’s Support Model

  • Organizations find the L4G model effective in supporting their feedback practice.
  • The amount of TA provided has remained adequate despite changes in the model, and organizations highly value the SurveyMonkey platform.

 

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Listen4Good 201602017 Cohort Findings by ORS Impact is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

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