In October and November 2016, ORS Impact interviewed representatives from the 13 organizations with ongoing feedback practice, feedback research, and openness grants from Fund for Shared Insight. As in 2015, ORS completed these interviews to capture information about grantee progress, lesson learned, and insights based on grantees’ funded work.
Key findings
- There continues to be a positive sense of momentum. Many grantees are seeing a growing interest among a broader audience and increasing sophistication in their conversations about feedback.
- Key components that contribute to building a culture of feedback are leadership support, internal capacity around implementation, and relationships with the constituents from whom grantees are collecting feedback.
- Some grantees have seen a shift in the degree to which they are making the case for feedback. Conversations are focused more on advanced aspects of “how” rather than “why”.
- Grantees providing capacity building and support around feedback see greater demand among their audiences since last year, including more donor feedback participation, more people attending feedback-related events, and greater uptake in consulting and related services.
Foundation Openness Grantees
- Grantees were all making individual progress, with some developing digestible content around the topic of openness and clearer messages for communicating about openness over time.
- While grantees are on track and not experiencing pushback in the field around the idea of openness, they saw less uptake in their work than they had hoped.
- Grantees did not experience any level of synergy with each other in the way the feedback practice grantees did, nor was there any sense of cohesiveness of views in the sector or field around openness.
Other Insights
- Sarah Stachowiak
- ORS Impact
