Evaluation

Exploring Clients’ Feedback Experience

September 4, 2019

In prior reports, ORS Impact, Fund for Shared Insight’s learning and evaluation partner, has analyzed the feedback initiative Listen4Good from the perspective of participating nonprofits. In this report, ORS examines what nonprofit clients, the people taking the L4G surveys, think about the experience of providing feedback and what impact it has.

To explore this, ORS conducted focus groups with 83 clients at seven L4G-participating organizations; interviewed staff from those same groups; and reviewed L4G-survey data to better understand the organizations’ feedback practices and triangulate answers with perceptions clients shared in the focus groups.

Among the findings:

Clients feel it is important to meaningfully connect with organizations, and most were happy with the opportunity to do so by providing feedback.
Most clients feel their voice matters, but some questioned whether the dynamics of a specific organizational structure, such as multiple sites managed by a central office, hampered their ability to affect change.
The majority of clients felt happy to complete the L4G survey; young clients and those who did not observe changes in response to feedback had less positive experiences completing the survey.
Organizations continue to face challenges with closing the loop, as most clients don’t know what organizations learn from surveys and don’t see the changes made in response to feedback.
L4G and its participating organizations have more work to do to better serve non-English-speaking clients in the feedback process.

Exploring Clients’ Feedback Experience by ORS Impact is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License