Evaluation

Sustainability of Feedback Practice: 2016 Listen4Good Cohort

July 30, 2019

Past evaluations of Shared Insight’s Listen4Good grantees have reported that through L4G they increased their technical ability to perform high-quality feedback loops, gained insights that informed data-driven changes to programming and internal operations, and improved both their programs’ effectiveness and their overall ability to serve clients. Evaluations have also found that L4G helped foster a culture of openness and listening in participating organizations and advanced their equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts.

Until now, however, these studies have examined L4G participants only during their grant periods. In this report, ORS Impact takes on a central learning question for the sustainability of Shared Insight’s feedback work: To what extent do grantees continue collecting high-quality perceptual feedback from clients after the L4G grant ends?

Here, ORS looks at 46 nonprofits that were the first to receive L4G grants in 2016, conducting interviews with 35 of them about a year after their grant ended.

Among the findings:

Thirty-one grantees are continuing feedback practices, which means that at least 67 percent of the entire cohort is sustaining feedback post-grant.
More than three-fourths (26) of the 31 grantees continuing to collect feedback report that they are still using all five steps in the L4G process, thus maintaining high-quality feedback loops as defined by the program.
Most grantees have made minor adjustments to their feedback practice, including changes in survey questions, data-collection systems, and uses of feedback data. Twenty-nine of 33 grantees continue using the Net Promoter System question, and 26 continue using SurveyMonkey, the platform used in L4G.
Nonprofits report that changes they made in response to L4G feedback are holding and that they continue using feedback to make adjustments. Feedback continues to contribute to some grantees’ efforts to increase equity and change power dynamics with clients. And some (14 of the 17 that participated in the longest interviews) report that their organizations’ culture continues to change in ways that support feedback.
Grantees made suggestions about ways to improve L4G, including by providing a certificate of L4G completion to signal to funders that grantees are conducting high-quality feedback loops.

Sustainability of Feedback Practices by ORS Impact is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License