Evaluation

The Listen4Good Journey So Far

March 15, 2020

This report by ORS Impact, Fund for Shared Insight’s learning and evaluation partner, looks at the impact of Listen4Good on the funders and nonprofits that participated in the feedback program in its first four years. It also includes some findings related to nonprofit clients to help assess the extent to which L4G may be contributing to Shared Insight’s overall vision of “foundations and nonprofits being meaningfully connected to each other and the people and communities they seek to help, and more responsive to their input and feedback.”

Similar ORS assessment reports until now have mostly focused on a single cohort of L4G participants, tied to grant cycles. This report looks across 158 nonprofits, 80 co-funders, and clients from seven organizations.

Among the key findings:

L4G has had strong impacts across three cohorts of nonprofits on their capacity to collect feedback, gain insights, take actions, and see organizational effects by the end of the L4G grant. For example, 81 percent of participating nonprofits made at least one change in response to feedback in programming, operations, client-staff interactions, or offering new services.
L4G has had some impacts on co-funders, despite Shared Insight’s light touch approach to engaging with them. For example, 33 percent of interviewed co-funders reported changes to their foundation practices related to feedback from grantees or communities and mentioned that L4G contributed to that change. (Since Shared Insight began increasing its engagement activities with co-funders beginning with the 2019 cohort, ORS will assess — and include in future reports — whether these increased efforts lead to better outcomes.)
L4G has made some contributions to meaningfully connecting nonprofits and foundations, but contributions are uneven, and there is opportunity for greater impact.
There is some progress — and more opportunity — for using feedback to advance equity and inclusion. For example, Shared Insight might further assist more organizations in segmenting data by sub-groups to identify differences in client experience, interpreting findings and developing appropriate responses to those differences.