See what funders around the country are doing to listen well in order to shift and share power with the people and communities at the heart of their work.
Dozens of real-life examples highlight practices and policies that value lived expertise, improve grantmaking, and advance equity.
Get inspired by this collection of insights and ideas to spark the changes you want to see.
Introduction
Fund for Shared Insight promotes the idea that foundations and nonprofits can do more good in the world and have a greater impact when they regularly and deeply listen to the people and communities most affected by their decisions. Over time, as the listening and feedback field has grown more robust, the question we field most frequently has shifted from “Why does listening matter?” to “We recognize the importance of listening, but how do we do it well?”
We created this menu to help answer that question. It features a variety of ways funders are listening across the many dimensions of their work, and is designed to help you think broadly and systematically about how to listen, respond, and shift power to the people and communities at the heart of your work. We’ve drawn examples from a range of sources, including our own partner funders, media reports, and philanthropy-support organizations participating in our Funder Listening Community of Practice. Many are also drawn from the report “Bridging the Gap: A Review of Foundation Listening Practices” by the consulting firm Ekouté, which we highly recommend.
- Listening, like most things, can be done poorly or well. Shared Insight believes that listening well means:
Listening with a willingness to change in response to what you hear. - Listening to a broad range of voices, with specific attention to people and communities not typically consulted by philanthropy and nonprofits.
- Committing to an ongoing process, not a one-time activity, that includes closing the loop by reporting back on what you hear and how you plan to respond.
- Engaging with people and communities as partners throughout the process, from framing the initial questions to making meaning from what you hear to determining how to respond.
We understand that funders approach listening from different starting points. The frameworks outlined in the papers, Meaningfully Connecting with Communities in Advocacy and Policy Work, prepared for Shared Insight by the Aspen Institute, and Participatory Grantmaking: Has Its Time Come?, prepared for the Ford Foundation by Cynthia Gibson, may provide useful context.
As you review the examples in this menu, consider how your funding practices, operations, policies, and values either support or create barriers to listening well. And then take the learnings and inspiration offered here to make the changes you want to see.
The menu is a living document and we are always looking for new examples of funders listening well, so please contact us if you have suggestions or would like to be included.
1. Support grantees to listen well
2. Use listening and feedback to inform grantmaking
3. Use listening and feedback to inform strategy development
4. Use listening and feedback to inform measurement, learning, and evaluation
5. Use listening to learn directly from people and communities
6. Listen through participatory practices
7. Listen by changing the composition of staffs and boards
One indirect but significant way for funders to support listening is by signaling to grantees that they care about listening and providing capacity-building support for listening and feedback, either alone or in collaboration with other funders. We encourage funders to ask about organizations’ listening and feedback practices – whether in the application process, during site visits, or as part of final reporting – because it sends the message that listening to people and communities is an expectation. We also recognize the power dynamics inherent in relationships between funders and nonprofits, so we encourage you to approach organizations’ responses with understanding. Grantees may, understandably, cite capacity constraints that hinder their feedback collection or ability to make changes in response to feedback. Make sure you are asking in the spirit of partnership and with serious intentions to use what you learn to change your own practices.
On the grant application, ask grantees how they collect and use client feedback
A sample of questions:
Include questions in your site visits about how the nonprofit listens to people and communities
During a site visit to a nonprofit that had applied for a grant to pay for security upgrades at its facility, the Plough Foundation suggested the nonprofit conduct informal surveys among staff, volunteers, and clients before and after the upgrades to inform plans for changes and then gauge how they were received.
Collaborate with other funders to learn about listening and feedback
When funders think about feedback and listening, they often focus on feedback from grantees about their performance and relationship. While grantee feedback is a critical practice to help funders improve, Shared Insight believes that funders can and should use insights gained through grantees’ listening efforts, as well as their own direct listening, to make better informed and more equitable grantmaking decisions.
After one of its grantees collected feedback that included concerns about clients’ interactions with staff supervisors, REDF created a new funding opportunity for the organization to improve its staff training. Then, seeing similar issues at other youth-serving nonprofits, the funder created a new grant program to pay for different approaches to behavioral-health interventions at six nonprofits.
Based in part on learnings from its participation in Listen4Good, when it sponsored nine grantees building feedback loops with clients, The Boston Foundation itself made some changes, creating a staff position to focus on participatory grantmaking practices, including a new grant program designed to be informed by community voice
Many foundations engage in strategic planning and other processes to develop strategies and establish priorities in multi-year cycles. These moments are an important inflection point when listening can be especially critical.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation considers itself an experienced donor in the field of family planning, yet when its Gender Equity and Governance Program was refreshing its strategic plan, the foundation turned to design thinking, a way of problem solving by deciphering what people really want through watching and listening. Hewlett brokered a partnership between IDEO.org and Marie Stopes International to engage adolescent girls in Zambia in project design. The result was a new approach that better connected with teenagers around issues of reproductive health.
There are many ways of knowing, and Shared Insight believes that data gained from listening and feedback is just as valid as data from other monitoring and evaluation activities, and should be a component of how funders approach measurement, learning, and evaluation.
Omidyar Network worked with Lean Data to collect feedback — through phone interviews and online surveys — from 4,800 clients involved with 24 organizations in Omidyar’s education portfolio around the world. Among other findings, the data showed that clients of ed-tech organizations were most concerned with the depth and variety of content and the user experience, whereas clients of early-education organizations wanted wider choices in content and were most focused on the quality of the content. Omidyar shared these insights with other players in the sector and used them to advise their investees and guide their own future investments.
After participating in Listen4Good, REDF incorporated some of the Listen4Good survey questions into a multi-year study conducted by an outside research group evaluating the effectiveness of REDF’s job-preparation interventions. REDF also followed up by seeking additional feedback from employees at the social-enterprise businesses it supports.
Beyond listening specifically to support grant decisions, strategy development, or measurement, funders can embrace listening as a way of being that informs multiple aspects of their work and builds trust and a sense of partnership with communities.
Listening is a foundational component of participatory philanthropy, a term that describes a range of practices and models in which people and communities affected by an issue become part of decision-making processes. There are many resources for funders on this topic, including those from GrantCraft, the National Center for Family Philanthropy, and Shared Insight’s Participatory Philanthropy Toolkit. Here are some ways funders have put those ideas into action:
While much of this menu focuses on external practices, hiring staff and adding board members with lived experience is another way to shift power and bring new voices and perspectives into decision making. Here are some ways funders have done that:
Hire employees, interns, and consultants who have relevant lived experience
The Ford Foundation created a professional development program for graduates of the Bard Prison Initiative, a program Ford had long supported that gives incarcerated people an opportunity to earn a degree from Bard College while serving their sentences. Participants spent a paid year exploring career paths at the foundation and getting other supports, such as opportunities for networking and building technical skills.
When the Community Foundation of Greater Flint was looking for a new CEO in 2017, its retiring head knew the funder, as she told The Chronicle of Philanthropy, “needed to involve community members who before had not been involved in our grantmaking decisions.” The board selected as the new CEO Isaiah Oliver, who had joined the foundation as a vice president three years earlier and had stood out for his leadership style, which included listening, consensus-building, and connecting with the people and communities the foundation serves. Oliver was the first Flint native to hold the post, telling The Chronicle that he grew up poor not far from a church-housed community outreach center that the community foundation supports.
Bring people with relevant lived experience onto your governing board
Bring people with relevant lived experience onto your advisory boards
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