Funder Listening Action Menu
Listening to inform grantmaking and strategy development
When funders think about listening, they often focus on feedback from grantees about their performance and relationship. While grantee feedback is a critical practice to help funders improve, you can and should use insights gained through grantees’ listening efforts, as well as your own direct listening, to make better informed and more equitable grantmaking and strategy-setting decisions.
The Colorado Health Foundation’s annual survey of nearly 3,000 Coloradans helps shape strategy. In recent years, residents have identified the rising cost of living, the cost of housing, and homelessness as the most serious problems facing the state. In response to those results and other input from community, the foundation added a new priority area, Economic Opportunity. And it is relying on additional listening efforts, such as interviews and focus groups and its staff’s continued community engagement, to inform its work in that area.
Says Tracey Stewart, a senior program officer: The survey data, “point us in a certain direction and then we start knocking on the doors of the people we need to meet to understand, plan, and act.”
Grantmaking
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.
Grantmaking
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.
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.
Strategy development
When The James Irvine Foundation changed its focus to supporting low-income workers in California, it partnered with community organizations to hold listening sessions, reaching 400 residents (in 10 languages) across the state. The purpose of these sessions, attended by a mix of foundation board members, leaders, and staff from different departments, even IT, was to better understand individuals’ hopes, fears, challenges, and dreams. Foundation staff members described being indelibly changed by the events, saying they helped to ground Irvine’s work.
Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo undergoes a strategic refresh every five years, conducting a listening tour in order to re-examine its community goals. In one such effort, the foundation worked with community-based partners to engage community leaders, nonprofits, and residents through interviews, focus groups, and surveys. One result: instead of continuing with plans to invest in transportation and childcare, the foundation pivoted to focusing on systems change within education and workforce training programs to address the root causes of the challenges residents from low-income households said they were facing.
Before launching a new grantmaking program, the Freedom Fund collaborates with frontline organizations and local advisors on a scoping study and strategy process that includes the voices of people with lived experience. To learn about how to address the risks to young women in textile mills in India, for example, the fund supported partners’ field staff to collect 300 life stories, then brought together nearly three dozen people, half nonprofit staff and half community members, to together analyze the stories and identify themes to focus their efforts on. The findings were also used to create a film and an accompanying curriculum that the local organizations used for community-led discussions.
Grantmaking
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Pacific Northwest Initiative team used an in-depth listening tour to inform its funding strategy focused on Native American communities in Washington and Oregon. Consulting with community members, one program officer said, “I’m not Native, who am I to say, and how am I going to decide [what to invest in]?”
Real-life examples highlight practices and policies that value lived expertise, improve grantmaking, and advance equity.
About this collection
We offer a range of examples because there are no one-size-fits-all solutions; and we share them in a menu format so you can pick and choose what’s interesting or relevant to you. We don’t rank the practices or the organizations employing them or intend to signal that any featured funder has listening figured out or listens well across the board. Each example represents only a moment in time — a practice one of your peers told us (or an intermediary) about, and that we hope might inspire you to enhance your own listening work.
We encourage you to examine the menu with a willingness to turn kernels of ideas into something right for you. Remember to assess your organization’s understanding of the values, commitment level, and resources needed to implement high-quality listening and feedback practices. For more information on preparing to incorporate new practices or programs, check out our Participatory Philanthropy Toolkit’s Funder Readiness Assessment.
