Proposal Selection Criteria

We are assessing proposals received in response to the request for proposals based on the criteria below.

Importantly, this grant opportunity is open to nonprofits located anywhere in the 50 United States serving domestic beneficiaries and working in any issue area, as long as the effort is customer-facing. Nonprofits need not have experience collecting feedback from the people they seek to help in order to apply, but they do need to demonstrate a commitment to collecting and using beneficiary feedback going forward.

THRESHOLD CRITERIA

• Applicants must be nominated by a current or new funder who supports their participation, and who agrees to contribute $15,000 to Fund for Shared Insight’s Listen for Good initiative in support of the grant.
• Applicants must be a U.S.-based, 501(c)(3) public charity whose work is focused domestically. Its beneficiaries for this initiative must reside in the 50 United States.
• Applicants must have a minimum annual budget of $500,000 in the current (2017) and previous (2016) fiscal years.
• Applicants must serve at least 100 beneficiaries annually and have intentions to survey a minimum of 50 respondents for each cycle of Listen for Good.
• Applicants must serve, and plan to implement feedback loops with, clients whose voices are least heard. For example, these might be families visiting food pantries, youth attending afterschool academic and enrichment programs, residents living in public housing, recent immigrants using legal-aid services, or individuals participating in job-training programs. (Please see FAQ documents for more detail on what this does — and doesn’t — mean.)

ADDITIONAL SELECTION CRITERIA AND EXPECTATIONS

• Organization demonstrates commitment to design and implementation of high-quality beneficiary feedback loops, defined as:
  – Data are collected regularly (at least 2x/year, ideally more often);
  – Response rate over the course of the year is substantial (targeting 60-80%);
  – Data are used to inform organizational practice (and ideally lead to programmatic changes); and
  – Staff close the loop with those who provided feedback (how this is done will vary by organization).
• Organization embraces use of the standardized question set and data collection via the SurveyMonkey platform; participation in technical-assistance offerings provided through L4G; contribution of anonymized data to benchmarks; and sharing data and lessons with Shared Insight and its nominating funder.
• Organization’s leadership team demonstrates commitment to engaging in the downstream activities associated with implementing high-quality feedback loops, including:
  – Using the data for ongoing improvement
  – Communicating and advocating the value of beneficiary feedback to staff and other stakeholders
  – Dealing with hard situations that could arise from receiving or responding to feedback
  – Closing the loop with beneficiaries.
• Organization has sufficient capacity to execute on the proposal and to participate in Listen for Good technical-assistance sessions (group and individual) and Shared Insight’s evaluation of the project.
• Organization can collect data in English, Spanish, Chinese (traditional characters), or Vietnamese. If organizations wish to collect data in other languages, they must manually enter data into a pre-programmed survey in one of the above four languages on SurveyMonkey.