This is a guest post by David Bonbright, co-founder and chief executive of Keystone Accountability.
By David Bonbright
When we study the existing approaches and tools used to understand the results of organizations that seek to create social value, we can see that something new and exciting is slowly being born.
For the first time, a performance measurement approach is gaining traction that takes seriously those who are meant to benefit from their work. This approach, known as constituency voice or beneficiary feedback, uses techniques familiar to us from customer satisfaction surveys, combining them with lesser known, but tremendously important social accountability methods such as community scorecards and deliberative democracy.
But even as constituency voice methodology proves its value, it has to break through the cost barrier. By definition, the people who tend be the least heard are those who lack access to technology, and even literacy, and therefore won’t be easy to reach through the Internet. To engage them one needs to conduct survey interviews, either face-to-face or by telephone. To give respondents the confidence that their feedback will not be used against them, it needs to be collected by people who are trusted to be independent. In the commercial world, this means independent professionals of the type that the customer satisfaction firms employ. And this requires the most coveted type of funding for grant-funded organizations – unrestricted income. Few nonprofits have enough of this kind of money.
For the past two years Keystone Accountability has been developing and testing a very low cost model that utilizes volunteers to collect constituency feedback from those who are meant to benefit from social programs. The work so far has utilized undergraduates engaged in service learning programs. There are three major benefits to university service learning for feedback collection. First, universities can hold and sustain arm’s length, high trust, ongoing relationships with civil society organizations. Second, they have the capability in their faculties to provide statistical and survey expertise to support the volunteers. Third, they have a self-renewing supply of volunteers.
It is clear from Keystone’s pilot work with undergraduates from two American universities – St. John’s University and Georgetown – that undergraduate volunteers can undertake meaningful feedback data gathering.
In Keystone’s pilots, the student volunteers worked with the charities and their constituents to develop short questionnaires. They then conducted interviews with random samples of the charities’ constituents. Finally, with the help of their professors, they analyzed the data and presented it to their “clients”.
The students rated the experience of feedback data gathering higher than the usual volunteering activities as they enjoyed the constituent interviews and could see that they were making a real contribution to the organizations. In one case, a charity discovered that it needed to change one of its basic services – and it subsequently did so. Another discovered a demand for a new service that it also later met through a new program. In all cases, the feedback generated new insights and opportunities for the charities to improve.
There is much to learn as we take these fledgling efforts forward, but this just might be the beginning of a repurposing of volunteering to contribute to one of the most difficult problems in philanthropy and social investing – enabling everyone in the ecosystem to have in real-time empirically rigorous data on constituent satisfaction.
