What is Constituency Voice?

Keystone helps organizations develop new ways of planning, monitoring, assessing and reporting social change. Our work is organized around the central concept of constituency voice.

Social purpose organizations (SPOs) engage with various constituents, including three core groups: those who provide resources (funders), those who implement programs (implementers) and those intended to benefit from interventions - the groups, often vulnerable and marginalized, for whom social change is directed (primary constituents).

We use the term ‘primary constituents’ to denote the unique importance of the people whose lives are affected most by SPOs’ efforts. Their actions are most important for making and sustaining positive change. They are the ones whose relationships with the SPO most determine its effectiveness.

Constituency voice refers to the practice of ensuring that the views of all relevant constituents, particularly primary constituents, are seriously taken into account in the planning, monitoring, assessing, reporting and learning processes taking place within organizations. It is closely linked to the concepts of participation and empowerment. We gratefully acknowledge our debt to these ongoing bodies of work and a wide range of related research and practice.

In practical terms, we believe constituency voice can be applied in three crucial processes.

Planning

  • Hear all relevant constituents’ voices when analyzing social issues, determining strategies, and defining success.
  • A ‘theory of change’ based approach can help identify system-wide issues, and as the basis for designing specific and measurable activities.

Assessment

  • Hear all relevant constituents’ perceptions about actual performance.
  • Feedback systems can make the views of the least powerful people accessible for managers and funders.
  • If different people’s views of similar issues are quantified, they can be summarized and compared to each other, creating powerful insights across programs.

Deliberation

  • Engage all relevant constituents in dialogue and critical review of performance compared to plans.
  • l This can generate action-oriented learning, deeper analyses and lessons for improvements.

Deliberation can naturally flow into the next cycle of planning, feedback and deliberation. We sometimes call this the ‘relationship cycle’.

These processes depend on bridging the inherent power differences between different constituents. They rely on enabling conditions including:

  • Sincere commitment from senior decision-makers to listen, engage with and respond to less powerful constituents at every stage.
  • Transparency in public reporting. This means ensuring that public reporting is accessible to the least powerful constituents in ways that are easy for them to access. This includes information about strategies, resources, constraints and what constituency feedback the organization has collected and how it is using it.

Feedback can be used to measure the strength of constituency voice itself – for instance through questions like “when and how much do managers solicit your views?”. This can generate metrics of the quality of relationships between constituents. In turn, these may be predictive indicators of overall success.

Finally, we argue that constituency voice should land in public reporting. In almost all cases, individual organizations can make the greatest contribution to solving complex social questions when they publicly report their plans, their deeds, the feedback of their constituents, and their learning. This helps strengthen collaboration between social actors and accelerates society-wide learning and progress. Reporting constituency satisfaction can also generate comparable performance data between organizations.
 

The most developed application of constituency voice comes from the world of business. In 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy issued a Special Message to Congress launching the consumer rights movement. It noted that consumers “are the only important group in the economy...whose views are often not heard”.

Half a century later, detailed customer feedback data on virtually any product or service is freely available online. A whole industry has grown up to collect and deliver consumer satisfaction data, which is valued by consumer and businesses alike. Research has proved the correlation between customer satisfaction and long term growth, profitability and shareholder value.

Paraphrasing President Kennedy, we might say that primary constituents are the only important group in the social economy whose views are often not heard. Are we in social change ready to recognize their rights as the primary constituents of social change? Have we arrived at our 1962 moment?

 

  

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