Why Constituency Voice?

We believe that constituency voice helps social purpose organizations achieve more, collaborate better, and deliver improved services for the constituents they serve.

Enhancing Accountability

Recent debates suggest that social purpose organizations are often seen as being more accountable to their funders (‘upward accountability’) than to the people they serve (‘downward accountability’). This can lead them to impose ‘solutions’ on communities without fully and effectively allowing them to shape work as it unfolds.

Enabling constituency voice is a way of addressing this. Organizations can develop systems to engage with their primary constituents. Collecting and responding publicly to feedback can help build more accountable relationships – so that (a) primary constituents’ views are always heard about the programs implemented on their behalf, and (b) managers know what level of ‘downward accountability’ is actually achieved in practice.

Addressing the Power Imbalance

Normally, primary constituents have less power than development agencies, which in turn have less power than funders. Vulnerable groups may hold critical views about the support they receive, but may have strong incentives to tell agencies what they think they want to hear. Implementing agencies, fearing cuts in funding, may report the situation to their funders differently than it actually is.

We advocate that organizations tackle this difficult set of issues by fostering a  'constituent-focused’ organizational culture based on dialogue, power sharing, transparency and open relationships with all relevant actors. This can have the effect of empowering primary constituents and amplifying their voices, which is often seen as a developmental goal in itself.

Measuring Performance

Primary constituents are uniquely placed to assess the impact that development work is having on their lives. Their feedback can be immensely valuable in determining who has gained and who has lost from particular interventions and addressing questions such as gender-specific impacts, effects on particular social groups and issues of quality, as constituents’ perceive it.

Primary constituents’ views can be systematically sought, to check whether an organization is
achieving its aims and provide funders with insight into more of the consequences of the interventions they fund. We believe that constituent satisfaction properly measured can become a driving force for improvement.

Enhancing Outcomes

Downward accountability and constituency voice are increasingly seen as necessary for improving the quality of interventions. So we argue that, in most cases, strengthening constituency voice improves the processes that lead to outcomes. In addition, metrics that describe the quality of relationships with constituents may offer a predictive indicator of longer-term outcomes.

The data collection process itself can be an opportunity to encourage primary constituents to consider the different ways that outcomes can be sustained for the long-term benefit of their community.

By reporting those metrics back to constituents, mutual learning between organizations and their primary constituents can lead to improved approaches and a deeper understanding of the processes that drive social change. Collecting feedback from primary constituents can enhance the performance of organizations that take this feedback on board, thereby aiding them in their long-term developmental missions.

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