Constituency voice

An emerging solution to the problems of assessment is: "Ask them!".

Organizations can ask the people who are intended to benefit from social change what they think about plans, performance and reports. We call this constituency voice.

How do we know if [the people] are better off, whether they gain or lose from our projects? The answer is to ask them. They are the experts on their own condition.
Prof Robert Chambers, Institute of Development Studies (IDS)

Organizations can systematically manage how much all constituents are involved in their work. For instance, organizations can systematically:

ensure that all relevant constituents are involved in planning projects and defining success,
ask for feedback from constituents on the organization's work,
report feedback and other performance measures back to constituents, as the basis for reflection, future planning and action.

All these activities aim to build better dialogue and stronger relationships with other constituents.

They also contribute across the different purposes of assessment. The process of assessment can build capacity and legitimacy. It can shift power dynamics and make organizations more accountable to primary constituents. Quantified summaries of constituents' feedback can provide credible performance data to managers and funders on the things that matter most.

We believe that this constituency voice approach offers a new and better model for planning, assessing and reporting social change.

A Related Case: Consumer Rights & Customer Feedback

In 1962, 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 on-line. A whole industry has grown up to collect and deliver consumer satisfaction data to decision-makers. 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 at our 1962 moment?

We recognise that these are complex processes and that many people have been wrestling with them for years. Keystone's work builds on years of participatory practice as well as innovations from customer feedback.

We want to be the first to say that new approaches that we advocate are not yet proved. We are keenly aware of the risks they bring of misrepresenting different peoples' views and worsening power imbalances.

Some exciting examples are emerging that suggest how the complexities can be tackled.

Keystone aims to contribute to the sector-wide project of trialling new models, in particular through our Impact Planning, Assessment and Learning (IPAL) method. Our research hypotheses set out the core beliefs we are testing. Our services set out how we are doing that with organizations. We publish tools and the results of our work in the resources section.

Try it here

Performance Surveys

Constituency voice

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