The Method

For the past 18 months, Keystone has been piloting an approach that explores how organizations can align and inform their strategies and operations with their learning from stakeholder engagement, especially beneficiaries.

In pilots in South Africa and the Philippines, organizations planned and engaged in interactions (dialogues, consultations, feedback sessions, etc.) with stakeholders in order to enhance the strategic awareness of what they do, and improve their accountability; in all cases, increased accountability led to increased performance in some area of the organization.

We have created a set of tools that enable organizations to implement a process that may be summarized in the following steps:

1. Identifying the stakeholders

The organization identifies the different actors that are involved – explicitly and implicitly – in its work. This implies identifying the key social actors that give shape to ecology around the organization, determining different ways in which to communicate with them (tone, style and content of the conversation), and designing an adequate process for learning-based engagement.

2. Interacting and learning with stakeholders

This implies findings ways to interact with stakeholders identified -- through surveys, participatory engagements, dialogues, etc -- both about the strategic insights of the organization and the joint development of indicators and metrics to measure the success of the organization’s work.  The organization’s theory of change must be validated, developed and improved through the interactions. In essence, the dialogue must lead to action: The purpose of the dialogue is the co-creation of what we do together to improve our lives. It does this in part by indicating specifically how we know success by agreeing measures.

  • Why the organization does its work? This refers to the philosophical foundation of development work in the particular context of the organization. What are the higher principles that guide the organization’s work? Development is about change, so how does the organization conceive its production of social outcomes and of learning in its particular situation?
  • What's its theory of change and it determines its success? An organization’s better grasp on its strategy to affect social change leads to an immediate improvement of the organization’s performance. Grounding an organization’s learning and accountability on an internal and external dialogue about its theory of change implies understanding the key factors (social, relational, political, and economic) that underpin its success in achieving social outcomes. What do we do and what do we measure? Programs and activities are spoken about no only in themselves, but in the way they relate to measurable social change.
3.  Changing the nature of public reports

Public reporting is a way of anchoring transparency, integrity and real accountability for an organization. It is also a means of informing society at large. While different audiences require different formats of communication, a report is a stake in the ongoing river of organizational life. It is a landmark point around which the cyclical nature of the overall process must navigate.

The core contents of a report should outline:

  • Joint learning and re-definition of strategy and theory of change.
  • Agreements about the indicators that will measure the organization’s performance, timelines and expected outcomes.
  • Impact and the activity progress; how the work of the organization affects change.
  • Stakeholder views of the progress as reported.

Published reports and reports “of record” should specifically include the views of those most affected on the organizations’ claimed results (outputs and outcomes).
 


What are the impacts of the method?

The method seeks to provoke shifts in development practice in three areas:

First, changes in the organization’s strategic awareness of how it operates within its ecosystem, learns, and contributes to the learning of others, how it may be held to account and how this shapes and refines the organization’s purpose, its strategy and its operations. We call this the “internal reflection cycle” of the method.

Second, changes in how an enhanced strategic awareness drives new sets of agreements about joint activity with stakeholders through dialogues and interactions, and how this shifts the organization’s understanding, analysis and communication of its performance as informed by a wider set of actors and relationships. We call this the “dialogues cycle” of the method.

Third, changes in what and how an organization publishes public reports and how it invites and accommodates feedback to those reports.

 


Co-creating the Keystone Method in the Field

The Keystone co-creation process is grounded in dedicated field pilots undertaken with a small number of organizations committed to bringing enhanced accountability and learning into social change work.

Field pilots are of two types. First, we are directly supporting the application of the model through field pilots in South Africa and Philippines where Keystone has had permanent staff. Second, we have entered into a limited number of strategic partnerships with organizations that are themselves directly supporting the application of the model. Keystone is providing custom reporting tools for these co-creation partners, who in turn provide them to their partners in the field. Our work with social change marketplaces falls into this category.

Through these two forms of field piloting, Keystone is also building a technical support infrastructure that will enable the model to be taken to scale.

The co-creation process in the Philippines has been led by Veronica 'Boots' Mendoza, in partnership with the Philippine Council for NGO Certification.

Our co-creation partners in this phase are: