Tool 3: Learning with Constituents

As we implement our strategies, we need to constantly reflect on what impact we are having. We need ways of recognizing and documenting evidence of our success or failure. And we need to be learning how we can do things better.

Some changes we can measure quantitatively, with numbers. These can be short-term changes such as an increase in the number of young people who say they are practicing safer sex. Or they can be longer term such as a sustained decrease in the number of deaths related to HIV infection. But numbers alone seldom tell us why these changes occurred or how we may have contributed to bringing them about.

To really understand the impact that we are making, we need to be especially sensitive to qualitative feedback from our constituents. Feedback can take many forms – a word dropped in conversation, a change in levels of cooperation, a formal letter of praise or complaint, even silence can mean a lot – like if you organize an activity and no one comes.

The trick is how to gather and document meaningful feedback in ways that does impose a huge burden of staff. The IPL guide Learning from Constituents discusses different options including:

•    Change journals in which staff record the informal feedback and changes that they observe in their daily work,
•    Various structured dialogue techniques such as focus groups, world café, and others which probe deeply into what small groups of people think and feel about what the organization is achieving.
•    Large scale feedback techniques such as surveys that generate detailed feedback from large numbers of people on many specific aspects of the organization’s behaviour and performance. Survey results are an excellent way to stimulate deeper learning dialogues.

The way we communicate with and respond to our constituents and other stakeholders determines the quality of our relationships, the quality of our learning, and ultimately our effectiveness. IPL fosters the craft of dialogue among constituents – in clarifying their theory of change, in planning strategies and in learning – as a powerful way of generating confidence and trust, stimulating new and creative thinking, and promoting effective collaboration and partnerships as well as learning and improving.

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