Comparative Constituency Feedback for Social Purpose Organizations
Keystone provides organizations with transformative data about how they are perceived by their constituents.
“Is this feedback good, bad or what?” When undertaken for a single organization, feedback from constituents is always useful, sometimes painful, but often difficult to interpret. Keystone answers this question through comparative feedback that allows organizations to contrast what their constituents say about them with comparable feedback to other ‘like’ organizations.
Comparative constituency feedback surveys use a carefully designed questionnaire to collect perceptions anonymously from organizations’ constituents on key aspects of the organizations’ performance. The questionnaire is administered simultaneously to a comparable constituency group for a cohort of similar organizations. As indicated in the figure that covers this flyer, it can be applied at different points along the development value chain, between funders and grantees, international NGOs and their field-based partners, networks and their members, and, most importantly, between organizations and their primary constituents – those who are meant to benefit from their work.
Keystone provides each participating organization with a unique and confidential constituency feedback report with absolute and comparative data. This is anything but a one-time data extraction exercise. Organizations are encouraged to reflect and act upon the data by reporting back to their constituents on the findings and to engage with them in a two-way dialogue about how to improve performance.
Keystone also produces an overview public report that draws on the results of all participating organizations in the cohort (on an anonymous basis) to identify important trends and issues across the field.
Benefits for participating organizations:
- New insight about their impact on their constituents
- The feedback reports inform the organizations’ assessments of their work and help them learn and refine their approaches and strategies
- Comparative data allow organizations to understand their relative strengths and weaknesses, and form an empirical basis for peer learning
- Opportunity for organizations to renew their relationships with constituents on the basis of new, important and independent data
- Organizations grow in legitimacy as a result of their visible efforts to be accountable to their constituents
Benefits for the field and for field builders:
- The survey empowers constituents by amplifying their voice
- Sends a powerful message to the wider society of funders, government and business about the importance of understanding how constituents are experiencing organizations in the field
- Sets an example to other organizations in the field of how to hear the voices of those affected by their work
- Data help other organizations in the field to refine their strategies
- Assists citizen sector infrastructure institutions to develop appropriate technical assistance and resources to support organizations in the field
