White Paper on the 21st century potential of constituency voice

In November 2007, in the USA, Keystone, the Alliance for Children and Families (ACF) and United Neighborhood Centers of America (UNCA) started a process for exploring the possibility of implementing a comparative constituency feedback survey for children and family service organizations.

Out of this comes a white paper written by Keystone’s David Bonbright, David Campbell of Binghamton University, USA and Linda Nguyen of ACF, which wrestles with a seeming paradox. There is an enduring and widely held conviction among human services leaders that feedback from primary constituents is of great – perhaps even paramount — importance in their work. And yet in practice human service agencies do not find current formal feedback practices to be helpful.
This report shares findings from an ongoing learning and innovation project on the human services sector in the US and provides learning which supports and deepens our understanding of the challenges reflected in the multiplicity of feedback purposes. It has six principal findings:

1. Measurement is a core management function. All study respondents participate in some kind of formal measurement activity and pursue a core set of measurement activities.

2. Agency leaders believe in the transformative potential of feedback. Study participants believe in the potential of feedback to strengthen their work.

3. Feedback is underdeveloped and therefore of inconsistent value. Nearly half of the respondents find the feedback they currently get is only sometimes useful.

4. There is no consensus between providers and funders about the goals of feedback. The goals that providers seek from feedback differ from the goals they are required to address by funders.

5. Lack of capacity limits agencies’ efforts. Agency leaders have too little infrastructure to use feedback to improve their work in meaningful ways.

6. Feedback data are not reported back to constituents; feedback is not used to foster mutual accountability.
Reporting is directed at funders and not toward meaningful discussion of results with the primary constituents who provided the feedback in the first place.

And five recommendations

1. Human service organizations and funders should jointly adopt a comprehensive feedback purposes framework

2. Human service organizations should take advantage of the opportunity for leadership to improve feedback efforts

3. Feedback efforts (and measurement more generally) would be more effective and sustained if they were approached in a bottom-up fashion

4. Develop mechanisms to create genuinely comparative data to strengthen the utility of feedback for all stakeholders

5. Adopt the feedback principle of public reporting:

To read the full report click here.

For those interested in seeing the proposal for the next stage of this project please email Roger Granada.