What is Feedback? Why is it important?
Collecting feedback is an important way for you to gather information from your community to improve the services you offer to your beneficiaries or constituents. Closing feedback loops helps you move beyond simply collecting data in community surveys- by acting on that information, and communicating those actions back to your constituents, you can engage your community in a more impactful cycle of learning and improving your work. You’ve heard us talking about listening, acting, and learning– closing a feedback loop helps your organization do all three.
Collecting and acting on feedback from your constituents is analogous to conducting consumer satisfaction surveys in a for-profit setting. These surveys help businesses measure their performance and adjust their activities accordingly. The same principle applies to collecting feedback from the community in which you work. This type of “bottom-up” information helps you adjust your programming to ensure that you are meeting the needs of your community, and amplifying your impact as much as possible.
There are a variety of effective ways to collect and act on feedback- and, with the new GG Effectiveness Dashboard, we are giving you credit for doing it! One method of collecting feedback from your community is through the GG Storytelling Tool. This tool guides you through the collection of stories from your community about the issues that they find most pressing, and then helps you analyze that qualitative data in order to help you discover how best adjust your programming. In short, this tool helps you make sense of a large amount of qualitative information (stories) by turning it into quantitative information (like more traditional M&E approaches).
Read the full article at Global Giving.
