Social challenges are complex. We have hundreds of projects that address social issues around the world. One of our core values is to never settle, so we're trying to improve how we measure the effectiveness of your donations and how we help project leaders best meet the needs of their communities.

At GlobalGiving we've learned that one of the best ways we can contribute to social change is to develop better feedback loops. We are committed to finding better ways for stakeholder voices to be heard in the development process. With initial funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, our Storytelling Project is an experiment in collecting community feedback. We've started by recording thousands of stories told by people from areas where GlobalGiving partners work.

In 2010 and 2011, teams of over 1,000 local Kenyan and Ugandan scribes have collected 36,190 stories from over 5,000 community members by asking a simple question: "tell us about a time when a person or an organization tried to change something in your community."

These stories have covered a wide range of topics, problems, and solutions. So far, the community members have named more than 1,000 organizations related to something happening in their local communities, but we're far from done; we're getting over 1,000 new stories each month from over 50 towns and cities across Kenya and Uganda. We use Sensemaker® to turn these stories into data, and this data helps us inform and encourage organizations to provide solutions to communities' most pressing needs.