Peace and Reconciliation United States Project #56179

Empowering and centering community voice

by Feedback Labs, Inc.

Empowering and centering community voice

Project Report | Jan 31, 2025
How Feedback is Evolving to Drive Meaningful Change

By Sarah Fonticiella | Operations & Training Coordinator

Core Principles of High Quality Listening and Feedback

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of our updated Core Principles of High-Quality Listening and Feedback!Feedback Labs first released the Core Principles in 2018, along with the Irritants for Change, in order to help nonprofits and philanthropic foundations understand what high-quality listening and feedback practices look like. With so much new evidence about what high-quality listening and feedback entails emerging in the last few years, it was time to update them! Whether you’re a nonprofit or funder, these eight principles are a guide to shifting power, acting on feedback, and centering the voices of the people most affected by your work.

Feedback Coaching

The highly sought-after Feedback Coaching Calls are finally here! These one-on-one sessions with experienced Feedback Labs staff are designed to enhance your organization’s ability to listen and act on feedback effectively. These personalized coaching sessions offer tailored strategies, tools, and examples to help you act on what you hear and drive a greater, more equitable impact in your work.

Currently, we are supporting five grantee organizations from the GitLab Foundation through personalized Feedback Coaching Calls. With a growing demand for tailored guidance in feedback, we look forward to expanding these coaching opportunities to even more organizations as the year progresses.

Feedback+Bozeman Summit 2025

Feedback Summits are Feedback Labs’ flagship conferences that bring together leading thinkers, practitioners, funders, and researchers in closing feedback loops in aid, philanthropy, nonprofits, and government. Each convening ignites widespread community experimentation and collaboration among organizations that aim to improve people’s lives by collecting and responding to constituent feedback. This year’s Summit, Feedback+Bozeman will take place from June 4-6, 2025 and registration is officially open!

This year’s Summit theme “Rooted in Listening” recognizes that meaningful impact relies on high-quality, equitable, and inclusive listening with a commitment to action. It is tailored for nonprofit leaders, funders, advocates, and community stakeholders. Together, we’ll explore how listening deeply and sharing power with those closest to the issues we aim to address can transform program design, implementation, and evaluation.

We know that the feedback field is expanding and we want to give everyone the chance to join in on the action! The scholarships are intended to help cover some or all of the Summit registration costs, excluding lodging or transportation. If you are passionate about feedback and listening in your work, then this is for you! Apply for the scholarship by April 5 and join us in Bozeman!

Thank you for your continued support. We remain committed to continuing to build the feedback field and make feedback the norm in aid, philanthropy, nonprofits, and government.

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Oct 8, 2024
The Feedback Crash Course's Impact

By Sarah Fonticiella | Operations & Training Coordinator

As of 2024, Feedback Labs has been offering the Feedback Crash Course for seven years! As part of this meaningful milestone, we’ve taken a step back to assess the impact this course has had on the organizations that have participated. We examined data from post-course surveys, responses to polls taken during Crash Course Reunions, and qualitative data from interviews conducted with five Crash Course participants. We’re excited to share that not only are Crash Course participants satisfied with the course, they also leave the course feeling confident in their ability to achieve their feedback goals, and report improvements to buy-in, collection, dialogue, and course correction three months after the course.

Crash Course Survey Results

The post-course survey data was collected from Crash Courses that took place from March 2021 to March 2024. In that time, over 150 people shared feedback about the course, including responding to a Net Promoter Score question to let us know how likely they would be to recommend the course to a colleague. In response to this question, the Crash Course received a Net Promoter Score of 69, with 104 respondents out of 151 rating the course a 9 or 10, a strong indicator that they would highly recommend the course to a colleague or friend.

During the Crash Course, participants present a feedback challenge their organization is facing and come up with goals related to feedback after the course has ended. When asked to rank their confidence in their ability to achieve their feedback goals following the Crash Course, on average participants give a 4.3 out of 5.

Crash Course Reunions

In response to feedback from Crash Course participants, we began offering Crash Course Reunions in 2022 as an opportunity for participants to reconnect with their peers, share updates on their feedback loops, and ask lingering questions about their feedback work. As part of the Reunion, we ask participants what progress they have made on their feedback goals since the Crash Course took place. Analysis of the polls responses tells us that three months of the Crash Course, organizations are making progress on internal buy-in for feedback efforts, educating their teams about high-quality feedback practices, making improvements to feedback collection methods, carrying out feedback dialogues, working to course correct in response to feedback, and reporting back to constituents on new and existing feedback loops.

Case Study Interviews

We conducted interviews with five Crash Course participants that participated in the course between 2022 and 2023 to learn about feedback loops at their organizations and write case study blog posts. Here are a few examples of how feedback has changed at participant organizations:

Development in Gardening (DIG) used the Crash Course and Introduction to Feedback Mini Course to establish a shared vocabulary and feedback methodology for their teams in Kenya, Uganda, and Senegal to begin to incorporate constituents’ perspectives on defining program success and strengthening program implementation to complement existing monitoring and evaluation processes.
First Workings reoriented its organizational decision making to prioritize feedback, strengthened existing feedback loops, and made substantial programmatic changes in response to student feedback.
Minority Veterans of America is building a culture of feedback across the whole organization so that every program is informed by feedback. The organization has also used its improved understanding of high-quality feedback to advocate for changes in the Department of Veterans Affairs feedback processes.
Participating in the Crash Course reinforced Young Farmers of America’s commitment to prioritizing the perspectives of BIPOC farmers and informed feedback loops for the second iteration of the organization’s racial equity Accountability Report.
REDF is using the Crash Course to inform a standardized approach to feedback collection and course correction across the organization.

The interviews highlighted some key themes about the impact of the Crash Course:

While many organizations are already practicing listening, the feedback loop adds valuable structure that’s made it possible to make changes within their programming or organizational strategy.
Organizations are not only carrying out high-quality feedback loops, but they are also seeing a shift to an organizational culture that prioritizes feedback.
Organizations that conduct both direct service and advocacy work have been able to apply their feedback work to strengthen their advocacy and influence other stakeholders, such as federal agencies.
Organizations are not only making incremental changes to their programs (what farm tools to offer, how to structure an application process, whether to offer remote or in-person services), but are using feedback to rethink what impact means to their constituents.

Opportunities for Improvement & What’s Next?

While our analysis of the impact of the Feedback Crash Course has produced some promising results, feedback data also told us that, as always, there is more we can do to improve the Crash Course experience for participants. In response to feedback, we have continued to course correct by iterating on the course design, including sending out color and high contrast slides in advance, inviting guest speakers with diverse identities representing different sectors to share their feedback experiences, and lengthening breakout room discussions. We have also heard that participating organizations continue to encounter some challenges carrying out feedback, most notably staff time and funding.

We are thrilled that evidence tells us that the Crash Course has strengthened feedback loops for many participating organizations, helped organizations foster a culture of feedback, and enabled some to use feedback to influence other stakeholders. Feedback Labs looks forward to continuing to offer the Crash Course as a tool to achieve its mission, to support philanthropy, nonprofits, and other social sector organizations to regularly listen and act on feedback in high-quality, equitable, and inclusive ways!

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Jun 7, 2024
Recent Updates on Feedback Labs Programs

By Sarah Fonticiella | Operations & Training Coordinator

Feedback+Denver Summit

At Feedback Labs, we believe that people are the best experts in their own lives and should drive the policies and programs that affect them. Our mission and programs are designed to create incentives for good feedback practices, offer tools and training, and foster a community of leaders and organizations committed to listening. By amplifying and uplifting the voices of those often excluded from the conversation, we aim to leverage our position in the feedback field to ensure that listening and responding to feedback becomes a powerful force for increased equity and better outcomes.

In April, the 2024 Feedback Champions completed their four-week long Crash Course. The Crash Course sets the foundation of feedback knowledge and consists of interactive exercises, personal reflection, and group work designed to help develop a feedback action plan that is ready for implementation and learn about the core elements of a high-quality feedback loop.

Last month, over 170 attendees gathered in Denver, CO, for Feedback+Denver, the annual Summit hosted by Feedback Labs. At Feedback+Denver, Feedback Labs celebrated ten years with the theme “Feedback in Community” and explored what it means to listen and act on feedback in community, with tracks focused on Learning in Community, Geography in Community, and Giving in Community.

During the Summit, Feedback Labs facilitated a one-day Crash Course, speakers presented engaging plenaries and breakout sessions on various topics, which emphasized the importance of community perspectives, the power of collective action, and cross-sector collaboration, and five organizations hosted in-person LabStorms to address their feedback challenges. You can catch up on all the action by reading our daily recaps for Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3.

Thanks to your support, Feedback Labs was able to power our programs and continue to collectively center community voices in the feedback field. We look forward to continuing to build the feedback field and make feedback the norm in aid, philanthropy, nonprofits, and government.

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