Giving citizens a say in development

Over the year we have continued to pioneer ways in which citizens can have a say in their own developent.

We have worked with large multi-national NGOs, small domestic NGOs, social enterprises and voluntary organisations across the globe to test, pilot, and adapt ways to ensure that those most affected by development initiatives have a voice in the delivery and performance management of those initiatives.

We have continued to work with long-standing partners such as LIFT and the Centre for Employment Opportunities in the United States, CARE International and the Charities Aid Foundation in the UK, and Ashoka and CIVICUS globally. We have forged new partnerships with the funders of development, such as Comic Relief in the UK, Instituto C&A in Brazil, and its implementers, from the food pantries on the front line of food poverty in New York to human rights advocators and defenders in Russia. In each case we have taken our method, Constituent Voice, and adapted it to the specific context in order to unleash the power of feedback loops for enhanced performance, learning, and relationships.

We have sought to widen access to our services to more organisations by working in 'multiplier' partnerships with the likes of CIVICUS and Bridges Management Fund, so that a more diverse range of organisations can engage with concepts of feedback and downwards accountability. We have standardised our core product and service offerings so that they are more accessible to organisations with varying budgets. We have also sought to catalyse our own learning about how to make Constituent Voice in diverse contexts by building our suite of tools and how-to guides so that more organisations can explore the benefits of primary and secondary constituent feedback without having to pay for our time. We have continued to invest in our unique online platform, the Feedback Commons, and ensure that it's goal of making feedback so cheap, easy, and simple to do that everyone can do it, more of a reality.

We are proud of our role as the source (and sometimes the proximate cause) of the following achievements in the emergence of a Constituent Voice field:

• Increasing adoption of the term Constituent Voice™ by other organisations who are starting to use, study, and test the method
• New laws, rules, policies, and special programs of government aid agencies, including: US federal legislation requiring closed feedback loops in humanitarian and development aid (which we instigated and helped draft): Sec. 7034 (m), “Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2018”, S.1780 — 115th Congress (2017-2018)); USAID Local Works (our work was cited by Congress and USAID as a key source for the program design); DFID policy on feedback in humanitarian and development aid (based on the US legislation) 
• The incorporation of Constituent Voice into prominent performance, measurement, evaluation, rating, and reporting models, including, in the US nonprofit sector, Charity Navigator, GuideStar, The Performance Imperative, and InterAction’s impact evaluation guidelines. Through Bridges Fund Management Impact Management Project, Constituent Voice™ is being featured as an essential part of understanding impact (and risk) in the fast-growing field of Impact Investing. Through CIVICUS: Global Alliance for Citizen Participation, it forms the kernel of the new generation of NGO accountability
• The incorporation of Constituent Voice requirements into request for proposals from bilateral and multilateral funders (World Bank, USAID, SIDA, DFID).

We walk the feedback walk as well as talking the talk, and routinely collect feedback from our clients to inform our own practise and help us improve. Taking all client feedback received over the year, Keystone received an average Net Performance Score (NPS) of +36. This is a good score but we think we can do better and we aim to achieve an average of +60 or above for our client feedback in 2018/19.

We will leave the final word to some of our clients in the past year, who had this to say about our work: 

• “Keystone helped to support and guide our organisation strategically. They did a great job of framing the concept of Constituent Voice as a learning process that should be shared at all levels of the organisation.” (Vitamin Angels)
• “You gave us ideas that pushed our thinking and … how to apply it.” (Teach for All)
• “Great capacity for steep learning curve. Went beyond strict focus of mandate to provide really useful recommendations.”“Keystone are an agile and flexible consultancy offering important learning and evaluation services.” (Better Buying team at the University of Delaware)
• “Being open to a somewhat different measurement challenges, helping to flesh out the initial idea, earning the cooperation of the country offices, providing thoughtful feedback in the final report.” (CARE USA)