Last Thursday, Feedback Labs hosted GlobalGiving at a LabStorm. Feedback Labs LabStorms are a collective platform through which organizations can bring their ideas and get friendly feedback to improve them.
GlobalGiving has been trying out the Net Promoter System (NPS) to get feedback from a variety of its stakeholders. These stakeholders include nonprofit partners, individual donors, GlobalGiving staff, and direct constituents (beneficiaries) of several nonprofit partners in the Philippines.
For GlobalGiving, the New Year starts by looking back at what they’ve learned so far from their experimentation. There have always been questions about whether the NPS—developed for the private commercial sector—would work for the nonprofit sector. Rather than writing NPS off as another private sector idea, GlobalGiving has taken an approach of learning and adapting. This mentality means that experiments are light, nimble, and low cost. What it learns will allow the next round of feedback to be vastly improved.
For example, in implementing the NPS for direct constituents of nonprofit partners in the Philippines, GlobalGiving learned that it’s important that the feedback be procured soon after the nonprofit service was provided. Constituents get busy with their lives and forget —as all humans do— and the service provision is no longer top-of-mind. Also, as the NPS system was implemented through SMS text messaging, GlobalGiving found that constituents who had prior experience using SMS for feedback had a higher response rate.
These insights, among others, will help feed into the future feedback projects. For 2016, it will try the NPS among new stakeholders to continue learning. Some of the questions that it seeks to address include:
- How can information (feedback) be communicated back to constituents? How do we move away from “just data” to more productive conversations around the data?
- How can nonprofit organizations be held accountable to responding to feedback?
- What if the feedback is not useful? In other words, will there be a positive bias such that constituents give only positive feedback because of the power dynamic (fear of reprisal) between them and local service providers?
The LabStorm helped GlobalGiving untangle these questions and many others. If you are interested in presenting your organizations feedback-related projects, please contact Feedback Labs at [email protected].
