Honesty in Aid
Earlier this week I was speaking to someone who works at a foundation and who is facing a quandary. Like most philanthropic funders, the foundation staff offer several ways for their grantees to give them feedback.
Ecosystem Op-Ed blog posts present creative new ideas and visions for the feedback field. They weave together evidence, theory, and lessons learned by the feedback community to discuss current issues in a thoughtful and accessible way. If you would like to suggest a topic for an op-ed or write a guest piece, please reach out to us at [email protected]
3TT: Generating and Using Feedback through Participatory M&E
Looking for feedback but not sure where to start? As practitioners and facilitators, we are constantly looking for innovative ways to generate meaningful feedback to inform our work. Join us – Jill (The Improve Group), Marissa (The Hunger Project) and Sophie (OneVillage Partners) – as we share innovative and participatory monitoring and evaluation strategies to close the feedback loop at the 2017 Feedback Summit. Here are three strategies we look forward to sharing with you in November:
Cynicism, Naiveté and Amnesia
The way Tiago Peixoto tells it, there’s not much difference between a Napoleonic telegraph and Twitter. At least, not in terms of the hype surrounding how they’ll transform democracy.
3TT: Government, Consult Thyself First
On November 2-3, we hope you will attend the Feedback Summit and talk with us about internal culture change, both in the public sector and otherwise. We have learned through observation and our own trial and error many painful lessons about the value of closing feedback loops and introducing new practices within the public sector.
Ecosystem Op-Ed: Vivid Stories
August is a feel-good month. The office clears out and you find yourself beside a lake, or a mountain, or a field, maybe a cathedral or a castle. Even if you’re not on vacation, the pace of work slows perceptibly and chatter around your desk dies down. You can reflect, ruminate. Feelings of happiness and repose render you receptive to ideas and plans.
3TT: Making the Case for Feedback
Collaborating, learning and adapting (CLA) is USAID’s approach to organizational learning and adaptive management. Part of my work as Senior Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning Specialist on the USAID LEARN contract is to build the evidence base that using a CLA approach improves organizational effectiveness and development results.
3TT: Understanding the Role of Power
For all the talk about human-centered design, one very human factor often gets overlooked — a basic understanding of how power operates in relationships between people. This lack of understanding by design students and design teachers results in wasted funding, poorly prioritized projects, and broken promises to the very communities that are being served.
Grand Designs
Fifteen self-driving vehicles assembled in the Mojave Desert, competing to win $1 million dollars. All they have to do is be the first driverless car to conquer a rugged 142-mile course.
3TT: Using Feedback to Guide Your Social Change Campaign
The Mobilisation Lab is a global learning and collaboration network to equip progressive movements and leaders to adapt and thrive in the digital, people-powered era. A key aspect of that work is improving the way all of us in the social change world plan and implement campaigns so that those campaigns are much better grounded in the needs and motivations of the people we’re trying to inspire to take action.
3TT: Give It Time
In the social services world, feedback has long been a pain point. We often don’t have the time or money to build formal feedback loops into program administration, and we usually gather it from written surveys and informal conversations. The problem is, the forms get filed away in a drawer and the feedback is biased.