As a grantmaker, you likely have specific areas of work where it feels easiest or most relevant to start deepening your listening practice. Perhaps you’d like to hear more community insights as part of your program evaluations. Maybe you’re starting to make grants in a new issue area and need to understand who’s already operating in the space. Or perhaps you’re looking to better understand how your grantees listen to the people at the heart of their work, and how you can help them listen better. These are all important opportunities to listen (and respond!) to your grantees and the communities most affected by your grantmaking.
The funders that make up the Feedback Incentives Learning Group have created this tool to help fellow grantmakers identify the listening approaches that best fit their goals. Below, we present five opportunities grantmakers have to deepen their listening practices. For each opportunity, we outline common decisions you might be making, along with useful listening approaches that can help you make those decisions and examples from other grantmakers. We encourage you to identify the opportunity for listening that feels most relevant and feasible in your work now, and build to the other opportunities from there.
This framework will be most useful to funders with a fundamental understanding of the core principles of high-quality listening and funders that already listen to their nonprofit partners and have nonprofit partners that listen to the people they serve. For funders and nonprofit partners earlier on in their listening journey, we suggest reviewing the core listening competencies that both funders and nonprofit partners can invest in to be prepared for a crisis. Feedback Labs also offers free webinars, resource pages, brainstorming sessions and trainings to help funders and nonprofit partners develop high-quality listening practices during COVID-19.
Opportunity #1: Moving into a new issue area or community
Decisions you might be making:
- Figuring out who is already working in the system, what goals you can support, and where the gaps and opportunities are;
- Determining how you might bring your foundation’s unique strengths to the new space as well as the boundaries of your strategy;
- Deciding what role you want to play in this new space and how you want to shift existing dynamics;
- Identifying who you will partner with or fund in this new space, and how.
Possible listening approaches:
- Listening tours
- Commission community research
- Survey large, representative samples of community members
- Convene constituents to define strategies for change
- Connect with fellow funders to learn about their approach to working in the space
- Identify and connect one-on-one with community leaders, and ask them who else to connect with
Case Studies
- The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation conducts listening circles to better understand the perspectives of artists and cultural workers in communities that have been underserved by their arts grantmaking.
- The Satterberg Foundation helped incubate the Seattle Equity Summit to help community members and allies listen to each other, share strategies, and network.
Opportunity #2: Investing in grantees’ listening efforts
Decisions you might be making:
- Deciding how to have ongoing conversations with your grantees about how they listen and respond to the communities at the heart of their work;
- Determining what support you will offer to help grantees address the listening-related capacity needs and priorities they identify;
- Identifying how you can share community insights and feedback with grantees.
Possible listening approaches:
- Ask current and prospective grantees how they currently listen and how they aspire to listen;
- Use data that grantees share about how they listen on public platforms like Candid to start conversations about what listening capacities you can help them build;
- Reciprocate by sharing insights and learning with grantees in addition to asking questions.
Case Studies
- The Mosaic Forum and Dress for Success Austin use the How We Listen section of their Candid profiles to share how they are listening to the communities at the heart of their work.
- The Boston Foundation supports grantees to build high-quality feedback loops with clients and respond to what they hear.
Opportunity #3: Strengthening internal processes, governance, and staffing
Decisions you might be making:
- Deciding how to recruit more people with lived experience onto your board;
- Determining how to ensure staff members are proximate to the communities most affected by your grantmaking;
- Identifying how to improve or streamline your grantmaking processes.
Possible listening approaches:
- Incorporate lived experience as a key criterion when hiring consultants or recruiting staff and Board members;
- Staff Community Liaison roles or set targets for the percent of work time staff spend in communities affected by your grantmaking;
- Ask grantees how you can improve grantmaking processes, whether through direct conversations or tools like the Grantee Perception Report, and close the loop on what you hear and how you’re responding.
Case Studies
- The Ford Foundation created a professional development program through which formerly incarcerated people explore career paths at the foundation.
- Community leaders on the Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s Community Advisory Board help shape the foundation’s strategies and policies.
Opportunity #4: Evaluation and learning
Decisions you might be making:
- Deciding what signals of progress you’ll look at for each of your grantmaking areas;
- Deciding how you’ll sense changes to the systems in which you make grants and refine your hypotheses and programs based on learning and evaluation;
- Sharing learnings with the grantees, practitioners, and fellow funders who operate in your grantmaking areas.
Possible listening approaches:
- Work with grantees, partners, and community members to choose the signals of progress you’ll track for each grantmaking area;
- Engage grantees in evaluating your progress;
- Build in moments to share what you’re learning with the people at the heart of your work and invite them to help determine how you should shift your tactics in response, for example in live forums or via written updates;
- Survey large, representative samples of the people most affected by your grantmaking strategies on their perceptions of progress or impact.
Case Studies
- The Caring for Denver Foundation worked with over 1,500 community members to create the shared impact plan that guides their approach to learning and evaluation.
- Omidyar Network used feedback from 4,800 clients of organizations in its education portfolio to guide future investments and inform the wider sector.
Opportunity #5: Sharing power over grantmaking decisions
Decisions you might be making:
- Deciding how participatory you aspire for your grantmaking to be;
- Identifying where you can shift decision-making power to the people most affected by those decisions;
- Identifying which community members you are not hearing from and taking steps to better hear from or engage with them.
Possible listening approaches:
- Set up advisory councils of people most affected by your grantmaking that might have the power to:
- Formally approve grants
- Propose grants to the board for approval
- Provide feedback and advice on grant proposals for board consideration;
- Adopt participatory grantmaking approaches;
- Engage community members in grant program design.
Case Studies
- The Global Fund for Children recruits youth leaders to co-design strategies and programs and select new community-based grantee partners.
- All of the Brooklyn Community Foundation’s strategic grantmaking programs use participatory grantmaking models in close partnership with community members.
Get in touch!
If you need more help deepening your listening practice, check out our resources for funders or email Megan Campbell at [email protected]!