October 31, 2018 | Read Time: 5 minutes
My annual performance goals this year include a commitment to increasing the collection and use of feedback from the people we seek to serve across all of the Hewlett Foundation’s grant-making programs — my way of telling the foundation’s board that I (and the staff) will make this a priority.
Our reason for doing so can be simply stated: If you want to help people, asking what they find helpful makes obvious sense. We all do that in our personal lives with our family, friends, and neighbors. We do it in our workplaces, asking for and giving feedback to team members.
And in a charitable organization, whose whole mission is helping people, it is essential that we make it a norm to ask for feedback from the people we’re seeking to help. It can only improve our ability to make a meaningful difference in their lives.
Our foundation, like some others, already uses the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Grantee Perception Report to gather and react to feedback from our grantees. These surveys have helped us improve how we work with nonprofits, prompting us to sharpen our proposal requirements, improve our approach to helping these nonprofits connect with each other, and more.
Now we’re focusing on the beneficiaries of our philanthropic efforts, including seeking feedback from people who live in the rural West and care about Western conservation and people who use family-planning and health services in sub-Saharan Africa provided by nonprofits we aid. These efforts are helping shape our grant-making strategies and making us think about how to systematically collect feedback moving forward.
It’s easy to understand why these efforts are vital, but not everybody understands how complicated it is to put the findings to use. That’s why I am sharing some of the key lessons we have learned thus far — which I hope will help other grant makers.
Interrogate the data.
Once you commit to gathering feedback — which in Hewlett’s case means reaching both our grantees and their beneficiaries — you must figure out how to use the information skillfully.
Sometimes aggregate data will suggest obvious changes or easy fixes, but just as often looking at aggregate data alone can mislead. It will seldom be the case, after all, that every person is unhappy for the same reason. There may be groups of people who are happy or unhappy to varying degrees but all for slightly different reasons that are masked by aggregate data. Acting too quickly can lead to remedial steps that are good for some but bad for others or that solve a problem experienced by some while creating new problems for others.
Grant makers must examine the data thoughtfully to ascertain whether they include people whose experiences differ and for whom different solutions are appropriate. Some categories to test are obvious: things like race, gender, or organizational role. Others may be harder to spot. Using feedback well is both an art and a science.
It calls for imagination and ingenuity, and this process of probing the data requires an open mind and preparedness to dig deep.
Recently, I reviewed some data that had been broken down in various ways, including by race and gender. These revealed stark differences in satisfaction, and my first reaction — hardly a surprise — was to assume this had something to do with implicit race and gender bias. But deeper analysis found that women and minority participants were also disproportionately younger, raising the possibility that age accounted for the differences, or, more complicated still, that they resulted from intersections among these traits.
Ascertaining what is causal and what is mere correlation can be tricky. It will not do to jump too quickly to conclusions — particularly since tackling the wrong problem can create new and bigger problems.
Make progress layer by layer.
Before coming to Hewlett, I was a constitutional law professor, and teaching about the civil-rights movement was a big part of my job.
I was always struck by how the initial efforts to combat racism not only fell short but also exposed levels of complexity we had not yet imagined. Activists in the 1950s focused on Jim Crow and thought we could achieve civil rights by getting rid of laws that discriminated on their face. Instead, by stripping away the obvious, these laws revealed more insidious forms of discrimination and prejudice ingrained in our institutions and entwined with other cultural and social conventions. These could not be addressed by law alone and have required continuous struggle.
Half a century later, we are still uncovering structures and attitudes that perpetuate racial differences; often our best efforts seem to exacerbate rather than alleviate the problems. Peeling back each layer of the onion reveals another, more complex layer beneath it.
The point is not just that these profound societal issues play out at the level of individual organizations. It is also, on a more prosaic level, that dealing with a first or most obvious cause of a problem may sometimes make things worse, at least temporarily, by exposing deeper challenges. The process of incorporating feedback may take longer and be more arduous than you initially expect, but it’s worth the time and effort.
Make hard judgments.
Anticipate complexity in developing systems to incorporate feedback; plan for it and embrace it. Using feedback well can be tough, but don’t let that become an excuse not to use it or not to learn all you can. Ask hard questions knowing you might not like what you hear.
At the same time, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Listen carefully and respectfully, but don’t be afraid to make judgments about what you can and cannot do and about what is feasible and cost-effective for your organization. You will need to make hard and sometimes controversial decisions. But in the long run, controversy over real issues is preferable to ignorance about whether they exist. It is better to know, and for that you need first to ask.
Larry Kramer is president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and former dean of Stanford Law School.
