Prioritizing the Voice of Clients
“The Listen for Good Project provides our program participants a unique opportunity to express their voice on what is really important to them, so that Peninsula Family Service will better understand in what ways, through which means, and at what moments in time we can best meet their needs.” — Rob Lajoie, Vice President of Financial Empowerment, Peninsula Family Service
A national funding initiative launched in 2014, Listen for Good aims to build the practice of listening to the people the social sector and philanthropy seek to help – the clients and beneficiaries of nonprofit programs. Nonprofits and funders, including Sand Hill Foundation, have joined together to roll out a simple but systematic and rigorous way of getting feedback from the people at the heart of our work. Listen for Good brings the Net Promoter System (NPS®), which has been widely used for customer feedback, to the nonprofit beneficiary context. Since inception, 158 organizations in human services, health, and education fields across the country have received grants that help them gather better data about the experience and wishes of the community members they serve.
Sand Hill Foundation nominated Habitat for Humanity Greater San Francisco (2016) and Peninsula Family Service (2017) for Listen for Good funding and provided matching grants. Habitat for Humanity Greater San Francisco used the system to query their prospective and current homeowners, home repair recipients, and participants in homebuyer readiness classes. Peninsula Family Service focused on their financial empowerment and second career program participants. Both organizations used survey
results to inform program improvements and support fundraising efforts. Additionally, the organizations made it a priority to communicate the findings back to the clients to close the feedback loop – a practice which continues to be all too rare in the social sector.
By 2020, an easy-to-use Listen for Good toolkit will be made publicly available at low cost, based on five years of implementation experience across a broad range of contexts. For more information about Listen for Good, visit www.fundforsharedinsight.org.