RELATED STORY: Finding the Questions that Matter

In 2016 the Fund for Shared Insight launched Listen for Good, a grant-making initiative aimed at exploring new ways for nonprofits to engage with the people they seek to help through high-quality feedback loops. Funders nominate nonprofits for Listen for Good grants, which are structured as co-funding arrangements between nominating funders and Shared Insight. This approach encourages funders to invest in building or advancing the feedback efforts of their grantees, recognizing that beneficiary feedback data may also serve to improve the practices of funding organizations. Shared Insight has awarded 46 grants of $60,000 each to customer-facing nonprofits in the United States—including organizations working to improve communities through health care, technology and the arts. Among the key goals of Listen for Good is to enable nonprofit organizations to apply the Net Promoter System, a simple feedback approach widely used in the for-profit sector to assess and respond to customer experience.

In addition to its overall sponsorship of Listen for Good, the Rita Allen Foundation is co-funding a grant to the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (Public Lab), which builds open-source hardware and software that enable scientists and community members to collaboratively investigate local environmental health issues. As Public Lab partners with science and environmental education specialists to develop a comprehensive evaluation framework for community science projects, a grant from Listen for Good is helping the organization examine how its diverse constituents define success—which may mean bringing people together to tackle questions of common concern, or working toward changes in laws and regulations.