“We always felt we had a ‘Hannibal-the-cannibal’ relationship: Stay where you are and mind yourself and you’re okay. Take one step forward and your arm will be bitten off.”
“The Foundation has had a negative impact on our organization in spite of funding. Runaround by foundation staff and [the Foundation’s] nontransparent priorities and processes have wasted staff time and effort…. It is disheartening to think that the viability of an important program is subject to an unqualified person’s review, analysis, and presentation of our project to the full decision group.”
In my last “Dose of Honesty,” I highlighted the positive end of the spectrum of commentary we receive from grantees. Here, I figured I’d talk a bit about the other end, using these comments from surveys of two different funders. Just like positive remarks, the terrible need equally careful consideration.
It’s a rare foundation that solicits candid, grantee feedback through CEP’s Grantee Perception Report, that doesn’t end up with a zinger in there. Invariably, comments like these cause serious freak-outs when staff members read them in the full list of redacted comments we provide.
Yet, as these one-off comments absorb attention and focus, they can distract from the important insights hidden in less snappy language in the rest of the qualitative feedback. So, staff should be upset – but mostly if those comments are part of a broader theme and not, as the zingers often are, just an indication of one very broken funding relationship.
One comment is scant evidence of failure – or, for that matter – of success. The glowing comment that gets tacked up on a bulletin board can wipe away dozens of comments that reveal utter mediocrity, or worse, a serious problem. As intoxicating as they may seem, like the zingers, one or two compliments – in a survey or at a dinner party – are just anecdotes.
Don’t get me wrong – qualitative anecdotes have their place. Terrible comments like those at the beginning of this post make for important warnings to foundations about what to try to avoid. They provide a visceral punch in the gut. But our focus at CEP is to raise up themes worthy of significant attention – and so we try to focus on trends in negative comments that highlight areas in which grantees say funders most need to improve.
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Kevin Bolduc is Vice President - Assessment Tools at CEP
What struck me most about this post was the way in which comments are often used and interpreted in our work. Comments are really just that unless you have enough to see trends and patterns. This takes: 1) time and comnmittment with regard to providing on-going opportunity for comments so they become qualitative data and 2) framing of questions in a manner that yields meaningful information, and 3) some degree of rigor to the analysis.
Numbers are so much “easier” but they don’t provide detail on experience which helps us understand the perceptions of others and the impacts of our efforts in other ways.
Comments both positive and negative trigger deeper responses because we hear the “voice” of another person. And no matter how hard we try to forget, we are all human.
Kudos to CEP for sharing with us the good, the bad and the ugly. You survived.
I think the secret to making feedback useful is actively trying to get over 50% of your customers to respond – adding incentives if necessary. The first to respond usually have much better/worse opinions than the silent majority.
If you were able to ask for feedback and somehow explain that it would lead to binding policy changes – such as the item people voted on as the biggest problem would become the top priority for the funder – people are more likely to take feedback seriously. Why shouldn’t “what do you think” become a binding referrendum?