Beneficiary Perception Report
The Beneficiary Perception Report (BPR) provides feedback and insights from a funder’s ultimate beneficiaries — the people whose lives it seeks to affect. The BPR is based on a confidential survey and provides comparative data to help funders better understand their performance and inform their strategies.
Our current work on beneficiary perceptions is focused on students of foundation-supported high schools through a student survey project called YouthTruth. Developed in partnership with The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, YouthTruth systematically collects meaningful feedback and reports it back in ways that can influence decision making by funders, as well as by schools, school districts, and school networks.
CEP recently hosted a webinar on YouthTruth:
YouthTruth is unique because it actively involves students and other stakeholders in the survey process and follow-up. Visit the YouthTruth site to learn more.
View the YouthTruth school assembly kick-off video:
CEP launched YouthTruth in 2008 through a pilot in 20 schools across the United States. The pilot project was highlighted in a Chronicle of Philanthropy article entitled, “Talking Back to Bill Gates: Do His Grants Matter?”
We are surveying students in 100 high schools in the 2009-2010 school year. By building an aggregate data set that is ever more representative of high school students in the United States, we aim to:
- Provide insightful and actionable feedback loops that contribute to the ongoing data collection efforts at programmatic, district, and state levels, and result in more informed and responsive funding strategies across multiple leading philanthropic funders
- Increase the effectiveness of high school improvement efforts by informing school leaders, districts and intermediaries, funders, and the broader education reform community about how students are experiencing these efforts
- Catalyze funders — regardless of their areas of programmatic focus—to think about how they ensure that strategy development and performance assessment efforts are informed by the rigorously collected perspectives of those who should matter the most: the people whose lives a funder seeks to improve
