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DOI

10.9707/1944-5660.1729

Key Points

Funders lack scalable tools and processes for advancing their community listening efforts. As foundations explore this work, there is an opportunity to leverage the nonprofit sector’s experience in listening and to partner more actively with grantees to learn from community.

Nonprofits have embraced community listening more rapidly than funders over the past 10 years. Over 40,000 organizations have affirmatively described their listening practices via How We Listen, a feedback self-assessment that is part of Candid and Charity Navigator’s nonprofit profiles, and approximately 1,400 organizations have participated in Listen4Good’s capacity-building programs. This momentum has enabled the development of tools such as Listen4Good’s Best Practices framework, which outlines feedback practices that center equity. Listen4Good has also developed robust, supportive tools, coaching protocols, and guidance that help organizations build equity-advancing feedback practices.

Foundations can also leverage the nonprofit sector’s expertise in listening. They can benefit from partnering with nonprofits and together learning from the communities both ultimately seek to serve. How can it work? Nonprofits can take the lead in data collection and community engagement (ideally with funding support) and then share aggregate themes and insights with funders to inform their understanding of community gaps and needs.

In this paper, we’ll detail approaches and tools for collaborative listening with funders and nonprofits, leveraging our experience at Listen4Good and the growing toolset we are developing for shared learning. We will describe the readiness process and foci of our supportive efforts working with organizations and highlight examples of collaborative listening efforts where funders are learning together with nonprofits.

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