Giving Compass' Take:

• This Feedback Labs post from the team at the Siegel Family Endowment describes the organization's effort to solicit feedback from grantees, including the use of an anonymous survey.

• The goal is to build trust and create transparency. How might other orgs learn from this example?

• Here's how relationship-based feedback helps with grantmaking.

Siegel Family Endowment’s mission is to understand and shape learning in an innovation-driven world. We’re big evangelists for the organizations we support, and it’s our aim to make the grantmaking process as simple, straightforward, and user-friendly for our grantees as we possibly can.

But the grantmaker/grantee relationship is a complicated one, and dynamics around securing funding can make sharing candid, thorough feedback difficult to achieve.  We aimed to create an internal system that’s streamlined, easy-to-read, and grantee-centric. To that end, we set out to find ways to encourage constructive feedback from grantees while also ensuring that our methods remained lightweight and straightforward.

Here’s what we did:

Have grantees determine objectives and outcomes. We’ve found that when grantees are given the space to set their own goals and objectives at the outset, they have been be more likely to openly communicate with us about what’s going well and what isn’t. This also breeds trust that stimulates greater levels of sincerity for giving and receiving feedback.

Structure evaluation in a way that is aligned with organizational culture. While most of our processes are rooted in relationships and conversation, our initial feedback collection system was an anonymous survey. We found that this could make grantees feel detached and without a significant stake in the process.

Work towards greater transparency. In order to inspire grantees to spend time crafting thoughtful feedback, we need to show that we’re putting it to good use. We’ll be reporting back to grantees about the ways their feedback influences our planning and helps us take stock of our own process and strategy.

Read the full article about driving growth through learning by Siegel Family Endowment at Feedback Labs.