As we consider the evolution of our ratings, Charity Navigator sees collecting and learning from constituent feedback as a potentially critical marker of organizations’ capacity for impact. It implies organizations are taking steps to learn more about the individuals, groups, and communities they serve, and iterating on their current programs and products to become more effective.

And, it is our hope that, over time, donors will consider the ways organizations are engaging with the people they serve and learning from those interactions as part of their charitable research knowing that it’s an indicator of healthy, innovative charity.

At Charity Navigator, we are committed to making more and more decisions based on feedback from our donors, users, and the charities we evaluate. Here are some of the reasons we collect constituent feedback and why we think it is valuable to the evolution of our charity ratings and the nonprofit sector.

No one knows your programs or your products better than you do, and they make perfect sense, right? Maybe. Often we are too close to the programs we manage and the products we create to see their flaws or areas where they can be improved to be made even more effective.

At Charity Navigator, we launched an initiative called Tides of Change to ask donors, users, and charities for their feedback on everything, from the topics we cover on this blog, to the value of our ratings and the way we display them. Our ratings, resources, and website experience make sense to us, but do they make sense to individuals who aren’t as intimately familiar with their purpose and creation? Engaging with the people who use our resources ensures we are making valuable improvements that will benefit those individuals and others just like them.

Collecting constituent feedback doesn’t need to be burdensome. It can be as easy as asking those who benefit from your programs to complete a survey asking about their experiences and outcomes, or hosting focus groups to learn more from participants' interactions with one another.

For organizations with a greater digital presence, you can learn a lot about your constituents’ experiences through your website analytics. Are they getting to the right pages on your website? Once they’re there, are they interacting with the content you’ve provided in the manner you ideally want them to? Where are the places they bounce off your website or don’t engage with the resources you’ve provided?

Read the full article about collecting constituent feedback by Ashley Post at Charity Navigator.