At Feedback Labs, we love hearing stories of how nonprofits and foundations have implemented feedback and we want to share those stories with our community to inspire and give helpful tips and tricks. We interviewed Dr. Sharon Asonganyi, who, at the time, was Director of Research and Impact at Thread and recent Crash Course participant, about how the Thread team worked to put the feedback loop into practice.

Thread is a Baltimore-based nonprofit working to combat social isolation and weave a new social fabric for Baltimoreans.The Learning and Development group at Thread was using a customer satisfaction survey after training volunteers. Responses to the customer satisfaction survey were positive, but the group was not getting information to help them take action on making improvements and the survey response rate was low. Here is how Thread used the Feedback Loop to design, implement, and take action on a new post-training survey.

  • Survey Design & Collection
    The Learning and Development team knew the training program could be improved, so Sharon and Erin saw a Net Promoter Score (NPS) based survey as a way to understand the impact of the training program now and whether participants had intentions to use the knowledge gained in the training later. It was important that the survey be simple enough to be completed quickly and broad enough to collect a wide range of participant ideas.
  • Analysis & Learning 
    Thread created a dashboard using Trello, a software that enables teams to organize data and tasks into cards, lists, and boards, so everyone on the training team could see the feedback that was coming in from the survey. The Trello board was split up by training instance so new and existing volunteer and staff trainings had separate lists. Each week the Survey Monkey responses were put into the Trello board and the overall Net Promoter Score (NPS) was calculated for each training

The Thread team has found that the Dialogue phase of the feedback loop can be challenging. Training participants go out into the community after trainings and it can be hard to reconnect with them to dialogue about the feedback data collected. The Research and Impact team has begun to brainstorm ideas for what dialogues could look like in the future and have identified this as an area with long-term growth potential.

Read the full article about feedback tools and processes by Renee Bellis at FeedbackLabs.