feedback loop
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10 Steps to design your accountability feedback mechanism
Resilient Roots: conquering the feedback loop - Part 1 of 5: “Design”
By Isabelle Büchner (Accountable Now) and Belén Giaquinta (CIVICUS)In the Resilient Roots initiative, 14 organisations from all over the world are running pilot projects to test new primary constituent accountability mechanisms. In most cases, these mechanisms focus on collecting and using feedback from the key constituents of each organisation.
Feedback is an important element of improving accountability, and for this process to be meaningful feedback mechanisms must include all 5 stages of a closed feedback loop. You can read more about primary constituent accountability in this blog post, and learn about “closing feedback loops” in this 2 minute video.
In this blog series, we want to highlight some key considerations for every stage of the feedback loop, share solutions to common challenges and simple tips that can help you harness feedback to improve primary constituent accountability. To illustrate this process, we are using examples and learnings from Resilient Roots pilot projects.
Are you ready now? Then let us dig a bit deeper!
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10 tips to ensure a meaningful dialogue with your primary constituents
Resilient Roots: conquering the feedback loop - Part 4 of 5: “Dialogue”
By Isabelle Büchner and Belén Giaquinta (CIVICUS)
By now, you have designed your accountability feedback mechanism, and you have collected and analysed the feedback from your primary constituents. Now it is time for perhaps the most important part of building trust with your primary constituents: meaningful dialogue.
Meaningful dialogue means going back to the people who gave you feedback and discussing the questions, findings, and responses together. This can happen in a number of ways that do not necessarily involve an in-person conversation. Below we list several examples of how Resilient Roots partners have done this. The dialogue step allows your primary constituents to directly inform the decisions and changes you make in response to the feedback you received, and like so “close the feedback loop”.
In this blog post we want to share common challenges you may encounter during dialogues with your primary constituents, and 10 tips for how to make this process more rewarding.
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10 tips to “course correct” your accountability feedback mechanism
Resilient Roots: Conquering the feedback loop - Part 5 of 5: “Course Correct”
By Isabelle Büchner et Belén Giaquinta (CIVICUS)
This five-part blog series tries to break down this process as much as possible, to move beyond theoretical discussions about how to shift power within the civil society sector and offer practical solutions for how to change organisational culture through feedback. In the final step of the feedback loop, which we call “course correction”, we capitalise on the learnings of the feedback process we followed, and use this knowledge to inform changes in the structures and strategic direction of our organisations (and the feedback process itself). The following 10 tips will break down how to approach this crucial process, to foster culture change and truly put your primary constituents in the driver’s seat of your work.
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10 tips to analyse feedback from your primary constituents
Resilient Roots: conquering the feedback loop - Part 3 of 5: “Analysis”
By Isabelle Büchner and Belén Giaquinta (CIVICUS)
In the first blog post of this series we shared 10 steps to design your accountability feedback mechanism. In the second blog post, you learned more about how to collect feedback in an accountable way and make these efforts fit for purpose. Now, you should have a lot of qualitative and quantitative data about the needs, opinions, complaints and wishes of your primary constituents. If you don’t, you should go back to our second post and check whether your collection method was fit for purpose.
If collecting feedback from your constituents went well, you will now have information that can give you practical guidance on how to strengthen your work and build stronger relationships with those who matter the most to your organisation - the people whose lives are affected by your work.
In this post, we will share common challenges you may encounter when analysing the feedback you collect, some tips for making this process more valuable and thorough, and help you check your assumptions about what your primary constituents want from you.
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10 Tips to collect feedback from your primary constituents
Resilient Roots: conquering the feedback loop - Part 2 of 5: “Collect”
By Isabelle Büchner (Accountable Now) and Belén Giaquinta (CIVICUS)
In the first blog post of this series, we shared 10 steps to design your accountability feedback mechanism. Here we discussed how to set your objectives and layout the infrastructure and resources you will need to see this work through. If you missed it, we suggest you start there before turning to the next step: collecting feedback.
In this second part of our blog series on accountability feedback mechanisms, we want to share common challenges our Resilient Roots partners have encountered when collecting feedback from their primary constituents, along with some tips for how to make this process meaningful. Simply collecting feedback won’t make you a more accountable organisation, and it is important to be very intentional about what feedback to gather. This can then help you decide the methods and channels you will use, and the questions you want to ask. All of these aspects, along with the 10 tips below, will make your feedback collection exercise a fruitful, inclusive and productive process. Ultimately, this will help your organisation build a more trusted relationship with your constituents!
