In his July Giving Compass blog post, our chief executive David Bonbright shares our secret sauce for crafting artful questions. Every Question Has Three Faces You’ve probably heard some version of the quote attributed to Albert Einstein in which he said if he had an hour to solve a problem, he would spend the first[…]
Keystone Chief Executive David Bonbright’s monthly blog with advice for philanthropists, Mutual Accountability, is published by Giving Compass, a leading US philanthropy support platform. Here’s a re-post of his June 2019 contribution. Philanthropy Can’t Move Faster Than the Speed of Trust In 2009, my organisation, Keystone Accountability, had been invited, alongside commercial marketing experts, to[…]
Beyond the rhetoric: Provocations on power, voice and listening Blagrave Trust and Lankelly Chase joined forces to curate a set of blogs discussing power, privilege and voice in our sector. Here’s the contribution to that series from our chief executive, David Bonbright. Does business listen better than the social sector? David Bonbright, Co-founder and Chief[…]
Keystone Chief Executive David Bonbright’s monthly blog with advice for philanthropists, Mutual Accountability, is published by Giving Compass, a leading US philanthropy support platform. Here’s a re-post of his May 2019 contribution. Leading From Behind In Philanthropy Nelson Mandel writes in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, that a good leader “… stays behind the flock,[…]
Giving Compass Feedback Is Having a Moment: Philanthropy Can Make It Permanent Mutual Accountability for Social Change is a monthly series exploring feedback in philanthropy with practical steps for donors. It serves as a primer for the 2020 publication of David Bonbright’s (co-founder and chief executive, Keystone Accountability… Continue reading..
This is a cross-post from givingcompass.org Mutual Accountability for Social Change is a monthly series exploring feedback in philanthropy with practical steps for donors. By David Bonbright Have you asked (or considered asking) a nonprofit how your donation is making a difference? It’s a mistake. While it’s an important and natural question, it is not one[…]
I’m a slow learner. Over a decade into this work, it hit me that Constituent Voice is what New Yorker writer Atul Guwande dubbed a “slow idea”. In Guwande’s New Yorker article comparison of the historical uptake of anesthesia and antiseptics, he asks, why did one take off rapidly while the other languished? “First, one[…]
Nafisika Trust works in Kenya providing counselling and training to people in prison. The Trust is reaping the benefits of a Constituent Voice feedback system and using data to improve their programs. Vickie Wambura the founder and director of the charity said: “We thought were gathering feedback but we kept having snarl ups. We were[…]
How do you know how your organization is performing? Here at Keystone Accountability we say for a clear indication of how you are doing ask the people you serve. It is these customers, clients, beneficiaries, and other stakeholders, or constituents as we call them, that are best placed to determine the value of your work.[…]
This month’s annual Feedback Summit in Washington DC has been chronicled by journalist Marc Gunther as the moment where we recognized that we have arrived, and asked first order questions. In my blog post last week I said that I thought we had, collectively, set our intention for fundamental transformation of how we organize to[…]