Funders and feedback; putting their money where their mouth is

Last summer, the Blagrave Trust with support from Keystone Accountability set out to learn more about what youth-oriented charities do to listen and respond to the young people they help. Keystone spent time with key staff from eight Blagrave partners to understand and document their youth feedback related practices. Among the eight partners, there was[…]

Press Release: Keystone Accountability Awarded $600,000 Grant to Continue Efforts to Advance the Practice of Feedback Loops

For Immediate Release January 27, 2016 Contact: Ilva Letoja +44 20 3735 6367 ilva(at)keystoneaccountability.org Keystone Accountability Awarded $600,000 Grant to Continue Efforts to Advance the Practice of Feedback Loops Fund for Shared Insight to provide additional support for five previously funded projects and one new research grant in 2016 London, UK— Fund for Shared Insight[…]

David Bonbright interviewed by Denver Fredrick on the Business of Giving

Hear our chief executive, David Bonbright, in conversation with Business of Giving host Denver Frederick in a new podcast from the radio interview that aired on Sunday evening, 24 January. Denver was very well prepared and we think the result is a breezy, informative “state of the field”. Please let us know what you think![…]

Three Ways To Keep Your Clients Front And Center

Imagine if your funders treated you like a loyal customer that they could not afford to lose. One social investor, Root Capital, does just that. First published on Forbes on October 29, 2015, here’s a terrific piece spilling the beans on how. It’s conference season and the panels have been pulsating at events like the Clinton Global[…]

This Time It’s Personal

As organizations start to get serious about feedback, things inevitably come to the moment where feedback gets personal. To be really useful, feedback must touch on an individual’s performance. This is tough stuff. People resist feedback in many different ways. A growing part of Keystone Accountability’s Constituent Voice work with organizations is to help staff[…]

Beyond Accountability: Feedback as transformation

The post Beyond Accountability: Feedback as transformation appeared first on Alliance magazine. Beyond Accountability: Feedback as Transformation is the title of Alliance magazine’s June 2015 special feature, and this was the topic of the Alliance breakfast club, kindly hosted by the Shell Foundation. The panellists were David Bonbright, co-founder and CEO of Keystone Accountability and one of the guest editors for the special feature,[…]

Kai Hopkins discusses stories and the key lessons learned from various Keystone Performance Surveys

Having provided the reasoning and rationale behind gathering feedback about our relationships with our partners and intermediary organizations, Kai discusses Keystone’s Performance Surveys, which benchmark principal-agent type relationships for international NGOs, impact investors, grantmakers and social change networks. In doing so,  he focuses on the practical side of this kind of feedback, exploring key findings from some of[…]

Global Giving launches its “most important local initiative”, listening to those who are meant to benefit from development

The Slum Youth Map Community Development Fund will be mapping and reporting about the progress of local government development projects in the slums to increase accountability and transparency of community funds. Many projects that make use of a fund for community development aren’t completed or are not successful and Global Giving want to document them so that[…]

Keystone’s Kai Hopkins highlights the importance of indirect relationships, for creating social change and maximising the desired outcomes for ‘end-beneficiaries’

Writing on the Feedback Labs blog, Kai argues that intermediaries – implementing partners of an international NGO, a grant recipient, or an impact investor’s awardee – are an important and active agent of change and a key to successful development outcomes. And as such, we must understand these relationships and strive to improve them. To do so,[…]

Keystone helps launch Feedback Labs to address the problem of insufficient citizen engagement in development

Feedback Labs is a group of organizations that wants to see citizens become central throughout the development process, from start to finish. We look inclusively at four stages of the development cycle – governments, funders, NGOs & civil society, and citizens – to make sure that feedback loops are present between all stages. Keystone has[…]