Funders, make a plan to gather vital feedback on your work in 2026!
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At YouthTruth, we believe that the best way to understand how students experience school is to go directly to the source and ask the students themselves. Since CEP developed YouthTruth in collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2008, we’ve...
The other week, I was presenting at a conference about the importance of nonprofits systematically eliciting perceptual feedback from clients, or those they seek to help, about how things are going from the clients’ own perspectives. This practice, often termed...
It may be the time of year for resolutions, but, to start, I have a confession: openness is tough. In my role as project manager for Fund for Shared Insight (“Shared Insight”), a collaborative effort among funders to make grants that improve philanthropy, I think a...
No matter where you personally stand on the results of our recent elections, one thing is clear: we in the nonprofit sector — grantees and funders alike — are entering a moment of significant change in the context for our work. For some (voucher and charter advocates,...
Among the speakers at the 2017 CEP Conference in Boston will be Douglas Stone, lecturer at Harvard Law School and co-author of two New York Times bestsellers, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most and Thanks...
In the few months since I last wrote about 100&Change, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s $100 million dollar prize in pursuit of one good idea, I’ve been thinking a lot about the transparency of its selection process. One of the biggest changes...
Several years ago, the Medina Foundation, the organization I lead, converted to an online application. About seven months after it launched, one of our grantees called to tell me that it had a pretty serious formatting glitch. This was something we had missed...
Recently, I’ve been sharing some “a-ha moments” and takeaways that I’ve had as CEP staff have embarked on learning together from the book Thanks for the Feedback: the Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well by Sheila Heen and Doug Stone (the latter of whom will be...
Giving and receiving feedback doesn’t come naturally to me, and I’m on a journey of sorts with it. Like many, I appreciate receiving direct feedback as long as it’s delivered in a helpful way, but I tend to dread giving feedback to others. For years, I was a...
In reflecting on a year almost (but not quite) yet done, it can often be difficult to fit into a small space all the important things that happen in the span of 365 days, whether it’s in a family holiday card or in a year-end blog post. On the assessment and advisory...