I was recently asked to speak on a panel for the Chattanooga Women’s Leadership Institute, which an organization I really love. The conversation eventually led to my favorite topic: engagement. We considered lots of questions: How do we as staff engage our board members? How do we as board members engage with our organizations? How do our organizations engage with the community? How do we use the skills and experiences of our stakeholders best?
But the conversation really ended up focusing on this question: How do we make better decisions by including our stakeholders in the decision making process? This question really should drive every social innovation discussion we have.
At Causeway, our stakeholders are the community… the whole community… every single person. We have worked with kids as young as 12 years old and adults in their 70s on social entrepreneurship projects, and everyone in between. Over the past two years, Causeway has developed some great tools for getting feedback from our community. Some are simpler than others, but all have been useful:
- Have a one-on-one conversation with someone who has used your services. This provides a flipped perspective of the work you do. If you haven’t been out to a community program lately where you can talk to the people your organization is serving in real-time, make time to do it. You’ll be re-inspired in the work.
- Build advisory groups that reflect a cross section of your stakeholders. Causeway uses community judges in our Challenge grants process who provide invaluable feedback, each bringing to the table a different background and set of experiences. For example, during our Education Challenge we had a principal, a parent, a doctor, an education advocate, the director of an organization providing services to schools and students and the education reporter from our local paper. Now that’s a group that can give you the full picture of education-related issues.
- When you want feedback, ask for it. Causeway uses social media, our e-newsletter, our website, online forms, focus groups and any other way we can think of to ask the public to tell us what they think about our programs and our direction. This month, we even asked the public public for input on what our next Challenge question be.
- One last thing that’s so simple, I hesitate even to include it — get input from a board member or someone serving in that kind of role, like an adviser or mentor. It’s easy to forget, but they’re there to help, especially when you aren’t sure what to do or when your core team or staff disagrees on what to do next.
We at Causeway are always asking ourselves — “Do we have the right diversity of opinions, experience and expertise to make this decision?” If the answer isn’t an enthusiastic yes, get in touch with some of your stakeholders. I bet you’ll be glad you did.
