How do you create effective community feedback mechanisms?

Did you involve the stakeholders while setting the goals in the first place? That's the key to success for getting feedback since they are involved from the beginning. We cannot and should not solve their problems ; they need to and we just facilitate.

Don’t define your goals alone. Talk with your peers to understand the context from their perspective. It’s important to write out your assumptions about why you think this is an important goal. Evidence-based management offers a useful framework to help you design goals that have a positive impact.

Consulting with communities on what methods are appropriate and safe for them. For example, suggestion box can only be appropriate for only literate people. And if they ask other people to write for them, they may not feel safe. It is also important to consider accessibility and location. For example a help desk to be set up in front of the village office may raise concern for a complainant. Then, an organisation needs to be realistic about their own resources. So, the chosen tools and system need to resourced in accordance with their capacity.

Choosing the right method for feedback and self-reflection is vital. In sports, I found video analysis tools like Nacsport highly effective. I transitioned to its sister app, CODIMG, to assess my teaching. Using 10-minute lesson clips, I applied Emily Wray's RISE Model for self-evaluation. RISE, anchored in Bloom's Taxonomy, promotes higher-level thinking during reflection. It poses questions like "How did your actions affect performance?" and "What resources are available?" encouraging critical analysis of our decisions. Traditional reflection methods have value, but it's important to be open to using specialised tools like video analysis. The method chosen should be as versatile as the teaching-learning process.

Involving the community in creating feedback mechanisms empowers them to have a voice in how their concerns and opinions are heard and addressed. In keeping with the principles of user-centric design, community input becomes the cornerstone for shaping feedback mechanisms that are finely attuned to the specific needs, cultural nuances and values of the community. In one of my recent projects, we organized community events to gather insights from the beneficiaries and co-create the project components. Community members also utilized these forums to share their experiences, highlighting what works and what doesn't. This resulted in valuable ideas that steered us toward improvements in our engagement with the community.

No matter if you did interviews or a survey, always share your work in progress with someone. For qualitative data like interviews check with others if they see the same themes emerge. For quantitative data like surveys show others your exploratory results. They’ll spot angles and stories in the data you haven’t noticed.