The Power of Voice: Incorporating Client Voice into Your Evaluations
A common experience for many nonprofits is the experience of conducting a program evaluation. This is often a component of many grants to help ensure the program that is being funded is running effectively and having the desired impact. In order to conduct these program evaluations, data related to finances, number of clients served, services provided, client outcomes, and employee perceptions is commonly collected. However, one of the most critical and valuable data sources is client feedback. While client feedback is often collected, incorporating clients’ true voice is often overlooked in many program evaluations. Below, I share a few reasons to incorporate client voice into your program evaluation to help create more compelling and memorable results.
While the quantitative data is most critical for demonstrating overall impact, the client comments serve to humanize it.
1. Illustrate Impact. Client voice is one of the best ways to illustrate the impact your program is having. If you imagine quantitative data being the outline of a drawing, providing the general picture and form—client voice is the color that brings the drawing to life. The quantitative data is important for the overall picture of how clients are being impacted, but the comments provided from actual clients really serve to illustrate what the data says and in a more compelling and memorable way.
2. Create an Emotional Connection. Incorporating client voice helps to create an emotional connection to the data. While the quantitative data is most critical for demonstrating overall impact, the client comments serve to humanize it. Ultimately, people care about people. Hearing the voice of the individuals or families being impacted will stick with the reader far longer than any of the numbers will. Hearing the details of the connections the program made and the life changing impact it had is far more memorable than hearing that the program was rated a 9 out of 10.
3. Alleviate Cultural Barriers. Incorporating client voice also helps to alleviate cultural barriers that may exist among those who will be looking at your results. Quantitative data is extremely popular and widely used in western cultures; however, some other cultures more commonly rely on qualitative data. For those cultures, hearing that a program scored an average of 9 out of 10 on a survey may not mean a lot, but story telling is universal and hearing the client describe the impact they felt will go a long way.
4. Inspire Action. By humanizing the data and making it more memorable, you also help to inspire action. Because people care about people, those human stories will leave an impact and a desire for them to do more to help bring about even more stories like the ones they heard. This can help with future funding campaigns, grant applications, or with efforts to draw in program volunteers.
5. Empower Clients. In addition to all of the reasons stated above, incorporating client voice can also help to empower the clients you are serving. Giving them a chance to have a voice in the process and to share their story can be very meaningful for them. It also allows them to give feedback and share ideas of how the program can be even more impactful.
For all the reasons described above, we at C1C are passionate about incorporating client voice into the program evaluations we conduct. If you would like more information about how we go about conducting a program evaluation or incorporating the voice of your clients into that process, please feel free to reach out!