Unpacking the Community Review Process
As part of our ongoing journey to center equity, Good Measure’s commitment this year is to build community review into our program acceptance decision-making process. Community review engages diverse stakeholders in decision-making processes for program admission, grant funding, or other decisions that affect the outcomes or impact of program reach or strategy. In the nonprofit sector, decision-making is often concentrated with those who have historical power – typically the funders who underwrite the programs and the staff who are responsible for planning, delivery, and reporting. Community review processes seek to intentionally involve all individuals who have a stake in the program’s success, including beneficiaries of past or present programs and interested and engaged community members. This sharing of decision-making power can help to reduce bias in the selection process and shed light on access issues and challenges with the acceptance process. Below we unpack some of the lessons we’ve learned at Good Measure from implementing our own community review processes this year.
Map your Stakeholders.
It may seem obvious, but the first step in the community review process is to understand who the stakeholders are that you want to engage. This could be the same as your priority population (the clients you intent to impact through programming), however, it could include a larger audience than program beneficiaries. For example, Good Measure’s priority population is the Central Texas nonprofit sector and the funders who support them. Good Measure often engages stakeholders beyond this group (i.e. independent consultants, evaluators, local government representatives), however, all community engagement is in service to our vision of a nonprofit sector that creatively and strategically uses data and evaluation to amplify impact.
Stakeholder mapping can be done a variety of ways; one great tool that can help visualize a program’s funding, data, and influence is the We All Count Funding Web app – it’s free to make an account and use their funding web tool.
Be Intentional About Outreach.
This step is critical to ensuring that your community reviewers come from your priority populations described above. Building a strategic, intentional outreach plan to recruit community reviewers from your stakeholder groups is one way to move your equity practice from awareness to action.
There are many ways to design marketing and outreach practices to engage with your intended audience, and this is a great space to breakdown internal siloes and partner with your marketing and communications staff to develop a strategy that will work for your team and program. Our recommendation is to start with what you know; solicit community reviewers from your current marketing audiences, and from program participants and alumni. If the intention is to engage with a community that is beyond your known stakeholder groups, go to where they are – don’t make them come to you. Find neighborhood associations, community groups, church congregations, professional associations – this looks different for every program based on that stakeholder map you build in the first step. Don’t know where to start? Ask your alumni and use a waterfall approach; start building a list for outreach based on who you’ve talked to and who they think you should talk to next. Be intentional about this list, and take a step back at least once to ask, who’s not on this list that I was expecting? Who is overrepresented? Who am I really reaching vs. trying to reach?
Compensate Fairly.
The last year has reminded us that time is our most precious resource. As the world opens back up it is already apparent that people are being much more intentional about how they spend their time. Be upfront about the timeframe and hours commitment of the review process and show your audience that being a part of this process is valuable. Asking people to engage with you is a big ask – recognize it, honor it, and compensate fairly for the time it takes to be a part of the community review team. Compensation doesn’t always have to come in the form of money (although it should, if at all possible). It could be course credit, goods or services, program attendance, or coaching and consulting hours. Find what is meaningful to the folks you are hoping to engage with and offer it – and if you don’t know what that is, ask!
Close the Loop.
When the process is complete and program decisions have been made, remember to close the loop with your community reviewers. Make sure to thank them and, if possible, share with them how their support and feedback influenced the decision-making process and outcomes. Share how the process has been different because they have been involved. And, make sure to follow-up an ensure they receive compensation.
Incorporating community review into decision-making processes does take more time and intentionality, however, it is one easy way to move toward inclusivity and, ultimately, equitable decision-making processes. The nonprofit and philanthropic sectors are historically guilty of maintaining a status quo of “about us, without us” when it comes to designing, implementing, and evaluating program impact. We can flip the switch on this and share decision-making power by building authentic relationships through community review processes.
Interested in hearing about other community review processes at work? Check out our recent Partners In Measurement session and hear from United Way for Greater Austin, Austin Community Foundation, and St. David’s Foundation about how they are using community review in their grantmaking processes.