By Barbara Trenchard, JVA Consulting

There are many nonprofits out there doing fantastic work helping specific segments of the population with many different types of challenges.  There are nonprofits focused on helping the environment, nonprofits focused on helping kids and immigrant families with literacy issues, nonprofits focused on helping the population at large learn how to better manage stress and cope with the challenges of everyday life, etc.

All of this great work can become even better by adding a simple component into the mix:  feedback from the target population on the impact the program is having on them. That’s part of what we do in the Research and Evaluation group at JVA. By adding in this feedback, a nonprofit can make their program offerings even stronger, adding missing elements, or taking out ones that aren’t adding value.

By getting this sort of hard data on their program’s impact, organizations have powerful information to take back to their funding partners and have a solid basis to ask for continued funding and/or expand their offerings. But most important of all, they will have the information they need to make whatever service or product they offer even more effective and ultimately have even greater transformational impact on society.