Our Own Medicine: Learning from Feedback at CEP

It will surprise no one that at the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP), we’re big fans of feedback. For more than two decades, we’ve been encouraging funders to seek confidential feedback to get a clearer sense of their impact, build stronger relationships, and improve their work. We’ve seen that when grantmakers share what they learn from the feedback they receive, it reinforces a commitment to improvement.

That’s why, earlier this year, we partnered with Harder+Company to collect candid, confidential feedback from our stakeholders — and why we’re sharing those results now. Harder+Company surveyed leaders and senior staff at hundreds of grantmakers, including both users of CEP’s assessment and advisory services and those that have not engaged with us as clients. In addition to collecting survey data, Harder+Company also held interviews with current and former assessment tool users and advisors to individual donors. In all, they heard from more than 300 survey respondents and three dozen interviewees. We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who shared their insights with us!

What We Learned from Your Feedback

According to Harder+Company’s report, our audience sees us as trusted and influential on grantmakers’ practices and effectiveness — 93 percent and 84 percent, respectively, agree with these descriptions of CEP’s work. We were also thrilled to see that 65 percent of respondents see our reputation as “excellent” — the highest proportion since we’ve started surveying our audience (nearly all others rate our reputation as “somewhat positive,” and only one percent view it as “somewhat negative”). Our reputation and trustworthiness are key to ensuring that CEP can positively influence the philanthropic sector through our research, programming, and assessments.

Our Resources

What’s more, nearly half of respondents told Harder+Company that they’ve used CEP’s resources to inform conversations with their boards. Most of those surveyed (88 percent) have recently engaged with the resources CEP offers. Our stakeholders are most likely to read our research reports on important topics in philanthropy — like this report on MacKenzie Scott’s giving — as well as use our blog and website. More than three quarters of those who engaged with those resources rated them as useful.

Other resources, like the Giving Done Right podcast and our conference, are described as helpful ways to hear from field leaders. In the words of one grantmaker, “(the research)… promotes discussion, it shines a light on some of the power contradictions in philanthropic practice.” Another shared, “I have increasingly turned to CEP as a resource as we’re trying to support practice and policy shifts within the foundation.”

Our People

Our people matter, too: in interviews with Harder+Company, our staff were described as “trusted advisors” and “benevolent nerds who have a commitment to rigor” (our colleagues particularly loved the latter descriptor when we presented the results of Harder+Company’s assessment at an all-staff retreat last summer). As one grantmaker shared, “Our CEP staff is so responsive and always trying to problem solve. I asked them a million questions. They are great at presenting these complicated things to our team and making it come alive.”

Our Services

For funders who have partnered with us recently on assessments or advisory services, we see that they are using their results to better understand their work, plan effectively, and inform decision-making. In interviews, funders told Harder+Company how much they value CEP’s ability to benchmark their ratings against their peers — along with the support our staff provides in making sense of the results.

Recent clients who have engaged with us on an assessment or advisory project told us that:

• They use their CEP data to drive change: 100 percent of our recent assessment and advisory clients have used CEP’s engagements to make changes and inform planning and reflection. These take place in a variety of ways: in how funders communicate with their partners, how they offer beyond-the-grant support, and how they think about their own impact, among other actions.
• They think peers should also use CEP’s services: 99 percent of recent clients would recommend the Grantee Perception Report, Donor Perception Report, Staff Perception Report, or CEP’s advisory services to a peer organization.
• They are highly satisfied: On average, our recent clients rated 6.5 on a 1-7 scale for their satisfaction with their recent experience overall.

We’re proud of this work and of our partnerships with hundreds of grantmakers to help them make continuous improvements in their work.

What’s Next? Assessing Opportunities for Improvement

The feedback we received also pointed to important areas where we can improve. Each team at CEP is digging into the results, and we’re using this data now to inform CEP’s strategic planning (more on this in 2025!).

• From grantmakers who work internationally, we heard that some of our offerings — our research and assessments, for instance — focus too heavily on the U.S. philanthropic sector. So, we’re considering how we can have more impact in areas outside the United States across our work.
• We’ll continue to focus on our core strength of data — collecting, analyzing, and sharing important insights about the philanthropic sector and individual funders’ own work. To build on this, we plan to explore the use of emerging technologies like AI to draw even deeper insights from our data and shore up our technology systems. As one interviewee told Harder+Company, “CEP’s superpower is data.”
• We’re creating additional resources to help our partners prepare for and customize their CEP assessments and are finding new ways to better support them in understanding and acting on the findings we share.

We always take our partners’ suggestions seriously. In fact, we’ve already made changes in response to other recent feedback — like offering more survey rounds each year and cutting report turnaround times by a month so we can get data to our partners more quickly.

We deeply value these insights on our work. Feel free to reach out to us to share your ideas on how we can improve.

Lastly, we are so thankful to the Harder+Company team for your partnership and thoughtful analysis, and to the hundreds of individuals who generously shared their insights with us.

Mena Boyadzhiev is a director, Assessment and Advisory Services at CEP. Find her on LinkedIn.