Subject: Involving beneficiaries
What are your views on the pros and cons of beneficiary involvement in strategy development? What are the challenges? What approaches have you used that you can share learning about?
This comment was last edited on Feb 12, 2010
The organisation I used to work for actually invited a service user to certain board meetings. This informed the board on how the decisions before them impacted on the service user, at the same time as giving the service user a feel for the challenges the charity faced, especially in respect of funding. I have never come across this since, is it common practice?
This comment was last edited on Feb 12, 2010
The first step in working out where you want to go, is knowing where you are. An organisation can't develop an accurate understanding of this without stakeholder engagement.
An NGO should always have a system for generating qualitative and
quantitative input from its stakeholders, from grass-roots to management.
Firstly, if they don't - where's their M&E (Monitoring & Evaluation)
system? Secondly - how are they proving their impact to donors? Thirdly - what
are they assessing their project need against?
Stakeholder research and participatory engagement is often hugely
underestimated in the planning process. I think this is occurring due to a lack of
understanding of its relevance, but also because many organisations don't realise
that they are already doing it to some degree - so aren't capitalising on it.
