A simple guide for consolidating feedback
While many nonprofit professionals have been asked for feedback on development and communications materials, a handful of us have been assigned the potentially daunting task of consolidating that feedback. Whether for internal stakeholders or external partners like Big Duck, sifting through a pile of your colleagues’ notes and deciding what to implement is more manageable with a strategic approach to the consolidation process.
After all, simply placing all the feedback you’ve received in one easy-to-reference place is only the beginning. There will likely be conflicting ideas that need to be resolved, ideas that encourage reflection rather than prescriptive solutions, and ideas that need to be weighted relative to the corresponding stakeholder’s role in the project. And while feedback consolidation is rarely as quick and straightforward as we’d like it to be, ensuring one member on your team is responsible for leading that charge is your first key to success.
Whether you’re collaborating with a formal committee or informal working group, here is a simple six-step guide to help you effectively consolidate feedback:
1. Map your stakeholder landscape.
Before collecting feedback, it’s important to build a strong (i.e., specific and transparent) foundation for the consolidation process. Who are the topic experts you’ll need to engage? Whose buy-in do you need to secure? Who’s the final decision-maker or approver? You can use and adapt several existing frameworks for this initial mapping: RACI, DARCI, DACI, or MOCHA. But if your team already uses a specific framework, that’s probably your best bet to reduce the learning curve. This foundation will determine not only who needs to review content and when, but how to weigh the feedback you receive relative to each colleague’s expertise and role in the project.
2. Plan intentional touchpoints.
The good news is that not everyone needs to offer their feedback at every step in the process. Your topic experts, for example, are likely required early in the process to ensure complex ideas, programs, and initiatives are represented accurately. But your senior leadership team likely doesn’t need to engage until later in the review process when the deliverables are more fully fleshed out. A small core team of contributors, however, is often key for continuity through each step of the process.
Then there’s board buy-in to consider: how necessary is that, both in terms of your governance structure and organizational culture? This is where project management becomes both an art and a science. Who bravely embraces new ideas and change, and doesn’t need to see more than an almost-final draft? Who needs to have the surprises they encounter minimized, requiring engagement earlier in the process? There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, so this is where thoughtful consideration meets trusting your instincts while course-correcting when necessary.
3. Center transparency and consent.
Once you’ve got your stakeholder map and intentional touchpoints on paper, it’s vital to ensure everyone involved is both aware and supportive of your plan. After all, it’s never too early for radical transparency and informed consent! The fastest way to derail a project is forgetting to tell your team what the plan is, and neglecting to confirm your colleagues are clear on and comfortable with their roles and level of engagement. You can avoid or minimize frustration and bottlenecks down the road by establishing this precedent for transparency and consent. This step is easy to miss in our often fast-paced and high-stakes work. Still, this alignment is necessary for more effective accountability as you move through the feedback and approval process together.
4. Context is key.
Most of the folks you’ll be asking for feedback are juggling crowded inboxes and sprawling to-do lists. It’s easy for folks to “lose the plot” as I call it, reviewing content without consideration for what phase of the project you’re in. When sharing materials with your colleagues, be sure to ground them in a specific context. What work has already been done, culminating in this particular draft? What kind of feedback is most supportive at this stage in the project?
Having someone review content devoid of process context is never a good idea. If you don’t communicate you’re looking for broad strokes alignment around an early messaging draft, you’ll almost certainly receive line edits that would be more supportive down the road. Showing someone an “almost final” draft without explicitly asking for line edits could inadvertently invite big-picture feedback around reframing the entire deliverable. Context is key here, so help your colleagues help you!
5. Sort and probe.
Once you’ve collected your contextualized feedback, it’s time to begin sifting and sorting. A great place to start? Identify your lowest hanging fruit: suggestions that can be immediately and easily implemented. These are ideas and edits appropriate for where you are in the process, aligned with the goals and parameters for the deliverable, and don’t require further clarification or discussion. This is also when you can filter out feedback that does not need to be implemented. Then, you’ve cleared the way to address any comments that require further discussion.
Detailed and specific feedback is best, so don’t be shy about asking thoughtful follow-up questions. If a colleague says they don’t like the color of a new logo, don’t be shy about asking them to share more about why that color isn’t working for them. Are there other colors they were hoping or would prefer to see? Suppose there is contradictory feedback that can’t be easily resolved by filtering it through the lens of your stakeholder map. That is a great time to circle up the relevant parties for a probing discussion. You’ll want to make sure folks are aligned around a single solution to advance before implementing.
6. Create an implementation roadmap.
After tying up all the loose ends of your now consolidated feedback, it’s time to communicate the requested adjustments in a straightforward and concise manner. Approach this like a roadmap: could a stranger pick up your directions and successfully navigate to the desired destination? No matter who’s in charge of implementation, they are almost certainly not a mind reader. So, be sure to present the feedback in a way that someone who isn’t in your head will be able to understand and act on.
It can be tempting to default to “Let’s hop on a call to discuss our feedback.” And while real-time conversation is a great tool to address follow-up questions or concerns, we recommend sharing feedback in written form first. While some of your colleagues will be verbal and auditory processors, you want to ensure your feedback is accessible to visual processors and folks who need time to chew on input before chatting about it. Conversation can be a handy shortcut and sometimes necessary space to unpack complicated ideas, particularly when timelines are tight. However, having a paper trail for developing your deliverables is a step your hindsight will appreciate.
Encountering bumps in the road throughout the feedback consolidation process is to be expected. But following the six steps outlined in this guide will help set you and your team up for a smooth(er) ride.
