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David Bonbright

David Bonbright is founder and Chief Executive of Keystone Accountability, an organization whose mission is to improve the effectiveness of social purpose organizations by developing better ways of planning, measuring and reporting social change. Over the past three decades, as a grantmaker and manager with Aga Khan Foundation, Ford Foundation, Oak Foundation, and Ashoka, David has sought to evolve and test innovative approaches to strengthening citizen self-organization for sustainable development.

Posts by David Bonbright

This Time It’s Personal

  As organizations start to get serious about feedback, things inevitably come to the moment where feedback gets personal. To be really useful, feedback must touch on an individual’s performance.   This is tough stuff. People resist feedback in many different ways. A growing part of Keystone Accountability’s Constituent Voice work with organizations is to help staff recognize auto-immune-type […]

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Feedback as Democracy in Social Change Practice

  A huge shift is happening in the social sector. Dennis Whittle traces it all the way back to the birth of democracy in Greece circa 594 BCE. The people are sovereign! In titling our special theme ‘Beyond accountability: feedback as transformation’ we are signalling that the long march of democracy has arrived at our doors. When we say […]

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Jim Kim’s Bold Vision of Beneficiary Feedback in Development

  At the October 2013 World Bank annual meetings bank president Jim Kim committed to an extraordinary vision of collecting beneficiary feedback for 100 percent of projects with clearly identified beneficiaries. The World Bank locates beneficiary feedback as a subset within the larger theme of citizen engagement. Other elements of citizen engagement have been part of […]

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For The Love Of Business

  In order to avoid giving offense to living persons, Mark Twain embargoed his autobiography for 100 years. Among those he would have offended were America’s first titans of industry, the “robber barons” who were his contemporaries. From the man who coined the term Gilded Age, I guess this is no surprise. But what did […]

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Stimulating Demand For Constituent Feedback

Obviously, this is not a demand curve. (left) It could be seen as a “need” curve. David Bonbright takes us here, looking underneath supply and demand at the current state of constituent feedback and the need to increase and sustain the market conditions that can, in turn, generate the  feedback we need for high-quality programming […]

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