A terrific example of the value of client feedback—Part 1

I love my clients, but some have a special place in my heart — those who generously give me feedback.

All the conferences I design and facilitate have a time and place for participants to share their experiences. But most clients don’t give me post-event feedback about my work or the event.

And that’s okay. After all, feedback benefits me, and it takes time and effort for a client to articulate clear feedback.

So when a client graciously takes the time to share significant and useful feedback with me, I am very grateful.

One such client is Rachel LaForgia, the Senior Program Director of The Peace and Security Funders Group (PSFG).

My work with The Peace and Security Funders Group

The PSFG is a community of practice headquartered in Washington, DC, that “connects and supports the global community of funders advancing peace and security efforts in order to build a more peaceful, just, and equitable world.” Its members include over fifty well-known international foundations, non-profits, and collectives.

PSFG has a deep appreciation for the importance of meeting design. Here’s what Cath Thompson, Managing Director at PSFG shared about this topic in a 2024 interview:

“…One thing that we have learned over the past several years is that we need to be designing our events with such deep intention to bring folks together to have the conversations that they cannot get elsewhere, to not be reinventing the wheel, and to create spaces where people know they belong, they can find their people, and they can also have these challenging and expansive conversations that lead to social change. So that, we see as the core of our work, is not just to design a whole bunch of programs, but to design them well, to bring the right people around the table together.
…In networks, the strength is in the collective wisdom of the participants. One of my colleagues said to me recently, “If PSFG members can just watch the recording after an event and get out of it as much as they would have if they had participated in real time, then we’ve done them a disservice.” So we try to design things so that we are both addressing the power dynamics that are inherent in the field of philanthropy and trying to dismantle some of that and also making it very valuable to people where they walk away knowing at least one new person, for example, or knowing something new, or engaging in self-reflection that helps them improve their own work. We do a lot of that and focus on that.”
—Extract from an interview with Cath Thompson of Peace and Security Funders Group (PSFG) by Alec Saelens on January 25, 2024

Rachel contracted me in 2022 for design consultation on PSFG’s first online peer conference.

One of the first things we did was a short exercise that helped us explore the essence of her desired meeting. I asked her to visualize and draw what PSFG wanted and needed the conference to achieve.

Over several meetings in 2022 and 2023, we spent ten hours reviewing and refining her excellent draft design. PSFG held their first online conference in May 2023 [“We just finished our first peer conference—people loved it! “], and a second in  May 2024.

I get feedback!

Right after the second peer conference, I was delighted to receive detailed feedback from Rachel. I share it here [in red] because it’s a terrific example of the value of client feedback.

“Reporting back from another fantastic peer conference! Our second peer conference was even better than our first. We had great feedback from participants and even had one participant interested in learning how to bring peer conferences to her own work (I recommended your book and blog!).

We made three tweaks this year that worked really well for us:

1. Peer session development process.

We added more scaffolding/support to the peer session design process and got noticeably better (clearer, more well-defined) peer sessions. We added some guided reflection around possible topics (including asking people to think about why their session mattered to this group). Then, we had them workshop their idea with a partner in a quick pair-share (this was intended to just have them speak their idea aloud, which in of itself can help them get more clarity, but also to get some feedback from a colleague).

After that, we gave them the option of either working alone or finding someone else to create a session (we wound up having a group of 6 people interested in a specific topic create a two-party session together, which was great). We also had them confirm any facilitators or speakers during this creating time, which made the voting/scheduling piece easier for us.  I copied the details below.

2. Full group share outs.

We asked for share outs at various points in our agenda, but found that asking for share outs after the individual retrospectives was really helpful both for us as organizers and for the participants. We had 4 participants elect to share their action items to the full group and it turned out in a few cases that participants in other groups had someone to offer that person around their action item. It was useful for us as conference organizers to know some of the things that actually came out of the conference.

3. Group retrospective.

We shifted this to a reflection exercise where we asked people to reflect on four things (LEARN, APPRECIATE, PLUS, DELTA), circle 2 of their top items from each category, write them on post-it notes, and then we did a gallery walk. After the gallery walk, we invited share outs on what people noticed. We made this shift because last year, we found that the plus/delta process wound up being mostly focused on logistics and we really missed getting insights into what the group noticed about themselves, so we tried to parse that out a bit. We also heard from the introverts that they did not like having to come up to the mic to share. This process felt more introvert-friendly, while allowing people to still “hear” from one another (via the post-it notes). I copied the questions we asked below in case it’s useful.

Here’s a quick run down of the peer session process and the group retrospective:

PEER SESSION PROCESS (Total time: ~45 minutes, probably could have used an hour)

ENROLLMENT AND INSTRUCTIONS (5 minutes)

• • We gave examples (from last year) of the conference agenda, explained how long the sessions were, etc.
  • (About 70% of the attendees had done the peer conference the prior year, but we did have a lot of new people this year–interestingly many new people wound up leading sessions)

BRAINSTORM AND REFLECT (5 minutes total)

• • If you could pick a session to hold at this Annual Meeting, using the people and resources around you, what would it be?
    • What topic or question would it address?
    • Who here could you enlist as an ally or speaker or support person?
    • Why does it matter? (Here and now)

PAIR SHARE (6 minutes)

• • Turn to a person next to you.
  • Person 1 shares the what/who/why of your session in 1 minute
  • Person 2 has 2 minutes to offer tips/feedback/ideas/ask clarifying questions.
  • Switch!

SESSION DESIGN (30 minutes)

• • Now that you have shared and gotten feedback, you have the next 15-20 minutes to further develop your idea.
  • Again, by the end of this time, the goal is for you to create a topic for one conference session that you feel like you could make some headway on in 60 minutes tomorrow, with the people in this room.
  • You have two options:
    • Work independently. You can draft your dream session by yourself.
    • Find friends. You just spent an hour listening to what other people want to do and what expertise they have. Is there anyone here you want to buddy up with to propose a session?
  • By 5:10, here is what we need from you:
    • A Title for your session
    • A 7-10 word description of your session
    • Who can lead it/speak on it (yourself or others–go find them and confirm they are on board before submitting)

GROUP RETROSPECTIVE (30 minutes)

Column 1: LEARN

• • What did you learn? About yourself? This community? Your work?

Column 2: APPRECIATE

• • Who or what do you want to celebrate or appreciate today?

  • Someone in this room? Yourself? One of your pair share partners? Maybe it was someone who facilitated a session or someone you met at the snack table

Column 3: PLUS:

What’s something you thought went well? What are the things you wouldn’t change, that you really appreciated about the Annual Meeting?

Column 4: DELTA:

Deltas are the things you might change or do differently next time.

Hope this is useful info–happy to hop on a call to debrief this further or answer any questions you might have.”

I love Rachel’s feedback! In Part 2 of this post, I’ll explain why, and what I’ve learned.