Social challenges are complex. We have hundreds of projects that address social issues around the world. One of our core values is to never settle, so we're trying to improve how we measure the effectiveness of your donations and how we help project leaders best meet the needs of their communities.

At GlobalGiving we've learned that one of the best ways we can contribute to social change is to develop better feedback loops. We are committed to finding better ways for stakeholder voices to be heard in the development process. With initial funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, our Storytelling Project is an experiment in collecting community feedback. We've started by recording thousands of stories told by people from areas where GlobalGiving partners work.

In 2010 and 2011, teams of over 1,000 local Kenyan and Ugandan scribes have collected 57,191 stories from over 5,000 community members by asking a simple question: "tell us about a time when a person or an organization tried to change something in your community."

These stories have covered a wide range of topics, problems, and solutions. So far, the community members have named more than 1,000 organizations related to something happening in their local communities, but we're far from done; we received 1,000 stories per month from 2010-2012 from towns and cities across Kenya and Uganda; we are now working to open up the storytelling project to all regions. We are also building and testing tools to turn these stories into data, which turns out to be no easy task. But in the spirit of "Listen. Act. Learn. Repeat." we will continue searching for better ways to complete feedback loops between communities in need and the organizations that serve them.