User voice: Putting people at the heart of impact practice

This report explains how charities can best harness the views and needs of their beneficiaries in order to improve their impact.

All charities exist for their users. Yet paradoxically, users often have little or no influence over the charities’ decisions, and no way to let the organisations know how they would like things to be different.

The concept of user voice—involving the people whom an organisation exists to help in the planning, delivery, and assessment of its work—has been adopted by many organisations in the international development sector. But the UK’s domestic charity sector is lagging behind.

In this report—produced in partnership with Keystone Accountability—we give a step-by-step guide to how charities can best harness a user voice approach, and highlight organisations already adopting various ways of involving and empowering their beneficiaries. We argue that a best-practice way of adopting a user voice approach is to integrate it into your charity’s impact practice. Doing so presents an opportunity for charities to become both more user-led and more evidence-based.

Let us know your thoughts on this report over on Twitter via @NPCthinks and @Keystone_Acc.

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