by Alexis Banks, Feedback Labs, with Priyanka Yalamanchili, Generation
When GitLab Foundation launched the Learning for Action Fund in 2024, it made a deliberate bet on listening, hypothesizing that nonprofits working on economic opportunity could have greater impact if they had the capacity to learn systematically from the people at the heart of their work. The Fund offers existing GitLab Foundation grantees up to $50,000 specifically for impact measurement, learning and feedback activities, with an explicit expectation that those learnings lead to action, whether through improved programs, or a stronger ability to demonstrate effectiveness to future funders.
The premise behind the Fund reflects something we at Feedback Labs have been saying for years: organizations want to listen better, but designing feedback systems that are genuinely useful, inclusive and actionable rarely happens without intentional support. It takes time, expertise and dedication to listen in high-quality, effective ways that lead to operational change
Unfortunately, that type of support is rarely funded. As we highlighted recently in a piece for the Center for Effective Philanthropy, 96 percent of foundations rely on feedback data collected by their nonprofit partners, yet few directly fund the work it takes to gather, interpret and act on that data. The GitLab Foundation's Learning for Action Fund is one of the clearest examples in the field of a funder actually closing that gap.
Feedback Labs' Role as a Technical Assistance Provider
As a technical assistance provider for Learning for Action Fund grantees, Feedback Labs offered individualized coaching to support organizations in strengthening their feedback practices. Over the past 16 months, we have worked closely with ten GitLab Foundation grantees spanning different geographies, program models and communities.
Their learning goals were varied, including understanding program satisfaction among participants, how to design programs for long-term employability and even whether a program was contributing meaningfully to the quality of life of its participants.
Our coaching approach was grounded in what Feedback Labs calls high-quality listening: practices that are inclusive, transparent and participatory, and that close the loop with those who shared their voices in the process. In practice, that meant working through very concrete questions with each organization, such as how to structure a survey to generate actionable insights, who to involve in designing questions to drive higher response rates, how to facilitate a focus group with participants who might not feel safe being candid and how to actually use the data once it came in.
What We Learned: Four Lessons from the Cohort
Across the cohort, a handful of themes emerged that we think have broader relevance for any organization trying to build a stronger listening practice.
Design for context to improve response rates. To strengthen response rates, cohort members explored co-designing questions with constituents or staff who had relationships with participants, leveraging existing touchpoints for data collection, keeping surveys short and closing the loop with constituents.
Match your methods to your learning goals. Before selecting a collection method, cohort members learned to get clear on their learning goals. Grantees used empathy interviews, SMS surveys, focus groups and more to gather actionable insights.
Collect demographic data responsibly. The cohort explored the ways that demographic data helps organizations strengthen equity by understanding the experiences of constituents from different backgrounds; and how demographic data has to be collected with care in order to foster trust and ensure constituent safety.
Make sense of feedback through dialogue, not just analysis. Several grantees found that the real learning happened not just from their initial analysis, but in follow up dialogues with constituents where they could gut check their initial understanding and surface ideas for program improvements.
Generation's Experience
We asked Priyanka Yalamanchili, Impact Evaluation & Data Advocacy Lead at Generation, to share what the coaching experience looked like from her organization's perspective, in her own words.
Generation is a global nonprofit that trains and places adults into careers that would otherwise be inaccessible and advocates to improve workforce system for everyone. We work across 17 countries, and since launching in 2015, Generation has more than 155,000 graduates who have earned more than $2.5 billion in life-changing wages. Our programs demonstrate an ROI of 3-7x relative to counterfactuals. We take impact measurement seriously and measure impact as advancing against three types of metrics simultaneously — breadth (e.g., total number of people served), depth (e.g., employment outcomes 3-6 months after the program), and durability (e.g., employment, income and well-being outcomes 2-5 years post-program).
When we applied to the Learning for Action Fund, we had a specific challenge in mind. Our research showed that income growth among graduates in lower-middle-income countries was slower than in higher-income contexts, and we wanted to understand why. Specifically, we wanted to know: what are the key barriers preventing our Kenyan alumni from achieving stable employment and financial health two or more years after graduation?
We had done significant groundwork before our coaching engagement with Feedback Labs began in December 2024. Our working hypotheses included limited access to jobs post-program, discrimination against certain populations and a range of structural and contextual factors. What we hadn't yet figured out was how to design a study that would let us test and deepen those hypotheses through direct engagement with alumni.
Like many organizations, we had historically relied on external evaluators for this kind of research. But, through our coaching sessions with Feedback Labs, we decided to shift to a different approach: designing and facilitating focus groups internally, with our own staff leading the conversations. Our team members had existing relationships with alumni and understood the cultural context in ways an external evaluator couldn't. They could read the room, pick up on what wasn't being said and create conditions for the kind of candid conversation our questions required.
Across the focus groups, alumni consistently pointed to a few key themes shaping their career growth: the quality and stability of jobs, the financial pressures of supporting households and the difficulty of navigating career transitions or entrepreneurship opportunities. Many also emphasized the importance of supportive managers, clearer promotion pathways and continued mentorship as they progressed in their careers.
One theme that stood out in part because of how candidly it was discussed was risk aversion among low-income alumni with dependents. Graduates spoke openly about how career decisions that might otherwise create long-term growth — changing industries, relocating, pursuing further training, or leaving unstable jobs — could feel too risky when household stability depended on their income. These conversations underscored the value of our methodology: because the focus groups were facilitated by people alumni already knew and trusted, participants appeared more comfortable sharing the tradeoffs and pressures shaping their decisions.
As a direct result, we are deepening our focus on aspects like mentorship and professional development support to alumni, including helping participants navigate workplace culture, all areas that go beyond our core offering of skills training and job placement support, but that our alumni told us were real barriers between where they were and where they wanted to go. The feedback didn't just inform our programming. It gave us the language and the evidence to make the case for those changes internally, and to think about how findings from Kenya might inform our work in India and across our global operations.
What Feedback Labs Learned About Coaching for Feedback
Looking across our cohort, a few things stand out about what made the coaching genuinely useful, and where we want to improve.
Grantees consistently told us that what they valued most was contextualized, actionable support. They weren't looking for a training curriculum or a set of templates (though those have their place). They wanted someone who understood their specific situation and could help them think through the real decisions they were facing, and an external perspective helped them see things they couldn't before. We also heard that the coaching helped organizations build more durable systems and stronger cultures around feedback work, not just one-off tools.
There are also things we want to do better. Several participants said they wished the framing at the start of each session had been clearer to optimize the time spent together. And almost universally, grantees expressed interest in a longer engagement. We're taking both of those signals seriously as we design the next cohort.
Looking Ahead
Feedback Labs is thrilled to be working with GitLab Foundation again for round two of the Learning for Action Fund, which kicked off in January 2026. We’re supporting several new grantees to strengthen their feedback processes and ultimately improve their programs and outcomes.
We’re grateful to GitLab Foundation for investing in its grantees' listening work. Organizations in this cohort are genuinely hungry for this kind of support. What they need is the time, the expertise and the funding to do it well. GitLab Foundation has shown that it's possible to provide that support in a way that leads to real changes in programs and measurable improvements in how organizations understand their impact, and we hope that other funders in the field will join them in providing financial and capacity building support for community listening. If you’re exploring ways to deepen community listening within your own work or portfolio, we’d love to hear from you.
