I am excited to tell you that Britt Lake has agreed to take the baton as the next CEO of Feedback Labs.
This announcement from our board has all the details, but let me reflect for a moment how far we have come - and why I am excited Britt will lead us into the next chapter. I will continue to support Britt, the FBL team, and the community on strategic initiatives in my new role as Senior Advisor.
Feedback Labs started in 2013 as a lunch group of innovative organizations and leaders exploring how they might ask three simple questions: “What do regular people want to make their lives better? Are we helping them get it? If not, what should we do differently?”
Thanks to early support and encouragement from the Rita Allen Foundation, Fund for Shared Insight, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the White House, Feedback Labs came into formal existence as a project co-hosted by Development Gateway and GlobalGiving. Other key founding organizations included Keystone Accountability, Ashoka, Center for Global Development, GroundTruth Initiative, Frontline SMS, Twaweza ni sisi, and Ushahidi.
Since then, our community has expanded to include international aid agencies, foundations, nonprofits, government agencies and impact investors. Over 500 organizations have now collaborated through over 110 Summits, Labstorms, pilots, and research projects exploring how good feedback practices can be the right, smart, feasible, powerful, and expected thing to do. We have worked together in places including Houston, Boston, Austin, New York, Hartford, London, Chonqing, Addis Ababa and many more.
Financial supporters and collaborators have expanded to include Omidyar Network, the Packard Foundation, USAID, DFID, Siegel Family Endowment, World Bank, GIZ, Global Delivery Initiative, GlobalGiving, Accountable Now, Liquidnet for Good, Nurse-Family Partnership, the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood, and the Oxford Said Business School.
Building on this momentum, the Labs is now focusing on helping the feedback community develop the tools and incentives to make good feedback practices the “only” thing to do. In this context, we have begun collaborating intensively with an expanded core group that includes Guidestar (now Candid), Charity Navigator, Listen4Good, BBB Wise Giving Alliance, Lean Data Initiative, Steve Goodall (former CEO of JD Power), and Bridges Fund Management. At the 2018 Summit, this group discussed with the community a draft set of core feedback principles, and is working on additional common standards and tools for the field as a whole.
No one is more qualified to lead Feedback Labs at this juncture than Britt Lake, who has been involved since the early days of the Labs’s founding. As Chief Program Officer of GlobalGiving, she has pioneered scalable learning tools and incentives for thousands of organizations in 170 countries - experience and expertise that will now be available to our entire Feedback Labs community.
I have worked with Britt for nearly fifteen years, both in her role at GlobalGiving and in her role on the Feedback Labs board. I am thrilled that she will now be leading Feedback Labs into its next chapter.
Please join me in welcoming Britt. I am proud of what we have achieved together over the last five years, but the best is yet to come!
Dennis Whittle
Outgoing CEO and CoFounder
Feedback Labs
