OCP Feedback Survey: Closing the books on 2023 and looking towards 2030

We love hearing from our partners and allies on what we are doing well and what we could do better. Your feedback keeps us honest and accountable. In 2023, our annual community survey became even more critical for us as we shaped our new organizational strategy, which we are very excited to share with you next month.

Here are our key insights from over 250 reformers in 71 countries, especially around the four community targets that help us measure the inclusiveness and effectiveness of our support: our Net Promoter, Capability, Peer Connection, and Resource Usefulness scores. 

This is what you told us, and what we’ll do about it:

Net Promoter, Gender, & Impact Priorities

We are humbled and grateful that we received an especially high Net Promoter score from our community this year. Net Promoter is a common measure of customer satisfaction, based on how likely our partners would recommend working with OCP. We received an 86 out of 100, returning to the record high score we received in 2021 during our intensive COVID-19 response and recovery support. Across the last five years, this puts us at an average of Net Promoter 82, exceeding our strategy cycle target of 80. 

We are also very pleased that we achieved one of the closest gender balances in survey responses last year, closing the gap between Men and Women from a 22% differential in 2022, to an 11% differential in 2023. More importantly, there was virtually no gap in our indicators across gender.

When we asked which issue areas are most important to you, we saw a deep alignment with our own increased investment in anticorruption, sustainability, and electronic procurement. These will be important points to double down on in our new strategy. 

Anticorruption, which nearly half of respondents listed as a top priority, has consistently been the #1 issue over the years, and this time was no different. Together with the global community, we were able to close out 2023 with a big advocacy win, with the UN’s first ever resolution on public procurement passed in December. In 2024, we look towards implementation of the resolution and participation at the International Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC) in Lithuania this summer. 

Sustainability is a newer, mid-strategy entry but has seen rapid and steady growth, coming in at #2 for the past two years. Our Open & Sustainable Public Procurement Toolkit remains one of our most used and highly rated resources, and in 2023 we expanded our program and support in green and climate action procurement—leading conversations with funders and implementers, and publishing even more impact and progress stories on this topic. 

Electronic procurement support continues to be a hot topic with our Africa partners, and increasingly so in the U.S. as well, where we plan to kick off landscape research in the coming months. Across the globe, our fully in-house data team continues to provide streamlined data and e-GP support on projects, and we have made incredible gains using data and digital procurement platforms to plan and deliver reconstruction in Ukraine with the DREAM team.

Capability

Capability is one area where we did not quite achieve our strategy targets, and in the final strategy average, 53% of partners reported a very high increase in their capacity to do open contracting work, coming in under our 60% target.

That said, through the years we have learned in what ways we can best support partners to achieve impact through open contracting, and these lessons will also be reflected in our updated support model and approach in the 2030 strategy. As we saw with the 2022 survey results, this most recent survey validated that deeper, more intense engagements are the most effective. We found that those who work very closely with us feel the most supported, find our resources the most useful, and are most confident in their increased capacity to affect change in public procurement. We have responded to this with more in-depth partner engagements, and in 2023 we launched our largest Lift accelerator cohort yet! With this in mind, we have also shifted our measurement of this target and will instead focus only on high-engagement technical assistance partners through project closeout surveys, recognizing that we have many approaches to collaboration. Organizations we work with more as allies, advocates, or co-implementers may not be seeking capacity-building support from us in the first place.

Peer connection 

While peer connection is a target that has evolved over the course of this strategy cycle, we felt in 2023 that we landed on the right metric, focusing on an actionable question around OCP’s role as an effective matchmaker, facilitator, and platform for inspiration: “How much has OCP helped you form useful or meaningful connections to other open contracting reformers?”

Both our 2023 score and our final strategy count landed on an average 6.9 out of 10, once again just shy of our 7.5 target. But we are proud of our ability to be adaptive and responsive to our community, and in this survey we continued to see a demand for peer connection and learning: 25% of respondents who shared an open-ended response specifically requested more opportunities to connect with and learn from other open contracting practitioners in their regions and across shared impact areas. 

We stepped up our support here and therefore received above-average scores in some regions such as the European Union, where we co-hosted a conference with 100+ procurement leaders from 25 European countries, and in Latin America, where we worked to build partnerships across government, the private sector, and civil society.

This year, we will do more to pick back up on global and regional community calls and webinars to facilitate peer learning across key topics, and we will continue to publish impact, progress, and data use stories on our website (one of your top 4 rated resources) for inspiration and examples of open contracting proof points. 

Resource usefulness 

In OCP’s 2019-2023 strategy, we saw our resource usefulness scores peak during 2020, as our urgently needed resources for the pandemic response were well-received by the community. We have consistently improved the quality of our resources throughout this cycle, leading to a pickup in 2023 scores. But ultimately, we did not reach that peak again and fell ten percentage points short of our ambitious overall strategy target of 80% of respondents reporting very high usefulness of our key resources.

Moving forward, we will continue to develop and publish high-quality content that meets the needs of the global open contracting community. We will hire a new Policy & Research Manager who will be dedicated to transforming team insights and technical assistance into practical and user-friendly how-to guidance for our community. Our website and OCDS documentation continue to be the most important resource repositories for our partners, and we will make ongoing improvements to ensure that the information you need is accessible and effective.

As ever, we are grateful to the many practitioners and innovators who shared their insights and ideas with us, and we look forward to continuing to create impact through better public procurement, through 2024 and beyond.