The Ms. Foundation and Strength in Numbers are excited to announce that we are conducting a survey to follow our ground-breaking work: Pocket Change: How Women and Girls of Color Do More with Less. We are asking you to support this work by reaching out to the organizations that are by and for women, girls and nonbinary people of color in your network. Thank you!
When does the survey launch and close?
The survey will launch on May 1, 2024 and close on May 31, 2024.
Is there an incentive for the survey?
Yes! The first 400 people who take a survey on the organization’s behalf will get a gift card for $25 if they want it (they can choose where the gift card comes from through a platform called Tango). They can also choose to enter their organization into a raffle for a $1,000 grant, one of which will be given to an organization that has taken the survey at the end of the survey period.
Can individual activists take this survey on their own behalf?
This survey is for organizations, so unless the individual activists represent an organization beyond their own individual activism, they might want to skip this one.
I’m worried that the organizations I’m doing outreach to have been contacted too many times before for this same survey. How do I make sure I’m not annoying to them?
We totally understand that everyone is trying to be as careful as possible not to bother people. If you are concerned about overlap, we are happy to double check the email addresses against our contact list. In general, it takes three times receiving information to take action on surveys and similar types of outreach, so it’s okay if you aren’t the first person to ask them. In fact, our outreach to the organizations addresses this directly.
What if I want to get in touch with folks some other way? Can I text this information? Can I post the link to the donor or grantee gateway on my website?
YES! Absolutely. The only thing we ask you not to do is post a link to the survey itself on an open page or social media.
I’m very busy and so are my grantees! Remind me why this is important? And how will you use the data?
Our first report found that foundations give $5.48 per woman or girl of color in the United States, which represents a very small fraction of overall philanthropic giving. While this data is now five years old, it has supported:
- Organizations that support women and girls of color to feel less alone in their common struggles to get resources they need and to make the case for the money they need;
- Public foundations and intermediaries to raise money to support existing work or expand existing work;
- Program officers of private foundations to raise more direct investments to women and girls of colors and organizations that support women and girls of color.
I’m sure we don’t have to tell you how much has changed since the first report! We are looking forward to updating the data and circulating it even more widely than the first report. We will also, as always, contribute to multiple larger conversations with donors and activists about how to increase resources for organizations by and for women, girls, and nonbinary people of color.
What if my contact lists aren’t organized to allow me to select organizations we work with that are “by and for women, girls, and nonbinary people of color”? What do I tell the person who manages our contact list or grantmaking database? And are their other criteria for taking the survey?
We hear you! Many grantmakers organize their work in different ways. We encourage you to select the broadest possible criteria when you select who will receive your outreach. For example, it won’t hurt if an organization that is for women but is not by and for women and girls of color receives outreach – they can get excited about seeing the findings and they will almost certainly NOT mess up the data.
One of the reasons we do this work the way we do is to cast the widest possible net, so we can describe all organizations that identify themselves as by and for women, girls, and nonbinary people of color. This explicitly includes cis and trans women and femmes and nonbinary people, as well as organizations that focus on a community within the broad umbrella of women, girls, and nonbinary of color. For example, we’d encourage organizations that focus specifically on Indigenous women or exclusively on Black girls to take the survey. We’d love it if organizations that work at the intersections of multiple identities take the survey, such as women of color with disabilities or lesbians of color who work in tech.
Organizations should have at least one location in the United States (please DO include territories and associated states, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands). They do NOT need to be a 501c3 or to have funding to take the survey.
If you have any questions about the survey or the data that will result, please don’t hesitate to let me know or email Strength in Numbers at [email protected]. We so appreciate your help and look forward to sharing survey results with you.