2020 was a crazy year, and for all kinds of reasons, most of us are glad it’s in the rearview mirror. Spring is springing, the pace of the vaccine rollout is picking up, and we’re beginning to see glimmers of hope that we’ll be able to see our friends and loved ones—and fellow girlfriends—in person before too much longer.
But before we completely turn the page on 2020, we’d like to share some highlights of the 2020-member survey, along with information about some of the ways the organization is responding to the feedback.
246 girlfriends completed our member survey in December 2020, coincidentally, the same number as completed it in 2019. A few stats:
Age of participating girlfriends
Respondents self identified as...
length of membership
Girlfriends were largely positive about 2020 activities, and very appreciative of ninety-nine girlfriends’ efforts to keep things going during the pandemic.
And what a lot of activities there were! When we counted everything up for evaluation in the survey, we realized that ninety-nine girlfriends sponsored 32 separate programs and activities in 2020 across a wide array of topics and in a variety of modes.
Not surprisingly, COVID and the need to do everything virtually were barriers to participation and to members feeling involved in 2020. Zoom fatigue is real. Nonetheless, nearly three-quarters of girlfriends participated in at least one program or event and 43% were involved with a team or committee. A few highlights:
The vast majority of girlfriends who participated in workshops, forums or the key member events (e.g., Grantee Partner Showcase and Meet the Finalists) rated them “excellent” or “very good.”
The Love & Gratitude Event, Meet the Finalists and the Implicit Bias Workshop were most popular—rated “excellent” by 6 in 10 of those who participated.
Though relatively few girlfriends took part in special programs such as “Let’s talk about XXX,” or the “Spotlight” series, those who did also generally found them worthwhile, typically rating them “excellent” or “very good.”
More than two-thirds of those who participated in “Let’s talk about Climate Action” or the Spotlight Series, “Improving Stewardship of the Natural World,” rated them excellent.
Communication
As in past years, some girlfriends shared frustrations about not having been aware of programs or opportunities—something that was perhaps particularly an issue in this year when we were more dependent than ever before on email and our computers. Even prior to seeing results of the survey, the Communications Team was thinking about how to streamline communications to the ninety-nine girlfriends community, but the feedback has strengthened their commitment to this goal. Specific changes you may have noticed over the past several months include:
A regular cadence of member updates coming to us by email every 2 weeks.
An increasingly rich blog (Blog: Stories with Heart), featuring stories about our grantee partners, about members, and about other topics of interest to girlfriends.
Connections
Members’ top reasons for belonging to ninety-nine girlfriends have remained very much the same over the years: to leverage personal dollars for impact (83% of those who answered), to make a difference in the region (82%) and to meet and connect with other women (66%). This last goal was tough to achieve in 2020, and members clearly have a deep hunger to make more connections with one another.
A major theme of participants’ open-ended comments was the desire to meet and interact with other girlfriends in small group or one-on-one formats. Follow-on discussions to presentations, get-to-know-you gatherings and even informal walks and book groups were suggestions that came up multiple times. Though everything is still necessarily virtual, two new programs initiated in 2021 aim to begin to fill some of this yearning for more connections:
Conversation Circles will pick up on the popular “Spotlight series” idea from last year, providing girlfriends with opportunities to do a deeper dive into one of four areas of key community interest with other women: “Strategies for Social Change,” “Women & Power,” “Homelessness in our Region,” or “Impact/Sustainable Investing” (Conversation Circles).
New members can meet other girlfriends in an informal setting in one of several New Member Connections gatherings (New Member Connections).
With five years of experimentation and experience as an organization, and the disruption of the last year as a catalyst, leadership of ninety-nine girlfriends is approaching the coming year with real openness. The organization’s pillars remain the same: we exist primarily to serve our community through targeted grantmaking and to develop a strong, well-informed group of women grant makers through member education.
Grantmaking
Through the survey, members communicated willingness to be flexible in responding to community needs. Though the organization was founded with the idea of providing as many $100K project-based grants as the budget allowed, membership largely supported the shift to a “trust-based philanthropy” approach in 2020, which enabled us to support a larger number of area organization with smaller, more general-purpose grants. The Grants Committee is committed to being even more responsive to community needs in the coming cycle, and has begun by inviting last year’s grantees to provide feedback on the grant application process.
Though feedback on the “Meet the Finalists” event and the voters’ guide was mostly positive, there is always room for improvement. One concrete change for 2021: for the first time this year, the team that develops the voters’ guide will be involved in the grantmaking process throughout the whole cycle. We hope this will ensure a better integration between the information provided to members via the voters’ guide and “Meet the Finalists” event and the voting process.
Member education
Topics related to improving racial equity consistently scored highest with members as priorities for member education and grantmaking, alike. And the organization is investing in this in a big way in 2021, first and foremost through the engagement of Stephanie Montgomery, a racial equity consultant, who will be working with leadership on an adaptive planning process to embed racial equity and inclusion throughout the organization (Stephanie Montgomery announcement). There will be much more to come related to this process in the coming months.
As noted above, girlfriends identified four primary topics of community interest which will guide 2021-member education programming: “Strategies for Social Change,” “Women & Power,” “Homelessness in our Region,” and “Impact/Sustainable investing.” Embedding racial equity and inclusion will be an over-arching theme running through all of the organization’s programs this year.
This is just a taste of the many ways member feedback is driving programming and planning for ninety-nine girlfriends’ sixth year of collective grantmaking. Thank you to all of you who responded to the survey, and to every one of you who contributes your money, your good ideas and your hard work for our shared community.