Opinions Needed- Women Donor Groups

Each non-profit's brand, ethos, and donor culture will be different -and that needs to be weighed carefully.



Research suggests that women are key decision makers or influencers in a significant majority of charitable decisions. If you don't have a specific strategy for connecting these guardians of wealth to your mission, you are missing out. However, the way you go about that needs to reflect your identity.



In my non-profit space, focused events for women tend to be part of the religious culture and are welcomed. These aren't built to exclude anyone, but focus on incorporating activities that reflect cultural and biological differences between the genders and invite those who desire to participate. If these events are pandering or patronizing, it is disrespectful and those invited ought to be offended. If events are respectful of the strengths, acumen, and success of your key female supporters. Acknowledge the unique value of their perspective and experiences as women and I think you can see huge success.

I agree that it sounds a little dated.  But your reasoning isn't.  Stats on women and giving are relevant.  I wonder if you could start a group with a good leader and didn't implicity state that it was a women's group?  But if it started small and had a core group...



I also think that you may reach a only certain group of donors.  The generations/genders/whatever all respond very differently to everything.  For a lot of non-profits, the trend seems to be the young professionals groups these days.  And I think that the more generous or active people will naturally gravitate to that group.  But then older folks may feel out of place.  Maybe there isn't one answer. Maybe in theory we can have committees (for lack of a better word) of women, or young professionals, or 40+, or 90+ and your donors just find the right group for them.



Ironically, 2 young professionals groups that I've worked with have both been almost solely women.

I agree that I think it depends entirely on the culture, religious/secular focus of your organization, the political majority of your donors, and the branding you place on the activity. Our nonprofit, for instance, is based within a religously conservative environment, so there are several local groups that have male/female activities, groups, and events, and all are well received. In general, our political culture favors events that empower women, even if the same may not be said about events for empowering men, and you can probably hit off a very successful women's group if the branding is well-planned. If you are concerned about backlash from gender-erasure movements, I would simply say that I attended a local Womens' Retreat, and a couple of women hauled their husbands along with them. As far as I know, nobody was checking people's birth certificates at the door to bar entry if you weren't a woman.

I agree with the others that it depends on the organization and the purpose of the group.  Like the foundation that focused on women's issues, the same can be said for working at an all girls school.  We did have female influencers, active women, women of recognition that were involved or got involved with the school to empower the girls on campus in their future goals and endeavors.

The example I have a particular group as it were is that one of the alums wanted to fund a scholarship and use the power of a group to do it.  So -- in order to provile a full scholarship to a student over their time as a student with us.  So the alum and one of our development team members worked together to gather a group of 30 women that would all pledge the same amount over the same time period to cover the tuition and expenses for one student.  The project sparked interest and so every year we were adding one or two new groups of 30.  Each group was referred to as a circle.  The only way that they were differentiated in RE was that they had a pledge to that particular scholarship program.  They did not have a special consitit code or attribute or anything.  And reporting or pulling mailing lists etc. worked fine.