Thanks for taking the WPI Proven Practices assessment! Your results show your initial focus should be to Build Leadership Commitment.
A key principle of successful women’s philanthropy is to pause and assess opportunities for growth and support across your team. If you are a champion of women’s philanthropy in your organization, building consensus among your leaders will accelerate and strengthen your efforts. Making a compelling case for the “Why?” is a great place to start. By reviewing national research, and gathering in-house data, you’ll uncover opportunities that were hidden in plain sight for your leadership team to consider. You’ll help establish the validity of launching efforts focused on those who identify as women and how they prefer to give. Leaders will gain confidence that your organization can do this and that there will be significant and timely results to warrant the commitment.
Below are the first steps to build leadership commitment within your organization. Explore the tools to kickstart your efforts to mobilize your leadership team in aligning on a vision, strategic priorities, and resources that allow for real transformation and big outcomes.
Your First Steps
- Learn from others’ successes
- Read this blog, particularly about William & Mary
- Watch The Power of Curiosity
- Learn about national research
- Key WPI reports
- Women Give 21 explores how couples make charitable giving decisions
- Do Women Give More? examines basic gender differences in giving
- Where do Men and Women Give? provides insight about how people give to various causes, and their motivations for doing so
- Women Give 19 addresses the intersection of race, gender, and giving to understand the influence of diverse women donors
- All WPI research
- Choose data points that bring your story to life
- Sample Higher Education Data to Collect
- This template will help you begin to formulate what data is important in telling the story of your institution with respect to women's philanthropy.
- Sample Nonprofit Data to Collect
- If you are a smaller nonprofit with minimal capacity to review your data, here are a couple of easy analyses that can help you identify opportunities to grow women’s giving.
- Highlight achievable and time-specific opportunities
- Sharing opportunities you uncovered with your leadership may help them realize that the time is now to begin focusing on those who identify as women.
- Build your case for support
- Blend the national data, your organization’s data, and details of what is possible.
- Sample WP Internal Briefing.docx
If you're interested in additional ways to get started, explore Gather Women’s Input, Recruit Volunteer Champions, or Engage your Staff.