At POINT, when we talk about nonprofits, we think about the women who are running them. Here’s why: Since forever, women have been our community champions, seeing unmet needs and rallying our neighbors to help— organizationally and through grassroots efforts. Though it’s largely unnoticed, 3/4 of the nonprofit sector is women. Women in our communities work tirelessly to make them better places, and they do it all while scrapping together the few resources available.
But they shouldn’t have to.
Believe it or not, the nonprofit industry employs 1 in 10 Americans, making it the 3rd largest workforce in the U.S.
Women make up the vast majority of nonprofit employees. And like other women-dominated sectors (think teachers, nurses, social workers, etc.), they are under-resourced and overworked. That means over 9 million women go to work every day without enough resources to meet their community’s needs.
Community needs are at an all time high thanks to pandemics, inflation, climate change, racism, crumbling infrastructure and looming recessions. But the community heroes we rely on to keep us going need better tools.
Why? They’re underpaid, overworked, support their community in ways that go beyond a job function, and waste hours doing tedious tasks that could be automated with the right tools. That’s a recipe for burnout.
Even though these women make up the backbone of our community, the stress is unsustainable: 45% of nonprofit employees are looking to change jobs within 5 years. Plus, the Society for Human Resource Management reports that the voluntary turnover rate for nonprofit organizations is 19%. And volunteers can’t fill this turnover gap as 80% of nonprofits have challenges recruiting and managing volunteers.
Nonprofits struggle with employee retention and volunteer management plus they can’t keep up with increasing demand, all because they don’t have the right resources. Nonprofit employees waste hours each week on manual tasks that could easily be automated with the right tech, but the options they’ve relied on are overpriced and seriously outdated. They need better tools to save them time and money so they can pour more energy into
their community.
When we created POINT, we talked to hundreds of nonprofits (read, women) who told us that they’d been paying thousands of dollars for clunky tools that didn’t fully meet their needs, and were ignored by tech companies when experiencing issues. Is it any surprise that most of those tech companies are run by men, but the users were overwhelmingly women? It quickly became what sets POINT apart—we see, hear and act on what women community leaders tell us they need. Revolutionary, we know.
Our mission is to build *amazing* tools specifically for women leaders to find help faster and grow capacity to do more good in their communities. When we empower women, we make life better for us and all of our neighbors. It’s a win-win.
