The Client
The Metrowest Women’s Fund is a philanthropic organization dedicated to empowering women and girls through community grantmaking and fundraising. As one of their priority impact areas, Metrowest Women’s Fund aims to provide support for organizations and programs providing safety from violence for women and girls. In 2025, Metrowest Women’s Fund wanted to better understand the needs of these programs, particularly in light of changes to federal funding.
The Setting
The Yale Center for Customer Insights (YCCI) found that one of the most powerful drivers of charitable giving is when a nonprofit frames its mission as a solution to community challenges. To effectively adopt this solution-oriented approach, however, a nonprofit must first understand the problems at play, and those it’s best equipped to address.
In order to understand the problems within their own network, Metrowest Women’s Fund hired Market Street Research to speak with their non-profit partners — identifying where they could make the greatest impact and consequently inspire the largest appeal for donations.
Our Approach
When Metrowest Women’s Fund approached us to benchmark the current and future needs of organizations providing safety from violence, we understood the sensitive and timely nature of this research. Working with Metrowest Women’s Fund we sought to design a data collection strategy that would not only reveal the needs of these organizations but tell the story in a way that would make an impact.
Through qualitative research methods, we were able to go more in-depth and seek a nuanced understanding of the complexities of these challenges. Through confidential, in-depth interviews with over a dozen non-profit leaders, we learned how organizations were navigating decreased federal funding and planning for an uncertain future—but also that their needs went beyond the obvious fiscal demands. We were able to deliver Metrowest Women’s Fund with stirring, real-life examples of the real challenges facing safety from violence shelters and their clients.
Key Findings
- Current grant programs don’t meet the needs of non-profits. Throughout the interviews, it became evident that many non-profits, regardless of size, are finding that many grants are arduous to apply for, creating excessive strain on an already resource-depleted organization. For example, most grants are offered on an annual basis, which makes strategic future planning challenging. And many are designed to fund new projects, which consequently limits the ability of non-profits to fund existing work. These restrictions, coupled with the hours it takes to apply, make some grants feel more like a burden than a benefit.
- Financial uncertainty is only half the challenge. While decreased federal funding has a significant impact on how well safety from violence organizations can deliver protective services to women and girls, many leaders also say they have been struggling to recruit volunteers post-COVID. Further, among the non-profit leaders we spoke with, some anticipated cutting as much as 30% of their current workforce. In doing so, these organizations won’t just lose manpower but also the institutional knowledge and years of experience that tenured employees hold. These challenges have meant most organizations are unable to adequately match the needs of their community.
Impact
Through this research, we set Metrowest Women’s Fund up to help their donors understand community philanthropic needs and build a stronger relationship with their non-profit partners. Based on our findings, Metrowest Women’s Fund developed the Spruce Fund Grant to further support existing programs that address safety from violence.
They were able to design the grant to be more user-friendly, which reduced the strain on non-profits to apply. And by developing greater insight into the needs of their non-profit partners and designing a grant that met their needs, Metrowest Women’s Fund was able to support over 20 non-profits in their missions to provide support for women and girls seeking safety from violence.
In-depth Interviews allow us to capture rich insights from live or online one-on-one or small-group (dyads or triads) conversations that create the opportunity to probe further on individual experiences and personal motivations. We conduct in-depth interviews in Spanish and English to ensure participants can share their perspectives in their preferred language.
To learn more about In-depth Interviews and how conducting them can reveal your own audience needs and perspectives, contact us for a consultation today.