The Menstrual Health Needs Assessment: Serving Your Community with Data
Back your work with data and serve your community with input from the menstruators who know it best: the ones living there!
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Back in June, I spoke at the Days for Girls East USA Conference about incorporating data into advocacy using a process that I call a menstrual health needs assessment. During my time as president of Days for Girls at Penn State, we used this method to shape our menstrual equity work with data from the menstruators who knew our community the best: the ones living there!
What is a needs assessment?
A needs assessment is exactly what it sounds like: a data collection process to take stock of and understand the needs of a population. Needs assessments are based in the entrepreneurial principles of customer discovery and “see-a-need-fill-a-need.” I want to challenge you to see yourself as an entrepreneur in service, because that’s exactly what you are! By virtue of being involved in the menstrual equity space, you are creatively solving community problems and filling gaps where they exist. Imagine that your community is your customer, and you want their need for menstrual health resources to be filled by your solution.
The work to fight period poverty can be time-consuming and expensive. It can be difficult to know where the product access gaps are, who is being affected, and what other limitations are at play, like a lack of disposal facilities. With a needs assessment, you’ll interact directly with your community members to align your work with their reported needs. No guesswork involved!
A needs assessment is NOT the same as academic research. It is an informal process, like a survey or interview.
Why is a needs assessment important?
In the field of service, you never want to go into a community with your own biases and assumptions clouding your perception of the true needs of the people you wish to serve. A menstrual health needs assessment puts the decision-making in the hands of the population being served, so you can be sure that the solutions you’re bringing fit the context of the community. With a needs analysis, program feedback can begin before the program has even started.
When you decide you want to do a needs assessment, the first step is to ask yourself why. What questions do you want answered? How will you use the data? Knowing the answers to these questions can help you collect the right data and keep the scope of your assessment narrow.
At Penn State, our why was to find out:
- How many students were affected by period poverty, in the context of missing class because they did not have period products
- How many students were aware of & using available resources for free period products
- If and how students were experiencing menstrual inequity due to a lack of access to disposal facilities and education
Asking the Right Questions
A digital survey tool is the easiest way to collect information and have your results in a neat location. Tools like Qualtrics or Google Forms will even do elementary calculations on your results for you (e.g. “20% of respondents chose A”). Your survey should be SHORT- it should take absolutely no more than 5 minutes, ideally closer to 2. You want your respondents to answer every question and not feel overwhelmed writing long responses.
Your questions can be a mix of open-ended and closed-response. Closed-response questions like multiple choices give hard, quantitative data that’s easy for you to analyze and present. However, open-ended questions are just as important for qualitative data. You won’t always know the right things to ask- your community members might be experiencing challenges that you haven’t thought to ask about. Offering an open-ended space can help you recognize the hidden barriers to menstrual equity and give you real, in-their-own-words stories from your community.
Give a space not just for community members to share their challenges, but to share solutions! Ask about where they would like to see period products or what educational content they’d like to see from your organization. Take the opportunity to collect data that allows you to shape your work longitudinally in alignment with the real needs expressed by your respondents.
Be specific! Leave no room for misinterpretation of your questions. Get & give as much detail as possible. Remember that “period poverty” is not a familiar term to everyone, so you need to be clear in your definition. At Penn State, we outlined parameters for our definition of student period poverty as whether or not an individual had missed class or work because they did not have period products.
Sample Questions from Penn State
- Have you ever started your period on campus and been unable to find or access period products? What action did you take in this situation?
- Have you ever faced financial barriers to accessing the products you need to manage your period?
- Have you ever skipped work or class because you did not have period products?
- Have you ever been unable to properly dispose of period products in an on-campus bathroom?
- What options are you aware of to access free menstrual products on campus?
- Have you ever used the free menstrual products located in the HUB bathrooms?
- Are there any other places on campus where you would benefit from having free menstrual products?
- Is there anything else you would like to share about the experience of menstruating on campus?
Our final open-ended question revealed a whole host of issues: paid product dispensers were often empty or broken, international students did not feel that they had sufficient menstrual health education to menstruate comfortably on campus, gender-diverse students regularly lacked access to disposal facilities in restrooms, and limited options for period products at campus convenience stores were a major pain point. Having that last open-ended question was critical to getting this information.
Publicize Your Survey
Once your survey is created, the next step is to get responses! Think back to the entrepreneurial principle of customer discovery and how you can characterize your “customer.” Identify who it is you want to reach. What are their demographics? Where do they spend time? How do they get information? At Penn State, we wanted to reach students who menstruated at all Penn State campuses, not just University Park. This meant we had to publicize the survey both physically at our own campus with flyers in bathrooms and also digitally via social media to reach other campuses.
Set a goal for how many people you want to reach. Aim for it to be statistically significant for the size of your population.
Methods to Publicize Your Survey
- Paper flyers on bulletin boards or in restroom stalls (with permission) including a QR code
- Social media flyers
- Newsletters to relevant student groups (e.g. Society of Women Engineers)
- Cold emails to organizations or offices asking to share the survey
I have the data. Now what?
Once you have your data, take some time to really sit down and analyze it. Compute percentages for closed-response questions, grab a cup of tea, and read every open-ended response. Empathize with the people that just confided their experiences in you. Brainstorm action items to address the new concerns you learned about.
Be prepared to have your oversights called out to you. A huge benefit to this exercise is being told where your blind spots are, and you can take the opportunity to develop new projects to solve them. When we found out disposal facilities were a problem for gender-diverse menstruators, we launched a campaign for students to report any bathroom with missing disposal facilities, regardless of designated gender for the space.
With your closed-responses, go back to your why and figure out who needs to hear this information. Who needs to know about this data to make decisions supporting menstruators in the community? What will your call to action for them be? You could share your data widely on social media to get the conversation going. You could give a presentation to your community, like I did at State of State (pictured). You could even write a policy brief for local representatives or student government including your data and recommendations. I have a B.S. in data sciences and now run data systems for a menstrual health nonprofit, and I’ve seen firsthand the power that data brings to service. Not everyone understands period poverty, but everyone understands when I say, “13% of our students have missed class or work because they didn’t have period products.” Numbers are universal communicators to all of your stakeholders.
Continue expanding your work with what you have learned, but also remember to be generous with your data. There are times when your voice isn’t the loudest at the table. That’s okay! Give your data to whoever will get it to the decision makers for real change to be made. Data gives you external credibility and a deeper connection to the people experiencing the problem you want to solve. The core of the needs assessment is all about working together, both with the community you’re serving and the stakeholders who can help you implement infrastructural change.
Interested in conducting a menstrual health needs assessment in your community and not sure where to start? Contact me and I’ll get you in touch with the power of data!
