The Menstrual Health Needs Assessment: Elevating Your Community with Data
“It’s not always easy to convince someone a need exists, if they don’t have that need themselves.”
In her book, “Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men”, Caroline Criado Perez highlights how inequitable data collection & decision-making contributes to systemic bias against women. When data about the needs of women is not collected or considered, those needs go unaddressed. Until it became mandatory in the 1990’s, it was uncommon to include women in early-stage clinical studies. Research considered white men as a baseline, incorrectly assuming their data was representative of the entire population. As a result, women’s unique social & clinical needs remain under-researched and underfunded.
Data is power. Data drives every decision from product innovation to drug development funding to nonprofit program evaluation. The need for data, good data about a population is absolutely essential before approaching that population with any program. A menstrual health needs assessment can introduce advocates to a data-driven approach with simple and straightforward data collection.
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 people with periods 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 understand the needs of a population. Needs assessments are based on the entrepreneurial principle of “customer discovery.” I challenge you to see yourself as a social entrepreneur, because that’s exactly what you are! By virtue of being involved in the menstrual equity space, you are creatively solving problems. 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 access gaps are, who is being affected, and what other limitations are at play. With a needs assessment, you’ll interact directly with your community to align your work with their reported needs. No guesswork involved!
A needs assessment is NOT the same as academic research. It is informal, like a survey or interview.
Why is a needs assessment important?
In the non-profit sector, you never want to launch a program with your own assumptions clouding your perception of the true needs of the community. A needs assessment puts the decision-making in the hands of the population being uplifted, so you can be sure that the solutions you’re bringing fit the context of their community. With a needs assessment, 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 these answers can help you collect the right data and keep the scope of your assessment narrow.
At Penn State, our why was to learn:
- How many students were affected by period poverty
- 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
Your survey should be SHORT- it should take no more than 5 minutes, ideally closer to 2. You want your respondents to answer every question and not feel overwhelmed writing long responses.
Closed-response questions like multiple choices give quantitative data that’s easy to analyze and present. However, open-ended questions are equally important. You won’t always know the right things to ask- your community members might be experiencing challenges that you haven’t thought of. Open-ended options can reveal hidden barriers to menstrual equity and give you real, in-their-own-words stories from your community.
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. At Penn State, we defined 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 access period products? What action did you take?
- 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?
- Is there anything else you would like to share about the experience of menstruating on campus?
That final question revealed a whole host of issues: paid product dispensers were often empty, gender-diverse students regularly lacked access to disposal facilities, and options for period products at campus convenience stores were severely limited. An open-ended question was critical to getting answers to the questions we didn’t know to ask.
Publicize your survey
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”). Once your survey is created, the next step is to get responses! Identify who it is you want to reach. What are their demographics? Where do they spend time? How do they get information? Set a goal for how many people you want to reach. Aim for it to be statistically significant for the size of your population. At Penn State, we wanted to reach students who menstruated at all Penn State campuses. This meant we had to publicize the survey physically at our own campus and digitally to reach other campuses.
Methods to Publicize Your Survey
- Paper flyers on bulletin boards or in restroom stalls (with permission) including a QR code
- Social media
- 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 with it. Grab a cup of tea and read every open-ended response. Empathize with the people that just confided in you about their experiences with menstruation. Brainstorm action items to address the new concerns you learned about.
Be prepared to have oversights in your work called out. A huge benefit to this exercise is being told where your blind spots are, and you can take the opportunity to develop new programs to solve them. Use this data to align your work with the real needs expressed by your respondents. If you have the ability to communicate with your respondents (this can be difficult, especially with anonymous responses), evaluate your program efficacy with a follow-up survey.
With your closed responses, go back to your why and decide who needs to see this data to better support menstruators. What will your call to action for those decision-makers be? You could launch a social media campaign, give a presentation, or write a policy brief 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 & advocacy. Not everyone understands the nuances of menstrual equity, 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.
Like Perez wrote in Invisible Women, data about needs will help you convince others that those needs exist and deserve action. Continue expanding your work with what you have learned, but also remember to be generous with your data. Share your data with whoever will support you in your quest for change. 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 about working together, both with the community you’re elevating and the stakeholders who can help you implement infrastructural change.
