Annual Report 2015

🎉Thanks to the organizers, coaches, and volunteers in countries all over the world, 2015 was an absolutely incredible year for Django Girls. 🎉

We released some awesome new organizer tools, hired our first staff member, became a charity, and merged hundreds of improvements to the Tutorial, Coaches Manual and the website! The Django Girls tutorial has now been translated into 12 languages, thanks to the hard work of our translation team and volunteer translators from all over.

In this report, we would like to highlight our achievements, present some statistics, and tell you all about the things that we - as a Django Girls community - made happen this year.

Sit back and enjoy!

Financial Transparency 💰🔍

Financial fundraising for Django Girls began in February 2015, when we started our Patreon campaign and budget tracking. In June 2015 we incorporated the non-profit Django Girls Foundation in England. While we're still working on the best way to present our finances, here is a first step: aggregated data about our expenses and income in 2015.

Expenses 💸

In total, we spent $6,095.80 USD in 2015. The Awesomeness Ambassador position encompassed the majority (70%) of all of our costs. The Awesomeness Ambassador is responsible for running the daily operations of the organization: responding to organizer's requests, handling our mail, doing administrative tasks, updating the blog and newsletter, and maintaining the website and resources.

Another significant cost was sending some Django Girls team members to EuroPython, but that cost was entirely offset by a generous grant from Divio. Their sponsorship completely covered the cost of sending 3 of Django Girls team members to EuroPython in Spain.

Income 🌟👀

We raised $37,157.5 USD in 2015. The most significant part of our incomes comes from one company: Elastic. Their generosity accounts for 60% of our overall budget for 2015: they donated $17,000 USD from the tickets sales for Elastic{ON} Tour event series, and sponsored our Awesomeness Ambassador position with an additional $5,645.19 USD.

We also raised almost 19% of our total income through Patreon. We're currently receiving $899 USD a month from 48 people or organizations.

Our total balance for end-of-year 2015 is $31,061.70 USD. We're incredibly thankful to all the generous people and organizations that donated this year and helped us secure a budget for even more activities in 2016.

Budget for 2016 💵💡

In 2016, we're planning to focus on the following initiatives:

• Make the Django Girls Foundation sustainable by growing our monthly recurring income to cover recurring costs. Currently, we need at least $1,500 a month to cover the costs of accounting, the Ambassador's salary, and the cost of other services we're using to maintain the website. We want to grow this revenue by focusing more effort on our Patreon campaign, reaching out to more organizations with a fundraising deck, and establishing a permanent online merchandise store. (T-shirts all the time! 👕)
• We would like to start the Django Girls Box: we would allow all organizers to order a free box of Django Girls stickers, room decorations, cheat sheets, balloons, pins and other small goodies that are almost always ordered for workshops 🎈🍬. We can significantly decrease the cost of that merchandise for all workshops by pre-purchasing them in bulk.
• We're expecting that the cost of hiring the Awesomeness Ambassador will increase next year for a variety of reasons, so we're preparing for that.
• We're planning to organize our first Django Girls Summit: a two days unconference where organizers could meet and share their experiences about Django Girls workshops. 👭👫

Success stories 💖

We don't have information on the number of people who became developers after Django Girls, and that information is difficult to gather. But it's an important metric. In this section, we're featuring interviews with some Django Girls attendees who've become professional developers since taking our workshop. We hope these anecdotes give you an idea of how powerful and life-changing attending a Django Girls workshop can be.

Agata Grdal is 23 and lives in Wrocław, Poland. She attended first ever Django Girls event at EuroPython, and started to work as Python Developer shortly after. She now also studies Computer Science and co-organizes local meetup for Python developers in her city.

Django Girls helped me gain more self-confidence and gave me a boost to keep learning. I've created my own blog and then prepared workshops and taught other women to code. Nothing is impossible with this bunch of crazy, positive people!

Catherine is 25 years old and lives in France. After attending Django Girls event organized in Paris, she decided to switch career and is now studying computer programming fulltime.

I was looking for a professional reconversion when I came across Django Girls, and it was my very first immersion into the programming world. It was wonderful! The learning pace was intense and thrilling, and the community, built around strong values, very welcoming. It encouraged me to keep looking into this field and I am now studying it full time!

Maria Lowas-Rzechonek is 32 years old and lives in Kraków, Poland. Since December 2015 she can proudly add "Junior Django Developer" as her new job title. She also co-organized Django Girls Kraków 2014 and was a coach at Django Girls Kraków 2015. Last Spring with a group of people, she organized a two-month weekly workshops for beginners to practise resolving simple programming problems in Python. Most recently she also got involved in the organization of the Krakow Python User Group and DjangoCon Europe 2016.

I wouldn't be where I am now if not Django Girls. I wouldn't have been so motivated to carry on learning programming if I hadn't participated in Django Girls at EuroPython 2014. I wouldn't have such a wonderful experience of Django/Python community, and probably I wouldn't get involved in local meetups because of that. I wouldn't have that great opportunity to practise and get my code public, if not Django Girls Winter of Code. Lastly, if not Django Girls, I wouldn't meet all those wonderful people, who actually get me in touch with people looking for junior developers. Learning how to program is a dangerous journey to go alone.

Päivi Suomela is 30 years old and lives in Sheffield, UK. After attending Django Girls London 2015, she got a job as a Junior Full-Stack Developer and now she works with Django, Python, C# and JavaScript on daily basis! In Autumn, she organized Django Girls Coventry at PyCon UK 2015 and she is about to run Django Girls Sheffield, which will take place in Feburary 2016. She’s also been involved with microbit worldtour project about writing Python for BBC Micro:Bit and enjoyed that a lot.

I first heard of Django Girls when it was just starting out and I applied to the first workshop but wasn’t selected at the time. I applied again when the workshop was in London in March 2015 and this time I got in. I had been learning to program on my own, but the workshop gave me the push I needed to get more serious about it and actually try to get work as a developer. It was great to hear stories of other women who had become developers despite not having studied CS at university and having already spent time working in other careers. It made me realise that I could do it too! I’ve also met lots of nice people through Django Girls and heard about different opportunities that I might not have been aware of otherwise.