Impact Report 2016-2017

Django Girls Foundation is an initiative that aims to introduce women and girls who never coded before to the world of technology and increase the diversity of the tech industry. We achieve this by organising one-day workshops and inviting women to come and learn how to build the internet using HTML, CSS, Python and Django. Django Girls is a volunteer run organisation with volunteers all over the world. Django Girls has two part-time paid staff members and the support team (six awesome ladies who are also volunteers) to help provide support to all other volunteers.

This Impact Report aims to celebrate achievements of the Django Girls community in the past two years, and showcase the incredible growth of the organization. For the first time ever, we're also presenting results of a survey we conducted with almost 600 past Django Girls attendees to see if Django Girls Foundation actually achieves the goal of our mission: to bring more women into tech industry!

✨ Highlights ✨

👭👫👬 Django Girls community grew to 1069 volunteers who have organised 377 free workshops with 102 more being currently planned. That's more than 3000 hours of happy coding!

👩‍💻 21% of participants in our survey started working in tech after attending Django Girls workshop. 👉

💯 In the last 2 years we improved our tools to support the growth of the organisation, maintended our free online resources (our tutorial is now in 14 languages!), started Django Girls Store as a fundraising effort, shipped 146 organizer kits and more. 👉

📈🎉 In July 2017, on our 3rd birthday, we also celebrated our 10,000th workshop attendee 👉

🎓 We learned that 79% of Django Girls alumnis are still learning programming after the workshop. 👉

📚 693,524 people used our free online tutorial in the last year

Growth 📈

Map of Django Girls events from January 2016 to July 2017
2014-2015 2015-2016 2016-2017
Number of Django Girls workshops51122188
Number of participants16814129~4373*
Number of cities42102163
Number of new cities-79108
Number of countries264854
Number of new countries-2813
Unique users reading our Tutorial73,392313,064693,524
* Gathering events data on number of participants is delayed.

Foundation's Activities 👩‍💻👩‍💻👩‍💻

🌎 Maintenance & translation of our free online resources

The curriculum we developed Django Girls Tutorial is used in our workshops to introduce attendees to web development using Python and Django. The tutorial has been published online for free to allow everyone to learn without the need to attend an in-person workshop.
We are proud that the tutorial has been now translated into 14 languages We are thankful to all the volunteers who have made this possible.

The popularity of the online tutorial keeps growing significantly faster than our in-person workshops. In the second year it gained a 328.95% increase in the number of unique users who used the tutorial, and 121.53% increase in the last year. Since the tutorial as been published, it's been read by 1,068,995 of people!

🎁 Organiser Starter Kits

We realised that there are certain things such as room decorations and swag (stickers, buttons and tattoos) that are needed by all event organisers. We lowered the costs of decorations and swag for each event by ordering them in bulk from suppliers and stock them in the Django Girls shop. Organisers then order the Organizer Starter Kit from our shop for a small donation, and we donated a number of them to events organised in developing countries. We are super excited that we managed to introduce the Django Girls Starter Kit in 2016.

Since the introduction, 146 events have received their starter kits which has helped them make their events awesome! Out of those, 28 were donated for free for events in need.

💰 Fundraising

Most of our funds were generated through corporate and individual donations through Patreon, an online donation management system. In 2016, we also managed to introduce Django Girls shop where we sell swag such as t-shirts, socks and tote bags as a way of making the charity sustainable. Details of how much was raised in 2016 are shown in the table below:

Activity Amount Notes
Patreon donations$12,546.71Patreon donation have been steadly decreasing in the last months
Django Girls Store£7,258.00
Organiser Starter Kits£701.80

Participants Survey

We have celebrated reaching our milestone of 10,000 workshop participants by conducting a survey to see how Django Girls alumni are doing after attending the workshop in their city. We reached out to our former attendees and received an overwhelming response from 519 awesome women who shared with us their experiences with Django Girls and how attending the workshop changed their lives.

The ages of the respondents ranged from 14 to 65 years, with 71% being under the age of 30. This shows that Django Girls workshops are open and welcoming to women and girls irrespective of their age, as long they have an interest in technology and learning programming

We'd like to acknowledge that even though the total number of responses received is a significant representative sample of the Django Girls alumni, it is likely that most of the women who responded to our survey stayed active in the tech industry after attending our workshops and hence the results could be positively skewed.

Participants’ Involvement in Tech Activities

We asked the respondents if they were involved in tech-related activities after the workshop. The tech activities included attending tech events, organising Django Girls and similar tech events, coaching at Django Girls workshops, teaching or working in tech, working on coding projects and enrolling for programming courses.

We were excited to learn that 73% of the respondents are still involved tech-related activities after the event.

These statistics show that our workshops are generating interest in technology and programming in the participants who attends them. This interest then results in them organising other workshops and tech events as well as attending tech events for some of the women. These findings prove that Django Girls workshops have been a successful intervention to increase the number of women involved in engineering and programming.

Participants’ learning to code after the workshop

We were also interested in finding out whether our former participants continued learning programming after attending the workshop.

79% of women attending Django Girls workshop continued learning programming after and 7% were planning to continue learning

1% of participants had tried and given up while 13% had not continued learning programming after the workshop.

The findings showed that the majority of the women who attend Django Girls workshops continue learning to code after. The women continued learning in various ways; some on their own, enrolling for online coding courses or enrolling into universities. These findings show that Django Girls is indeed increasing the number of women in the programming field, who will one day be employed as programmers after they have developed their programming skills.

Participants’ Employment in Tech after attending workshops

The biggest question we were interested to answer was to know how many of the women started working in tech as developers after attending the workshop.

We were impressed to learn that 21% of Django Girls' former attendees are now hired as developers after attending the workshop!

It was also interesting to note that 15% of the attendees of were already working in tech and hence their newly acquired skills made their jobs better. About 23% had not yet got jobs as developers but were still developing their skills so they could get jobs in the future while the remaining 40% had not got tech jobs and did not indicate their future plans.

This further affirmed that our work has had positive results in the lives of women we introduced to coding as well as the tech industry that hires these women. We are proud that at least 109 women now work as developers after attending the workshop. This is a big achievement which we are happy about!

Impact of Django Girls workshops on Participants’ lives

We were also interested in learning other ways the participants had been impacted by attending a Django Girls workshop.

The survey showed that 93% of the participants had been impacted positively in different ways.

The survey showed that about 43% had been inspired by meeting other women in tech resulting in them becoming more involved in tech by organising tech events and attending other tech events. Many of these women were so inspired to learn that the tech industry and programming are for women as well.

About 25% had been excited that learnt new knowledge about technology, programming and web development; gained experienced and experienced personal growth. About 14% of the participants had been happy to have been able to meet new friends and new connections within the tech industry whom they have kept in touch with since the workshop. About 11% of the participants had changed their career path and became interested in a career in the tech industry prompting them to continue learning to code so they could one day become developers. Only 7% said there was no remarkable impact on their lives due to participation in the workshop.

Summary

The findings show that Django Girls has been successful in inspiring women to fall in love with programming as participants are exposed to women who are in the programming discipline within their own communities. The friendly environment that Django Girls workshops provide enables women who have never programmed before to learn to code and thereby arousing interest in tech and causing many of these women to work towards a career change and aim to be employed in the tech industry. The friendly environment also creates an atmosphere for making new friends and creating new network connections, fostering the beauty of the Django community which strives to be welcoming and diverse.

#IAmDjangoGirl

On our third birthday, we asked our Twitter community to tell us about the ways Django Girls impacted their lives. The response we received was overwhelmingly positive:

See more success stories 👉

Sponsors 📢️

Again, we would like to thank amazing sponsors of Django Girls and of the individual Django Girls workshops all over the world. They help us make Django Girls sustainable and more importantly, they help local organizers keep their events free. We want Django Girls to be accessible to many people as possible, and that couldn't happen without them.

Elastic

Known for Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash, Elastic creates products to to search, analyze, and visualize your data, allowing you to get actionable insight in real time. Before becoming one of our biggest sponsors, they also sponsored several local events. Thanks <3

Django Software Foundation

The Django Software Foundation (DSF) is a non-profit organization created to promote, support, and advance the development of Django. They've helped many Django Girls events that had problems finding local sponsors. Thanks <3

Python Software Foundation

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) is a non-profit organization that holds the intellectual property rights behind the Python programming language. They are one of the biggest sponsors for local events. Thanks <3

Github

GitHub is a Git repository hosting service. They have sponsored many Django Girls events, and they provide useful materials for new learners like cheat-sheets. Thanks <3

Divio

Divio, that created Django CMS and Aldryn, uses Python and Django to provide support for website installation, maintenance, troubleshooting, and development. They sponsored many local events and joined as Patreon supporters in June 2015. Thanks <3

Lincoln Loop

Lincoln Loop is a full service web studio offering user experience and development based on the Django Web Framework. They joined our Patreon campaign in April 2015, and have contributed to local events. Thanks <3

Python Anywhere

Since May, Django Girls has been hosted on PythonAnywhere! They host, run, and code Python in the cloud, and have made the lives of our attendees much easier by being really simple and pleasant to use. Thanks <3

Mandrill

Mandrill is a transactional email platform from MailChimp. They'vebeen supporting our emails since September 2015 and have also sponsored local events. Thanks <3

We would also like to thank our regular donors from Patreon: your commitment to help us every month is amazing. Thanks <3