Hi everyone!
So, remember a few months ago when we sent out that link to a survey, and seventy-nine of you responded over the six weeks that followed? We definitely do – the information we’ve gleaned about what our community wants and how our demographics break down has been invaluable in helping us move forward with the planning and execution of the current proto-version of MIX you are experiencing right now!
We thought you, our members, might also find this information helpful and interesting, so before we send out a new survey next week (which is coming – keep your eyes peeled for a link in next week’s newsletter), we thought it would be helpful and fun to share with you some of the results and the insights those results have provided. So, without further ado, here they are! 🙂
General Demographics
With one exception (which I’ll discuss in a moment), the current makeup of people interested in MIX is quite varied, representing a large selection of viewpoints and experiences. Our age demographics look almost like a bell curve, showing that the majority of our respondents are between 31 and 50, with the next largest grouping being over 50, with those 30 and younger being slightly smaller in numbers. We also appear to have a good representation of the gender spectrum, with cis and trans women making up the largest grouping of respondents. As in almost all groups, our representation of those in the trans community is low, and we would like to see that increase as time continues, something we hope to achieve through increased outreach to the trans community and by being as welcoming and accepting as we possibly can be.
In the area of ENM/CNM representation and philosophies, the numbers show that many of our respondents identify with multiple descriptors for where they operate on the ENM/CNM spectrum. A vast majority – almost 76% – identify as “polyamorous” in some form or fashion. However, in addition to this title, many other descriptors were also chosen: one in five respondents chose “open” or “solo poly” to describe themselves, with one in eight choosing to label themselves as “swinger”, practicing “relationship anarchy”, or “in flux/evolving.” While the Leadership Team would like to see more representation in our membership from the swinger/lifestyle community as a whole, given that our prior organization, Many Loves, was explicitly founded on supporting those in the polyamory community, having 20% of our membership identify as something other than polyamorous is a good starting point for increasing representation as we move forward. We hope to increase our members in those communities by increasing our efforts to connect with others in the Lifestyle both in and outside of in hopes of attracting more voices to represent those interests.
Our last area of demographics, ethnicity, is where we need to make the most improvement moving forward. At this time, our community is self-reporting to be overwhelmingly white – just under 95%, to be exact. While this is not uncommon in ENM/CNM spaces, it was quite the wakeup call to see things spelled out in such stark terms when it comes to how homogenous and monochromatic we are as a group. Obviously, this isn’t what we want for MIX, either now or in the future – as we stated in our post on Inclusion under the Mission section of the website, the leadership of MIX is not only committed to being inclusive, we want to stand as anti-exclusion, and this current lack of representation will certainly make it harder for us to create a space where those of other ethnic backgrounds are as comfortable and welcomed as we’d like for them to be.
This will not be solved by merely thinking about it and hoping it will change – so in addition to the efforts the Leadership Team will undertake to make our events as inclusive and welcoming as possible, the membership of MIX will also need to work collectively and as individuals to promote our community to people who, frankly, don’t look like the majority of us. How this will be accomplished is still being considered and worked on, and we invite anyone who’s interested in helping grow this part of our community to speak up, give suggestions, or even volunteer to help lead us towards overcoming our group’s stark representation deficit. We have no doubt that with all of us pulling in the same direction, we can change these numbers for the better as quickly as we possibly can.
Activity Preferences
As you can see above, while many of our respondents are looking for connecting with new people and private conversation, a grouping over twice that size would like those connection and private conversation opportunities to be blended equally with some workshops and group learning environments where Q&A opportunities can be had. While slightly surprising, this support of an equal blend of these two main types of events has guided the Leadership Team to prioritize events where people can mingle and have more personal conversations with others, with a good number of workshops and discussion groups being offered as well.
This block of scores – calculated using the Net Promotor Score methodology – shows the general attitudes each respondent has towards each of these ten activity types. While we aren’t using these results in the traditional manner they originally were intended to be used under (measuring customer loyalty and satisfaction), the Leadership Team has made some inferences from the results that we’ll be using to guide our decision-making on events in the coming months. A few of those inferences are:
- A surprisingly low number of our respondents were interested in attending any kid-friendly activities. While we recognize that many in the ENM/CNM space are childless by choice and enjoy child-free spaces, this indicates that we may not have a large contingent of people who are parents in our ranks. Another conclusion would be that the parents we do have possibly have children who are semi-independent/grown (and thus don’t need our events to be child-friendly sometimes) or don’t want to bring their children to public events for fear of public scrutiny or judgement. We’ll be continuing to evaluate this in future surveys so we can find out if child-friendly events are essentially a non-starter for our members, or if more tailoring needs to be done to meet the needs of our members who are parents.
- In a similar fashion, a higher-than-expected number of our respondents are not interested in doing any volunteering or community outreach work. It’s difficult to determine why this is. At first blush, it is easy to conclude that this response reflects that all of us, as humans, are often guilty of focusing on individual enjoyment over community benefit in many areas of our lives; this may simply be another area where that tendency holds true. A more nuanced conclusion, however, might be that our members are concerned about being so public about their ENM/CNM status, and as such believe that they may be risking some very precious things if they were to be seen in public volunteering with a group that would advertise their private relationship structures so publicly. This is not a selfish or unreasonable motivation; sadly, these dangers may be very real to many of our members, and we sincerely don’t wish to chastise or shame anyone for simply being worried about very real consequences they might face for being so public about their non-monogamy. We will be exploring this topic more in future surveys, as well, in hopes of teasing out more about this lack of interest we’ve seen in volunteering.
- The remaining eight proposed activity types, as listed above, were well received, with anywhere from 12 to 20 respondents saying that they were highly enthusiastic (scoring a proposal at 9 or 10) about attending a specific type of event. Based on this information, we’re anticipating that our smaller, more focused events – group discussions, happy hour meetups, etc. – will likely draw no more than 10 to 20 attendees for each event at this time. This may seem like a small number to someone reading this, but for us in the Leadership Team, we see it a strength. An event with ten, fifteen, or even twenty attendees is much more manageable for group in its infancy – a group like ours is currently – than something where we expect double or triple those numbers. These smaller events will also likely lead to more genuine and deeper connections between the members attending them. It’s harder for someone to be lost in a crowd and unseen when there’s only nineteen other people, at most, around them – and your Leadership Team is committed to focusing on events that will engage our members and foster connections over large events with impressive attendance numbers but low satisfaction by those who came to participate.
Conclusions
As you can see, a lot of information was provided to us on the Leadership Team from the responses to our initial survey, and we want to thank each and every one of you for taking the time to respond and get us this info. We are humbled by your trust in us, and we appreciate all the feedback and guidance you’ve given us; without it, we’d be trying to organize our new community based on what us leaders, as individuals, would like to see, and not on what you, our members, wanted – and as a result, we’d likely have missed the target on providing what you actually want to participate in when it comes to our events. Now that you can see how the information provided to us has been and will be used, we hope this motivates you to continue to respond to our surveys – the next of which we hope to release next week. If you have any questions or comments on these results or the inferences we’ve made from them, feel free to send us an email with your thoughts. Until then, thanks for reading, and we look forward to helping everyone create the ENM/CNM community we all will be proud of being members of.
