Edit: The survey is now closed and the 2019 worldwide report is up!

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Every year I run a short survey called the gender census to find out about the language gender-diverse people use to describe themselves, and then I publish the results as a spreadsheet and a summary blog post that are free for anyone to use for any purpose.

Each year we get more participants. Last year there were about 11,000 responses in all!

I process the results voluntarily, but to receive this many responses I need to pay for a survey provider. Now that there are so many people signed up to the mailing list I also need to pay for a domain and a mailserver. The costs look like this:

Survey service (SmartSurvey): £108 for two months. (Edit: It's actually £120, see below!)

Mailserver: £57.46 for one year

Domain name: [paid for 2 years last year, nice]

Crowdfunding fees: [some transaction fees, not sure how much]

TOTAL: £177.46

Every year I get a lot of gratitude in the feedback box. I know for sure that this project impacts a lot of people positively, letting everyone know that they're not alone and their genders are valid and recognised. Because I make the results public they're also useful in a practical sense; I know that people are using the results in academic and business contexts, because I get emails telling me about it!

If you'd like to see some of my previous work with this survey, please do take a look here.

What if we go over the goal?

I'm hoping that once we hit the goal of £165.46 people will stop donating, because I don't want to end up taking more money than is strictly necessary. However, last year we did end up with some unforeseen costs and the extra funds we'd raised with crowdfunding were a huge help.

Anything from this crowdfunding that isn't used in 2019 will go towards 2020's costs, hopefully meaning we won't need to crowdfund as much next time.

Cost update

I said there are always costs I hadn't foreseen, and this year is no exception!

This time I undercalculated the survey software fee, because I based it on the cost per month when buying a whole year in advance (£54), when it's actually £60 per month including VAT if you only pay a month at a time! So it's £120 rather than £108.

Also, it turns out that some fees are waived by Crowdfunder when you're an individual raising money for a non-profit cause, but not all, so there will still be some processing fees when the money is paid out. I'm not sure how much that will be yet but I'll keep you posted.