20th Anniversary Highlight
History of MAP: Analyzing the Movement’s Capacity
2026 marks MAP’s 20th anniversary. In honor of this milestone and in recognition of Pride Month, we are highlighting key pillars of our organizational impact. Each week in June, we will explore a dimension of MAP’s work that has been integral to our twenty years of powering the LGBTQ movement.
We begin with the origins and scope of MAP’s movement capacity research, which provides ongoing analysis of the LGBTQ movement’s overall strength, capacity, and operations.
As this post explains, our movement capacity program has been especially important to funders and supporters; it offers necessary information to set goals and strategy, apply resources more effectively, and measure the success of the movement’s work. Beyond that, MAP’s movement capacity work allows for deeper understanding of the capacity of specific segments within the movement — including national advocacy organizations, statewide groups, local community centers, and international advocacy organizations.
The Movement Advancement Project (MAP) was built from a simple proposition: provide the necessary data to help align resources in the movement to the areas of greatest impact with the goal of speeding equality for all. After becoming an official organization in 2006, MAP quickly became the research and messaging epicenter of the movement, providing critical analysis and communication guidance that helped shift public opinion in favor of marriage equality.
By September of that year, MAP released the 2006 LGBT Movement Financial & Operating Overview, a pilot project that aimed to provide a comprehensive and standardized look at the LGBTQ movement’s finances across 26 major LGBTQ social justice organizations and 13 of their largest institutional funders. This report evolved into MAP’s Standard Annual Reporting (SAR), a trusted reference tool for the LGBTQI movement and its institutional donors.
“In 2006, MAP’s Standard Annual Reporting (SAR) was a groundbreaking document because at the time it was impossible to compare how folks were asking for money or spending money in the movement. Funders needed a way to know if they were making the right investments in the community and MAP took an incredibly important, but fairly basic idea and morphed it into an invaluable data set for funders and organizations alike.”
— Michael Fleming, President, David Bohnett Foundation
MAP also delivered the LGBT Movement CFO Conference, a development and networking event for lead finance officers. By its second year, the conference welcomed 39 executives from 37 organizations across the country.
In 2008, MAP launched its first website, which featured an early version of our Equality Maps, access to SAR data, and the first-ever LGBTQ Community Center Survey Report in partnership with CenterLink.
The biennial publication offers a detailed picture of centers’ staff and boards, program priorities, constituencies and services, infrastructure, fundraising, budgets, and technical assistance needs. For example, our 2024 report finds that local community centers serving LGBTQ people provided vital information, education, and health services to over 58,700 people each week — i.e., more than 3 million people per year.
MAP’s movement capacity research has expanded in recent years. In 2020, MAP analyzed the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on LGBTQ communities, with a supplementary brief specifically highlighting the experiences of LGBT older adults. After receiving an unrestricted financial gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott in late 2022, MAP released Unrestricted and Unprecedented: The Impact of MacKenzie Scott’s Large Gifts on LGBTQ Organizations. The report analyzes the impact of the philanthropist’s over $163 million in financial gifts to LGBTQ movement organizations between 2020–2022.
Today, SAR and the LGBTQ Community Center Survey Reports remain critical resources for the LGBTQI movement, its institutional donors, and its advocates on the ground. Across our two-decade history, we have worked to provide rigorous research, insight, and communications that help speed equality and opportunity for all
▸▸ Learn more
- Read about our 20-year history by visiting our anniversary page.
- Explore MAP’s movement capacity research via our website.
