Home » How to Conduct a Community Needs Assessment
Giving back to your community and furthering your mission is one of the greatest joys of being a volunteer management leader. Creating a dedicated program for your community is a popular method of focusing on those efforts. But before your organization implements a new internal program, you may want to conduct a community needs assessment.
A community needs assessment is a tactical way of analyzing gaps in community services. It also determines the strengths and assets available in that community. The results from a community needs assessment helps you better understand what your program has to accomplish and the steps volunteers need to take.
However, creating a valuable assessment and managing the program is no easy feat— it requires a dedicated volunteer management strategy as well as some key tools to help you facilitate the program.
Keep reading to learn how to conduct a community needs assessment and explore some best practices for building your program around this assessment. Plus, we’ll share valuable resources like a community needs assessment example.
A community needs assessment is something that all volunteer program leaders should be familiar with and confident in conducting. Ready to learn more? Let’s begin.
Community needs are gaps between what services currently exist in a community and what should exist. It may be helpful to categorize gaps based on these four types of community needs— perceived needs, expressed needs, absolute needs, and relative needs.
When you conduct your assessment, you work to identify gaps and make conclusions about the needs that will ultimately help to fill them. Categorizing these needs with the above can help you better prioritize your actions.
The Child Welfare Information Gateway defines a community needs assessment as the following:
“A community needs assessment identifies the strengths and resources available in the community to meet the needs of [community members]. The assessment focuses on the capabilities of the community, including its citizens, agencies, and organizations. It provides a framework for developing and identifying services and solutions and building communities that support and nurture children and families.”
Put simply, the outcomes of a community needs assessment guides how your organization and volunteers help the community. The outcomes of a community needs assessment usually fall into one of three main categories:
A community needs assessment is a key tool that can aid any volunteer program you create. By conducting an assessment before you develop a program, you ensure a firm grasp on a community’s gaps. After all, your program works to fill those gaps through resources and services.
The assessment plays a critical role in guiding decision-making and priority-setting for your program while involving community members in the process. By following this method, you’ll build your program around the most vital services for your community members.
When you begin conducting the assessment, you need to figure out exactly who to reach out to in your community to help facilitate the assessment. Here’s who will likely be involved:
Conducting a community needs assessment requires ample preparation and a dedicated focus for the results and the subsequent program created to have any genuine effects.
Follow along below for how to best prepare and carry out your community needs assessment.
Defining your community can give you a sense of why gaps may exist. It also helps identify the group(s), or sub-communities, that tend to feel the effects the most. You can define the community with:
Defining the places and values that are important to the populations of your community is an imperative first step in the assessment process. This way, you form a comprehensive foundation on the needs that exist, helping you increase awareness of the driving forces behind your community and approach community members with sensitivity and respect for their needs.
Community needs are often interconnected and complicated. For instance, homelessness has many underlying causes and effects.
The types of community needs you choose to address will ultimately depend on your organization’s expertise and core mission. Does your organization address gaps in community health? In education? You may want to address homelessness and its many causes, or you may focus your resources on a smaller group that is disproportionately affected by a gap in services.
It can be tempting to want to assess and address all the needs in your community. But by identifying community needs based on your available expertise and resources and narrowing your scope accordingly, you can better concentrate your efforts on what will achieve the most impact. That’s why it’s important to define the intended reach or scope of your program from the outset.
Your scope should largely depend on the resources available in your community, with more available resources allowing for a wider scope. While it’s helpful to set lofty goals, it’s also important to know your scope and set achievable goals—and seek growth as your program becomes more established.
It’s important to figure out the types of assets you’ll need in your community needs assessment to create your program. These assets, also referred to as resources, are necessary for your program’s success. Assets can include:
It’s helpful to start by identifying the assets that are readily available to you. This can include community organizations and individuals who already provide services or financial support to assess needs and address them.
Nonprofit and other service-learning organizations also often look to other communities with similar demographics that have successfully addressed similar needs. Look at the resources that drove their progress and consider taking a similar approach.
To pull off your community needs assessment, you need to know the right people. As you learned above, some of your greatest assets are just people, from students to governors.
To get started, you should gather your contacts and reach out to community leaders.
Let’s say your organization is looking to develop programming for veterans. Reach out to leaders by visiting the gathering places of your community’s veterans, contact the congressional affairs office, and get in touch with a VA health center.
These connections can help you assess needs and play a key part in helping you address them. It’s important to have resources, support, and ample expertise available to you before implementing a program.
To conduct a community needs assessment, you need data.
Your data will include statistics, but the numbers aren’t enough, especially when you’re dealing with real people who have real needs that go beyond what is quantitative. You should also collect qualitative data, like the thoughts and knowledge of community members.
Considering qualitative data in conjunction with quantitative data will give you a broader sense of the types of gaps in the community. You’ll be able to better identify whether needs are perceived or relative, for example, and therefore shape your program more effectively.
Read on to the next section to dive deeper into how you exactly collect and use this data for your community needs assessment.
The data you collect plays a direct role in the results of your community needs assessment and can help define the actual program you create. However, how you find this data and use it can be confusing. Read on to learn about data collection methods, as well as how you can analyze and present that data.
As you now know, the main takeaway from your assessment should be a clear understanding of the impact, intensity, and distribution of services needed for your program. Collecting qualitative and quantitative data will help inform that decision making.
Here are the types of information you’ll want to collect:
Gathering quantitative data can be especially time-consuming and costly. Luckily, there is plenty of community-based data available to you already. You may look for statistics regarding demographics, as well as incident rates, prevalence rates, and growth over time specific to the needs that emerge. The following resources are popular places to start:
Many local libraries house a wealth of information specific to your community. Whether you’re looking to address graduation rates or community health, quantitative data can support qualitative findings and validate anecdotal evidence.
Once you have a great resource of data, including notes from your interviews, surveys, and observations, it’s time to analyze it.
Take that data and try to look for patterns and trends. For the best analysis that can help you plan your program, separate your key findings into the following groups:
After conducting a needs assessment, organizations typically produce a community needs assessment report. This report is used to demonstrate findings and make the case for program funding. The report generally includes the following sections:
Once you conduct your community needs assessment and produce a comprehensive and insightful report, it’s time to use those findings and create a dedicated volunteer program for it. Here are your next steps to consider:
The first thing you need is a clear and specific mission statement. A mission statement defines the purpose of your program and what exactly it intends to accomplish.
The mission statement should be written collaboratively with your team and presented to your board, funders, program recipients, and volunteers. Writing a clear mission statement will help you define the needs you hope to address and establish a focus on the work you need to move forward.
Check out this article for more information on mastering the mission statement and how it can be used.
Creating an action plan involves the exact steps and activities you want to take. This is deeply rooted in the findings of your community needs assessment.
Choose the key findings you want your program to focus on. For each key finding, list your intended activity or response. These activities should all work towards addressing the need.
Activities can include securing funding or convening a regular meeting with partners. Denote a person (or team) responsible for carrying out the activities and establish clear deadlines.
Finally, determine indicators of success. Indicators of success should tell you that you have completed the activity or accomplished a goal. Use a table like this to help organize your plan:
You’ve listened to what’s important to your community. You’ve developed a plan. Now it’s time to implement your program!
Gather volunteers, reach out to donors, issue a press release, and discuss your new program at the next town meeting or on your social media channels. Bolster engagement with your cause, and you’ll hit the ground running.
Successful community-based organizations understand the importance of community assessment. When organizations like yours assess needs within a community, you develop a deeper understanding of what matters to its members and the improvements they want to see.
Knowing how to conduct a community needs assessment will help your organization highlight the strengths of your community and allow you to more effectively enact positive change.
To help you gather research for your community needs assessment, we’ve compiled a couple of resources to get you started:
Author: Addison Waters
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