Assess Needs

Starting a Needs Assessment

As you develop a comprehensive service plan and coordinated strategy, the main goal is to engage citizens and established community partners to positively impact areas of greatest local need.

Keep this goal in mind as you move through the needs assessment process. Losing this can overwhelm the process and potentially cause you to lose sight of what you are trying to accomplish.

Background

If you are starting from the beginning on this needs assessment process, some background may be useful.

What is a community needs assessment?
A community needs assessment is a way of gathering information about a community’s opinions, issues, and challenges to determine the needs of the community. This manual includes separate needs assessment and asset mapping processes. However, be aware that as you move through a needs assessment the community’s assets also will be identified. Keep track of the information you receive about assets, resources, and activities during the needs assessment process.

What does a community needs assessment involve?
An accurate assessment involves a diverse group of stakeholders to produce a complete picture of the community. In preparing the assessments for distribution, consider cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and economic diversity as well as special needs. To administer the assessment, use a range of techniques, including interviews, surveys, and focus groups.

The main purpose of the assessment process is to clearly understand the context in which citizens live, the issues citizens want to address, and the strategies they believe will be successful.

Steps in a Needs Assessment

1. Identify a community needs assessment coordinator and form a community needs assessment committee; be sure to invite citizen stakeholders to participate in the committee.
2. As a committee, review the results of relevant needs assessments that may have already been conducted. If this is the first needs assessment the city is undertaking, find out if other agencies have conducted needs assessments and review their data.
3. For your needs assessment, determine the community to be assessed. Will you try to get needs assessment results from all citizens or targeted stakeholders?
4. Select community needs assessment techniques and tools. Create documents for collecting needs assessment information: focus group agendas and questions, surveys, etc.
• Examples of data collection techniques are explored here in “Conducting a Community Needs Assessment: Primary Data Collection Techniques,” by Keith A. Carter and Lionel J. Beaulieu, Florida Extension Service, 1992.
• Additional resources on assessing community needs and resources can be found here.
5. Develop a plan for the assessment.
• Who will participate in the assessment?
• What information are we seeking?
• When will the assessment be conducted? All at once or in phases?
• What will the assessment cover? The whole city, particular communities?
• How will the assessment be done? Written surveys, focus groups, online, large group meetings, etc.
• What questions will we include? See below for some sample questions for focus groups and surveys.

Sample Focus Group Questions

• What are the greatest needs in our city? Alternatively, provide participants with a list of issues (see below), and ask if this is a problem or need in our city.
• affordable housing
• arts and culture
• child care
• crime/public safety
• college access/affordability
• domestic violence
• education (K-12)
• environment
• health care
• homelessness
• hunger
• jobs
• parks and recreation
• senior care/housing
• social services
• transportation
• youth development
• other (group defines)
• What is the specific problem?
• Are there other needs/problems that you would identify?
• What changes would you like to see?
• How could these problems be improved or alleviated?
• How and why do you think these changes would improve the community?
• How might citizens help to the address these issues?
• What, if any, additional information would you like to share?
• Some probing questions that will generate more information as a follow-up to those above are:
• Can you say more about that?
• Can you give an example?
• Jane says X. What do others think?
• How about you, Joe? Or, does anyone in that corner of the room have some thoughts on this?
• Does anyone else have some thoughts on that?

Types of Survey Questions and Sample Questions

Open-ended

Designed to prompt the respondent to provide you with more than just one- or two-word responses. These are often “how” or “why” questions.

• Example: “How can we make improvements on the issues you think are priorities in our city?” These questions are used when you want to find out about respondents’ attitudes about issues, or how much they know about a given topic. Open-ended questions provide good anecdotal evidence. However, the drawback of using open-ended questions is that it’s time-consuming to compile the results. If you’re distributing large numbers of surveys, you should strictly limit open-ended questions.

Closed-ended (also sometimes referred to as forced-choice questions)

Specific questions that prompt “yes” or “no” answers.

• Example: “Do you think volunteers can help to address the priority needs of our city?” These are used when the information you need is fairly clear-cut, i.e., you want to know whether people use a particular service or have ever heard of a specific local resource.

Multiple choice

Lets the respondent select one answer from a few possible choices.

Example: “The most effective way to utilize volunteers to improve our city is as…”

1. Tutors and mentors in schools and after-school programs
2. Neighborhood watch participants
3. Cleaning up our streets and parks
4. Refurbishing abandoned buildings to create low-income housing
5. Visiting seniors in their homes and taking them to doctors’ appointments and on errands

These allow you to get more detailed information than closed-ended questions, and the results can be compiled more easily than open-ended questions.

Another way to provide choices is to limit the selections, while providing a wide array of choices. An “other” category will allow those who don’t see their issue identified to describe it.

Example:
Select our city’s three greatest needs and prioritize them by placing a 1, 2, or 3 in front of the issue. (See example below)

Likert scale

Eeach respondent is asked to rate items on a response scale.

Example: Please rate each of the following items on a scale of 1 to 5 when you:
1 = strongly disagree
2 = disagree
3 = undecided
4 = agree
5 = strongly agree

Public safety could be improved by:	Strongly Disagree	Disagree	Undecided	Agree	Strongly Agree
Adding street lights	1	2	3	4	5
Installing surveillance cameras	1	2	3	4	5
Increasing police patrols	1	2	3	4	5
Starting a crime-stopper hotline	1	2	3	4	5
Starting/expanding neighborhood watch	1	2	3	4	5

A Likert scale can help identify how strongly people think or feel about an issue. The question above seeks to find out what people think. An alternative or additional question might be, “I would feel safer if my neighborhood had more…” This question strives to identify how people feel. Understanding both the thoughts and feelings of constituents can help elicit appropriate responses.

Click here for a sample needs assessment survey.

Methods for Effectively Gathering Information

Some methods are outlined below. More information on methods can be found here in “Conducting a Community Needs Assessment: Primary Data Collection Techniques,” by Keith A. Carter and Lionel J. Beaulieu and online at the University of Kansas’s “Community Tool Box for Assessing Community Needs and Resources.”

• Focus groups are structured, moderated discussions that bring together small groups of people (usually six to twelve) in neutral settings to talk about specific issues. Discussion is a powerful means of learning from community members about their perceptions, experiences, values, and beliefs. It is also a good way to encourage the community to get involved.
• Community forums seek information directly from community members, but forums use large public meetings rather than small groups. Although community forums are noisier and harder to moderate than focus groups, they offer an excellent opportunity for community members to raise concerns and become involved in developing strategies.
• Interviews and surveys help a partnership understand the perspectives (or variety of perspectives), experiences, aspirations, strengths, and values of individuals and the community. These methods can reveal what community members want, how they view resources, and what issues are involved in gaining access to resources or programs. Interviews can also reveal disparities between what people want and what agencies think they need.
• Action research enables partners to develop research based on action. For example, practitioners may trace a community member’s ongoing progress through the maze of services and supports in a community, and assess ways a partnership could work with a community member. The practitioner-researchers document each community member’s interactions with agencies. The resulting case study shows in great detail how a community member finds and uses community resources and opportunities.

Dublin, Ohio

Dublin, Ohio, is a founding member of the Cities of Service coalition. When the coalition was founded, Dublin was already in the process of creating a citywide service plan. City organizers held citizen focus groups and convened larger stakeholder gatherings during a two-month period.

City staff hosted several focus groups with a diverse set of community members to offer insight on community needs and how volunteer initiatives could best serve those needs. Because a community supports what it defines, all focus groups completed an exercise to capture a representation of what the Dublin community perceived as the top critical needs volunteers could address.

In October 2009, all city agencies that utilize the services of Dublin volunteers were invited to attend a community roundtable discussion on service needs, community capacity, efficient referral, and accessibility to service requests and demands. These agencies included the Dublin Arts Council, the Dublin Library, the Dublin Historical Society, Dublin Methodist Hospital, Nationwide Children’s Close to Home, the Dublin Food Pantry, Welcome Warehouse, and the Memorial Tournament. This meeting proved to be extremely successful; as a result, the city plans to get this group to meet on more regularly, to increase communication, cross-referral, and capacity building among service leaders. Further, all agencies participated in an online survey to measure their collective ranking of critical needs identification. The findings were consistent across the board.