How to Integrate Community Voice in Your Needs Assessment
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When it comes to conducting a needs assessment, one of the most important things you can do is listen to the community you’re trying to help.
Integrating community voice into your assessment creates programs and services that genuinely reflect what people need and want. Community members have firsthand knowledge about the challenges they face and the resources they lack, which can really shape your understanding of the local landscape.
This episode kicks off a series that will give you strategies, tools, and resources needed to create stronger, more thorough assessments.
We’ll discuss where to find secondary data that can shed light on your community’s current landscape and how to collect your own data through surveys, focus groups, and interviews.
You’ll hear:
(01:33) What is a needs assessment?
(05:00) How to avoid assumptions and ensure community voice is central to your assessment
(07:18) Four key benefits of conducting a needs assessment for nonprofits
(11:32) Three steps to conducting an effective needs assessment
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Drew Reynolds: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Common Good Data podcast. I'm Drew Reynolds. Today, in this episode, we're going to focus on community needs assessments, that essential tool that we all need, um, to be able to better understand the communities that we serve so that we can then in turn offer programs, services, interventions, and strategies to our communities.
to address the challenges and needs in a particular community. Now, what's exciting is that this is actually the first, uh, podcast, uh, episode of what's going to be a series throughout the fall, where we are going to focus on strategies, um, and tools and resources that you can use to conduct, uh, stronger and more thorough community needs assessment that truly integrate Community Voice, and that give you the information you need to then, in turn, develop the program services and interventions that are going to address those needs in a community.
So across the series, we're going to talk about things like secondary data, where you can access secondary data to inform you [00:01:00] about what's going on in your community, how to collect data yourself using surveys, focus groups, interviews, and other strategies, and then making sure that as we're doing that, we're doing it from a disposition that recognizes and centers community voice in the process so that it is not.
experts or outsiders or a person from one non profit's perspective, but rather that you're able to really understand the nuance and difference and a series of voices, a series of data points, right, from across your community. So what is a community needs assessment? Well, what I mean by a community needs assessment is that it's a systematic process.
that looks at strengths, resources, and needs in a community. Now, I mention strengths and resources because sometimes as nonprofits, especially if you work in the area of addressing needs, we focus and hyper focus on the problem. What is it that this community lacks? But in a true community assessment does not just look at what is missing, but also looks at inherent strengths and sources, resources [00:02:00] within a community, because usually it is from those places that the solutions are derived.
So that community needs assessment, again, is going to be systematic. It's going to look at needs, but also strengths, resources, both that are lacking, but also that are already there and present in a community. So for example, a nonprofit who, um, is doing work in mental health might look at the degree to which there are mental services, mental health services available in a community.
They may look at the prevalence of key mental health indicators, for example, around, um, depression, anxiety, or, uh, you know, ER visits, um, suicide rates, things like that you might see across a community. Now, I mention that because community assessments will often have broad indicators, things like census data and whatnot, but a good community assessment is going to also dig into the specifics around the problem area.
So, in the case of mental health, I gave those examples, but you can imagine that would be the same in any other area of focus that you're going to be working on. Now, a key point here is that really no [00:03:00] community is the same,
there can be a temptation to bring in preconceived notions about what a community is, what we think about a community, um, prior to, uh, our, our work in, in a needs assessment. And sometimes that bias can actually point us in the wrong direction. So it's important to remember that local context matters.
No community is the same, and it changes over time. You know what a community was. Five years ago is not the same as it was today. And so those community assessments, uh, maybe if you have one from 10 years ago, it's time to take another look at it because things have probably changed. Um, also it's important to keep in mind that a problem in one area does not necessarily mean a problem in another.
One thing that I find all the time, actually, in the area of substance use prevention. for youth is that it is sometimes there's this associate we associate a lot of times in our culture, uh, that, uh, substance use and drug use is something that is associated with, uh, poverty associated with lack of opportunity.
And what we find in substance use data is that a lot of times [00:04:00] it is not necessarily poverty where the highest rates of substance use are occurring. It can sometimes be in some of the most. Affluent areas and the most high resourced areas where that can be occurring. So it's important to be paying attention to those things on a local level, recognizing that what's going on in your community is probably more complex, probably more nuanced, and probably less straightforward than we originally think.
Now as we're doing this, And I've already alluded to this a couple of times in this, uh, um, in this, in this episode is that we use data to unearth the assumptions that we may have about a particular topic or about a particular community and to challenge those assumptions. Right? So when we begin something, it's saying, what do we know or what do we think we know?
And what are the questions that we can ask around that to test those ideas? To make sure that they are correct, or if not, then to re imagine what those might look [00:05:00] like. And central to the way that we avoid assumptions, is to center community voice in the process. So I actually think one strategy you can use for community assessments is to make sure if you're not a member of the community, if you're an outsider, as we talk about it, uh, when we talk about insidership and outsidership, if you're an outsider in a community, making sure that if you're doing a community assessment, that you're bringing in community voice into the process.
In the actual design of your community assessment, that can be so important because without that community voice, you're likely going to miss something. Insidership and outsidership, I think can be really interesting because sometimes we might say that one is better than the other, right? Somebody might say, Oh, no, you need to be an outsider.
So you can give an objective view of a community. You can look at something without the bias of lived experience, without the bias of, you know, talking about your neighbors who you love so much, right? And that is, To an extent, kind of an advantage of being an outsider. On the other hand, you also have insidership where it's like, no, people on the outside have not lived in this community.
I have lived in this [00:06:00] community. People on the outside do not understand the nuances and the details of these different things. I was here. I lived that experience, right? And so you see that, um, you can, you can, in either of those two positions, you might have an advantage, right? But the key is, is just to understand where you sit in conducting a community needs assessment.
Do you see yourself as an insider or an outsider? And what are the potential limitations and biases that come with that? So as you're thinking about community voice and incorporating community voice, maybe you identify as someone who can bring community voice cause you're an insider. Maybe you're an outsider and you know that that's a limitation that you have and you want to bring that in.
The key here is to be, Thinking about that, what does community voice look like in the, in the context of your needs assessment? And how do you include that in a systematic kind of way? So those are, it's kind of a broad overview or some key themes to be thinking about with community needs assessment, but you might be asking yourself, why do we need to do this, right?
And I gave the example before of making sure that your programs and services align, and that's certainly kind of a key, key issue, but I [00:07:00] want to get a bit more specific about that. One thing that I think is really critical, um, is that when you're engaging in long term planning for your organization, typically you'll see something like a strategic plan, for example, that identifies some of those long term goals and things that you want to be working towards.
It's really critical to have a needs assessment to inform that strategic plan so that you can identify gaps in service delivery. You can identify Uh, areas of specific need in a community where things need to be expanded, where you can move on. And because you realize that that's not a challenge that your community really needs you to be focusing on.
And it allows you then to start to say, okay, this is what the community needs. This is where my organization is. And you can bring those things closer and closer together so that. The work of your organization is truly aligned with the needs of the community that you serve. In addition, I think after you have that alignment in place, it allows [00:08:00] you to then focus and target resources.
I was having a conversation with a client just the other day that was looking at this program that we had been working on and we're, and their broader question is not just, you know, how is the, how effective is this program, but rather should we continue to invest in it, right? Because there are so many needs in a You know, should we be I'm going to talk a little bit about how we're going to be diverting our resources to another need that might be of more critical importance of greater severity, so that we can make sure that our resources are appropriately aligned with the need that we're seeing in a community, right?
So, it's really helpful to have needs assessment to then appropriately allocate resources to the types of problem that your community needs. Needs assessments also lead to better design programs. that are going to be actually more likely to succeed because they're based on real data. They're based on community input, right?
Um, so, you know, for example, you might have a health focused organization that's shifting from talking about exercise, um, to be looking more about [00:09:00] food insecurity issues and diets, because those things both contribute to health and wellbeing, but maybe the lack of access to nutritious food and affordable and accessible food in a community.
might be even more important than the exercise. Probably both together, but you know, it can give you a sense of what might be most important and what you might prioritize in a community setting. I think also, uh, needs assessment is so critical from an operations perspective in an organization, and specifically around the ability To write effective grants to make appeals to donors and to raise the funds that you need to then support and sustain the programs and services that you're offering.
So a well documented community needs assessment is going to be able to strengthen your grant proposals, give you the information that you need to convince people that they should invest in you. Why? Because you have been shown that you truly understand and know what the problem is in your community.
And that. With that knowledge, you have designed [00:10:00] programs and services that are going to address that need effectively. It shows that alignment, which I talk about all the time in grant writing, the importance of alignment that shows that the need in the community is aligned with the programs and services that you're offering, which is aligned with the budget that you include in a grant proposal, for example.
And then I also think that there's something about community needs assessment that allows you to also demonstrate. Um, engagement with a community, right? Such that you are seen as somebody in a community. If you do it well, and if you truly incorporate community voice, you then become an organization that is sort of accompanying a community as it identifies its needs and challenges and tries to devise.
or design, you know, strategies to address that. And so you can actually, through the community assessment process, build trust, build relationships, um, strengthen your [00:11:00] relationship between your organization and the community in such a way that it's going to dramatically improve The programs and services and interventions that you ultimately end up offering.
Because every time you're engaging a community, even if it's through a survey, or an interview, or a focus group, or a social media campaign, you are having communication and developing a relationship. And the ways that you can do, if you can do that effectively, it builds that trust that we know is so essential.
So what are some steps in community needs assessment? Well, we're going to talk about this in a couple of the episodes coming up, but I want to provide a bit of an overview of some things that you might want to include. First thing always is the notion of engagement. So how do you start engagement? is to think, who do you need to bring to the table?
What voices in the community need to have something to, or need to be brought to the table so that they have, those voices are then reflected in the design and implementation of a Community Needs [00:12:00] Assessment. And even as I use the term bring to the table, it kind of almost assumes that you're leading the effort.
Maybe you're actually the organization that isn't leading the effort. You're joining somebody else's Community Needs Assessment, right? That could be part of it too. Uh, it's always good to be kind of thinking about, you know, uh, who is sort of the position and leadership and power in these situations. But regardless of what that looks like for you, the key is, is engagement first, building relationships first.
Do not go design a survey without having spoken with key members of that community first, so that you can better understand those needs. I had a story, uh, a situation one time where I was, Um, in a church actually one time and that church that I was attending, um, in the, uh, up in the northeast was served or was, um, a church community that was primarily, uh, black and Latino, uh, parishioners, right?
And that church, uh, would meet every Sunday, come together to do worship, right? I remember one time after a Sunday [00:13:00] service, uh, We were all kind of gathering and doing what you do after church, I suppose. And a person came in trying to survey members of the church community. That person was not from the community.
That person, uh, had no knowledge or relationship building, did not communicate with the church prior to arriving. And frankly, that person was ignored. That person came in to try to gather information about a community, um, was completely disregarded. Why? Because there was no relationship there. There was no engagement.
There was no authentic, um, you know, commitment from the person on the asking side that the information they were going to be gathering was something that mattered, that was useful to the community. And that ultimately was responsive to what the actual live context was. Um, so designing surveys and going out and asking people is important, but it's not the first step.
Because without engagement, without trust, without relationship building, none of that's ever going to work. So begin with engagement. Second, you can also gather a ton of information about a [00:14:00] community, um, through secondary data resources. And we're going to spend a lot of time talking about this in some of the upcoming episodes, where a lot of data sometimes is already there.
You don't have to go searching for it. You don't have to design another survey. You don't have to go through the Uh, all the work and labor of collecting information when it already exists. So for example, you can look at census data, you can look at public health reports, academic studies, local government reports, there are so many things out there, you know, you can look at school performance data, there's always education data, um, in your community somewhere, there's typically things around crime and public safety that you can find, uh, certainly public health, as I had mentioned, there's tons of things that are out there already.
And so. Starting there can be helpful because it can give you a broad view to help you narrow and focus your questions. Okay, so this is what the secondary data is telling us. We want to explore areas A, B, and C a little bit further, so we'll do our [00:15:00] interviews and focus groups focused on those topics. So the secondary data is a good place to begin because while you're building that engagement and building that relationship in the community assessment process, you can gather some information that's already been collected.
Then, I think it starts a good, a good idea to start focusing on what it is you want to, um, to, to measure. What are the things that you want to be assessing in a community and to choose some specific key indicators. It can be helpful if they're collected by secondary data, because then, you know, you're going to probably have some, Longitudinal opportunities there.
What was the data looking like 10 years ago, five years ago now, and five years into the future, right? Uh, things like, uh, uh, rates of unemployment, um, rates of, of rentership, uh, versus homeownership in a community, for example, you can look at some of these indicators to get a sense of what's going on. But usually what we find is that those key indicators.
that you identify first. Sometimes those broad ones are important, but you want to narrow and focus them a little bit to be a little bit more [00:16:00] tailored to the types of programs and services and challenges that you're running into. So I'll give a good example of this. I was working with one organization that does prevention of substance use.
And they focus specifically on the Latino community. And you could look at a high level indicator, like the term that we use is 30 day, uh, use in the substance use prevention field. So one is how much, you know, uh, to what degree have you used alcohol or cigarettes in the past 30 days? But in that context, it was good to have also further questions about.
The social context in which substance use happens. So, um, things like quinceaneras, things like sports events, things that were unique to the local Latino community, they started to ask more questions about that to get a deeper sense of where is the, what is the social context in which substance use is occurring, occurring at a local level.
So you start with those big overall key indicators. And then start to look at what are the local conditions that give rise to those key indicators. And that's an important process to be thinking about in [00:17:00] your community needs assessment. And then you start to then gather information about these things, analyze, and then prioritize those.
So like, what are the areas that are of greatest need based on what the data are telling you? And how do you go through that prioritization process to say, Hey, these are the areas that the community continues to say over and over again, and it's confirmed with the data that we've collected. are the areas of primary need.
Now, a key thing with this is that when you go through that prioritization process, that you are including members of the community in that conversation. That can be so important to be able to bring that back to community members and say, Hey, this is what we found. Does that make sense to you?
Incorporating and bringing people into the process as you are analyzing and prioritizing key indicators and core problems that you want to be focusing on.
So those are the key steps in a needs assessment. Um, over the next couple of episodes, we're going to start to drill down into the specific skill sets and tools that you can use to do a high quality needs [00:18:00] assessment in a community setting. So we're going to look at secondary data, Uh, which is data that already exists, and we're also going to look at primary data collection.
So strategies for designing surveys. Um, putting together focus groups and interviews to make sure that your community needs assessment, um, is thorough, uh, is complete, at least to the degree that it can be, um, and that you're able then to have the information you need to design the programs and services to succeed.
So as you prepare for the next upcoming episodes, I'd like you to start thinking a little bit about the, your relationship with the community that you serve, right? So. What is it that you already know? What needs assessments have you done in the past? Is it time to maybe think about doing an updated needs assessment?
Um, or is there information that's incomplete about the community that you currently have? Just take some time to reflect on that a little bit. What is it that you know about your community? What do you wish that you could know more? And then in the next couple of episodes, we'll give you the tools and information you need to help answer those questions and address those [00:19:00] gaps.
Looking forward to continuing this conversation with you on the next episode.
