Community Assessment Process

1. Community Assessment Process WHY?? To identify and document the opportunities, challenges, strengths, and needs of a specific geographic community and its residents.

2. Community Assessment Process WHY?? To build and strengthen relationships among community leaders, service providers and most importantly, community residents.

3. Community Assessment Process WHY?? To have the information needed to make good decisions for a community collaborative strategic planning.

4. How is the Community Assessment Process Different from a Traditional Needs Assessment • Process is as important as the product. • Residents are involved in design and implementation, not just as respondents. • Assessment focuses not only on needs, but also on assets and resources. • Assessment is multifaceted and uses multiple data collection strategies. • Assessment is about dialogue and consensus building as well as information gathering. • It is not just about social services. • It is not an academic process.

5. Community Assessment Process • Form planning and implementation committee. • Review secondary data. • Determine need for primary data. • Develop methods for new data collection. • Collect new data. • Analyze data collected. • Create report using secondary and primary data. • Share information with the community.

6. Usefulness of Secondary Data • Collection and aggregation is completed. • Include standardized data that is comparable across sites. • Provide data your collaborative may not be able to access directly. • May provide data your collaborative otherwise would not have thought of collecting.

7. Usefulness of Primary Data • Can provide neighborhood, age-group, and/or service recipient specific data. • Provide data on residents' perceptions of their community. • Provide data on residents' priorities for their community. • Can identify community differences in perceptions and priorities.

8. Why do a Community Survey? • Collect common data elements from a large number of community residents. • Assures respondent anonymity. • Multiple methods of administration. • Comparatively easy to collect data on a wide range of topics. • Comparatively easy to enter and analyze data. • Potential to collect data from a wide variety of community residents.

9. Why do Focus Groups? • Comparatively easy and quick to conduct. • Group interactions often bring out topics or issues which would not rise from individual interviews or surveys. • Allows for exploration of specific topics. • Allows for generation of new topics/ideas.

10. Why do Focus Groups? • Identify appropriate language for surveys. • Identify appropriate questions, areas for examination in surveys. • Obtain "exploratory" follow-up data for survey responses. • Obtain details on perceptions or experiences.

11. Development and Implementation of a Community Survey • Identify what data you want to collect. • Develop the instrument. • Develop administration methods. • Develop method for storing and analyzing data collected.

12. Development and Implementation of a Community Survey • PILOT the instrument and methods. • Collect survey data. • Enter and analyze data collected. • Prepare summary of data for use in community planning.

13. Development and Implementation of Focus Groups • Identify the group(s) from whom you want to collect data. • Identify what data you want to collect. • Develop focus group instrument and protocol. • Develop method(s) for storing and analyzing data collected.

14. Development and Implementation of Focus Groups • PILOT the instrument and protocol. • Conduct focus group(s). • Transcribe or type notes and analyze data collected. • Prepare summary of data for use in community planning.

15. Utilizing Community Assessment • Use in Collaborative strategic planning. • Strengthen and build partnerships. • Identify service gaps. • Advocate for activities/programs/services. • Obtain funding (prepare grant proposals and conduct presentations). • Identify and utilize community and neighborhood assets and strengths. • Build public will and public awareness.

16. Community Assessment Core Elements • Planning and implementation is broad-based and inclusive. • Use existing data and collect new data. • Establish key roles for stakeholders throughout the process. • Identify issues of importance, needs and strengths in your county. • Summarize and USE your findings.