A community needs assessment is a way of collecting data and surveying stakeholders to understand gaps in community services, as well as the strengths and assets available in your community.
Whether you’re developing a new volunteer program or reviewing an existing project, it’s important to know what your community actually needs and the resources available to you. That’s where a community needs assessment comes in; it can be used to inform and improve any community development initiative.
In this article, we’ll dive into how to conduct a community needs assessment and best practices for building your program around this assessment. Plus, we’ll share valuable resources, including examples and free templates to download.
A community needs assessment is a systematic process of identifying the needs or gaps in service of a neighborhood, town, city, or state, as well as the resources and strengths available to meet those needs.
Charitable organizations, nonprofits, and volunteer programs like yours can analyze community needs to help guide decision-making and resource allocation while involving community members in the process.
A needs assessment requires a multi-step strategy that typically involves defining a population and gathering data based on a set of indicators.
Now that you know what a community needs assessment is, let’s uncover the why, when, and who of your strategy.
The list below is some of the needs you’ll encounter and measure when conducting your assessment.
But what are community needs, anyway?
Local community needs are gaps between the services that exist for a population and the services that should exist.
Community organizations typically categorize community needs into five groups:
Anybody working in a service-driven organization knows that communities can experience all types of needs, even at the same time!
However, categorizing your community’s needs will help you understand those that are most pressing and important to your community.
Now that we have a deeper understanding of the types of needs in your community, let’s get into some specifics about conducting a community needs assessment.
If you don't have a good system for collecting volunteer data, no worries!
Learn about the Volunteer Impact Reports included in Get Connected and watch a preview of how easy it is to collect volunteer data:
Here’s a deeper look at each of the benefits of a community assessment:
Surveying community members and identifying needs are beneficial at any stage. Here are some of the times you may want to assess community needs:
Whether you work for a government agency or manage volunteers, there are often a lot of voices in the room, especially when it comes to planning community initiatives. But uniting stakeholders will help you achieve an even greater impact than going it alone.
Here are just some of the voices you can involve in your assessment:
While it’s no easy task, involving these stakeholders in your community needs assessment will help take the impact of your actions to the next level.
Here are some examples of what a community needs assessment should look like:
This comprehensive needs assessment from the City of San Antonio is one example of how community mapping can be used to understand a complex, city-wide need like poverty.
This United Way offers a range of community needs assessment examples that inform their regional initiatives, advocacy, and volunteer programs. The nonprofit even conducted a survey to understand the impacts of COVID on their community.
Feeding America offers a common community needs assessment framework and strategy to ensure each agency evaluates its communities consistently.
Government organizations like the CDC and the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services have also developed frameworks for community needs assessments.
Now that you’ve seen what a completed community needs assessment can look like, let’s get into how to actually conduct one!
Assessing needs in your community is a systematic process that requires planning.
These assessments can feel overwhelming at first, but if you follow these 5 steps, you’ll have a strong grasp of your community’s needs and strengths in no time:
The first step? Figure out the people and places that make up your community. Define your community by considering these questions:
Defining your community can help set the scope of your assessment by giving you a sense of who should be involved.
Your community is chock-full of helpful, knowledgeable people, important places, and useful tools.
As part of your needs assessment, you’ll not only identify needs and challenges, but you can also uncover the resources that are already available to the community!
Let’s examine these assets further.
Resources, or assets, can be anything that helps to improve the quality of life of the individuals who live in your community, from volunteers to the local library.
Getting enough resources is one of the hardest parts of working with a service-focused organization, but don’t overlook the assets that you already have.
These resources and assets can be:
While a community needs assessment serves to identify the challenges and gaps in services within a community, it can also help you understand unutilized or under-utilized resources and assets available to your organization and community.
Your organization may have internal resources, such as grants, volunteers, existing tools, and programs. But you can also leverage external resources to develop an effective initiative. By utilizing internal and external assets, you’ll build a more sustainable and effective infrastructure for addressing community needs.
Start by identifying the resources that are readily available to you; this may include community organizations and individuals who already provide services or financial support to assess needs and address them.
Then, you’ll want to identify potential assets. Identifying assets is fairly straightforward. We recommend gathering your team to brainstorm potential resources:
How to Identify Organizations and Associations
Gather your team to brainstorm potential partnerships with associations, organizations, and other groups. Google (or your preferred search engine) and yellow pages can help you identify relevant associations in your geographical area. Other community nonprofits and volunteer centers can offer a wealth of information and referrals.
Example A food pantry is looking to collect data on the populations most in need of free meals. So, they connect with several local ministries and homeless shelters to understand more about their clients’ needs and how to best serve them.
How to Identify People
Local Facebook and advocacy groups, volunteer centers, faith-based organizations, universities, and neighborhood associations are made up of like-minded individuals who can offer their skills, expertise, or time.
Example An animal shelter is looking to develop an annual 5K and 1-mile dog walk to raise funds and awareness for its spay and neuter program. The shelter must identify the assets available to it to help garner interest in the event. So, the organization leverages Facebook and other community boards to identify the organizers of local dog park meet-ups and running clubs.
How to Identify Places
What physical locations are available to your organization? How will leveraging these spaces benefit your clients? You’ll want to list the buildings, locations, and public and private spaces available to your organization.
Example A neighborhood association wants to reduce gun violence in the area. A growing body of research suggests that changing environmental conditions that facilitate community violence is an effective strategy for improving safety. So, the association identifies public spaces and lots throughout the neighborhood that can be improved through cleaning, the addition of greenery and community gardens, and art installations created by residents of the neighborhood.
How to Identify Equipment and Tools
Resources like computers, food donations, gardening tools, and public transportation can help you improve the quality of life for community members.
Example An after-school mentorship program has noticed that children who lack access to computers and the internet at home fall behind in school. The organization wants to build a program that expands access to technology and the internet for families. They identify local businesses that can donate old and unused laptops. They also list the region’s libraries that offer free internet and partner with the superintendent to identify transportation options from the district’s schools to the libraries.
Once you’ve identified the resources available to your organization, you want to make sure they actually get used to addressing the needs that your assessment will identify.
Many nonprofits and volunteer programs are using an asset-based approach to community development. This approach prioritizes the resources that already exist in the community, and helps empower its members to become agents of change.
Your assessment should highlight the voices of those at ground level. So, what’s the best way to gather these voices? Surveys!
Interviews, focus groups, and surveys are great data collection tools that will help you understand the perceived and expressed needs of your community.
Surveys are efficient at collecting lots of information, and they empower participants to get involved in community development. They can also provide both qualitative data (like observations, ideas, and feelings) and quantitative data (like statistics).
Survey questions that produce qualitative data ask open-ended questions, and may look something like this:
Qualitative data can provide your organization with a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities that exist within your community.
On the other hand, you can also include quantitative data. Quantitative questions have limited answers that can be tallied (or quantified), giving you a quick snapshot of a topic. It’s also easier to measure, summarize, and track over time.
Survey questions that produce quantitative data may look something like this:
The drawback of this kind of data is that you may get a more limited understanding of an issue than if you were to learn about people’s thoughts, stories, and ideas.
You’ll also want to consider the type of survey that best suits your organization’s needs. Generally, there are three types of surveys:
The type of survey you choose will depend on the types of needs you want to assess, as well as your organization’s capacity for distributing and collecting surveys.
Listening and participating in community gatherings like town meetings, PTA meetings, and other forums are a great way to learn about perspectives on local issues. In these cases, you or a member of your team will simply listen and record information that you feel is pertinent to your assessment.
This type of information gathering is useful for understanding perceived and expressed needs.
Sometimes, it can be helpful to understand a need or challenge firsthand. Participatory data gathering requires your team to take part in an activity, observe a gathering, or speak to community members directly in a way that is less formal than a survey.
You’ll need to take detailed notes, and it may help to bring a recording device with you. To collect data, visit your community’s spaces, like senior centers, shelters, and schools to observe, speak with those at the ground level, and participate in programs that already exist.
The drawback of this method is that information is subject to participant bias, as every individual may perceive an experience differently. For this reason, multiple people representing a range of backgrounds and viewpoints should participate in the data collection process. Additionally, each voice should be weighed equitably.
Gathering quantitative data can be especially time-consuming. Luckily, there is plenty of community-based data collected by experts 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 great 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.
Community needs assessments can inform any type of community development. So, whether you’re a volunteer manager or nonprofit development officer, you’ll want to gather your team to create an action plan that drives your initiative forward.
The outcomes of your assessment and resulting recommendations can usually be organized into three categories:
These are laws or policies that work to change behaviors.
Example Through public records, a local nonprofit discovers that 80% of the district’s children under the age of 18 are food insecure. The nonprofit creates a program that campaigns to lower the household income threshold to receive free school lunches. As a result of these efforts, the school board enacts new policies and increases its lunch program budget.
These are strategies that result in larger systemic changes to social norms, institutions, or standard practices.
Example A survey reveals that 30% of low-income families with school-aged children aren’t aware of their children's eligibility for free school lunches. So, a local organization campaigns to target awareness and reaches out to community families, helping them to apply for benefits.
These are changes designed to influence people’s behavior.
Example Through conversations with local pediatricians, a nonprofit after-school program learns that many of the community’s school-aged children aren’t getting enough of the nutrients they need to thrive. So, they implement a fundraising campaign that will provide children who participate in their after-school programming with healthy snack options.
The type of action you will take should be deeply rooted in the findings of your assessment.
Your process for creating an action plan may look something like this:
The table below is one way to organize your action plan:
| Key Findings | Activity/Response | Timeline | Person(s) responsible | Indicators of Success |
| Example: Lack of follow-up support for low-income women above school age. | Review our existing college prep and tutoring programs. | March 1 | "Horizons Tutoring" program coordinators, board members | List of concrete needs of program participants after graduation (i.e. interview skills session, career prep). |
| Meet with former participants in the program (strive for 7-10 participants). | 2x forums, March, April | Program coordinators | ||
| Develop and send surveys | Send March 1. Retrieve responses by May 1. | Amy S., Dan T. |
A community needs assessment usually results in a community needs assessment report that summarizes data, findings, and recommendations.
Before you write your report, you’ll need to gather the data from your interviews, surveys, and observations.
What trends and patterns do you notice? To help make sense of your data, you can organize it into the following categories:
After you compile your data, you’ll be able to populate a report that summarizes your method, findings, and recommendations.
The report should include the following sections:
Includes an assessment checklist, as well as everything you need to plan and complete a community needs assessment for your organization.
Check out these further resources, examples, and toolkits for planning and implementing your own needs assessment:
Asset-Based Community Development
Community Needs Assessment Resource Guide
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. Conducting a community needs assessment will highlight the strengths of your community and allow you to enact positive change.