• A community needs assessment will help you determine if the model you are considering is truly a community need. Check with your local community health department, hospital system or Area Agency on Aging and ask if you can view the results of their community needs assessment and build from there.
  • If your community is small, community needs can be identified during meetings and community events followed by information gathering and data collection.
  • Once you have identified your community’s needs, you will need to identify if other community organizations are addressing that need. If so, determine how your organizations can collaborate to meet those needs without duplicating services.
  • A community need may be identified based on the frequency in which a request for a specific type of service is made. Track the frequency of requests that come into your organization via phone, online registration, email and other referral sources.
  • Needs assessments often take a lot of time, energy and resources. Consider looking for funding to hire a firm that can assist with completing your assessment including developing and managing focus groups, identifying key questions, and managing data collection.
  • To avoid duplication, organizations can often use the data collected from larger partners to determine community needs. Look to your local Area Agency on Aging, hospitals, county and state health departments for assessment data that has already been collected.
  • Consider the target populations you intend to engage and whether outreach to these groups would benefit from evening and weekend engagement. Be sure to account for this in program planning.
  • When creating educational components for program participants and volunteers, develop programs based on conversations with care recipients and volunteers. This keeps your educational components new and fresh, brings in new participants and volunteers, demonstrates your responsiveness to community needs and ensures participants feel seen.
  • The types of assistance your model provides need to match the needs, culture and values of the community you are serving, as well as the functional levels of community members. Design opportunities to engage recipients and volunteers of different functional levels
  • At the very start of program development, determine if there are existing programs in the area addressing the needs you seek to address. It is often difficult to find funding to develop a new program if other programs already exist to meet a specific need. If other programs do exist, consider whether you can partner with those organizations and meet that need together. Helpful questions to consider include: At what capacity is the need being met? If others lack capacity, does another program need to be developed to help? Lastly, how deep is the community need if similar programs at other organizations are not functioning at capacity?
  • Listen to the needs of the family caregivers and care recipients as you complete the intake process and during check in discussions. This may lead you to additional programs that need to be integrated into your new or existing model.
  • Be willing to let a program go if there is not enough community interest even if the concept seems important. What your organization thinks is a great idea may not be of interest to the community. Trying again at a later date may be more appropriate.