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Dragonfly, Summer 2000 Success with Outreach: The Community Assessment

by Cathy Burroughs, Network Librarian, Evaluation
NN/LM Pacific Northwest Region

This is the second article in a series about planning and evaluating outreach programs.

Like any quality service or product on the market, library outreach programs should be closely tuned to the needs and wants of the customers. Getting to know your audience requires some investigation, beginning with a community assessment.

A community assessment is typically conducted in the planning stages of a new program or service, but it is also useful to do if you want to reassess what's already going on. This article discusses community assessment for library outreach programs, but the same ideas are useful for planning any library service or program.

The purpose of a community assessment is to understand the need and priorities for a program or service -- such as who will be targeted, what problems will be addressed, and what results or outcomes are intended. But, first, what is meant by the word community? It's meaning can be loosely described as a group of individuals who share location, culture, occupation, or a common interest. You may be setting up a library to serve the local community area, or your outreach program may be targeting specific groups, such as the teen community, Native American community, AIDS community, or health providers in a particular locale or type of practice (e.g. women's health clinics).

To choose the group(s) your program will target, look at the population your library or parent organization serves and identify groups with information access problems or needs. For example, perhaps your hospital is under contract with the county public health department and has a responsibility to the public health needs of a wide area. Find out about the public health professionals in the county clinics. Do they have adequate skills and resources to access current information resources? If not, can you effectively work with them in an outreach program? Some of these answers will depend on the assessment you conduct.

To conduct the assessment, first review the library literature for studies about information needs and behaviors of the user types you hope to reach. Then, gather direct user input from key contacts and stakeholders in your targeted group. You may not need to conduct extensive research -- user interviews or focus groups with a few key contacts can be the simplest and most efficient way to gather information. You may want to interview stakeholders who have a vested interest in healthcare, such as health providers, health care administrators, a hospital board, continuing education officers, public or rural health officials, and consumers. Local medical societies, public health associations, and other associations or collegial networks can help to identify the leadership or major stakeholders to talk with. In American Indian/Alaska Native communities, it is especially important to contact tribal elders who provide leadership for the entire tribe.

Getting this type of feedback will help establish buy-in for the program or service you will want to conduct. Ask stakeholders what they think are the biggest problems with health information access. Who might benefit most from an outreach program and why? Who do they think are the opinion leaders that might help promote the importance of health information access?

The community assessment stage is also an opportunity to obtain a broad understanding of the barriers, opportunities, or resources available to the audience you want to reach. This kind of information will provide context about your targeted audience and may point to areas where your outreach program can help. For example, in a health provider community such as a clinic, what are the demographics and typical health needs of the populations cared for by the clinic? Find out if there are environmental or political barriers that discourage Internet use. Or, even if Internet use is encouraged, is there support for difficult searches or for obtaining hard to get resources? Is there a strong information services department? Does the clinic recognize the value of an onsite medical or consumer health library? Does the clinic have a website or if not, what types of Internet resources do they use? Do health providers have a way of directing patients or the public to relevant patient education and health promotion materials?

After doing the initial investigation about information access needs, problems, and causes, sending out questionnaires might be appropriate if you want to confirm impressions already gained. Surveys that are meant to produce generalizable results should be pretested to make sure the questions are valid and reliable. Plus, you must get results from a truly representative sample of your audience. Most of the time, you won't need or want to make generalizations from your research. You can still gather a thoughtful and practical understanding of your audience through informal questionnaires without worry about statistical samples.

Thus, results from a community assessment might draw from several data sources mentioned thus far, including secondary literature, user interviews, focus groups, organizational web sites, and possibly informal or formal survey research. After gathering all this data, what will you do with the results? Hopefully you can answer questions about what is most needed and the types of changes that your program might be able to facilitate. You can then identify a list of hoped for outcomes that will be very useful as you develop objectives and eventually measure program impact.

The next article in this series will discuss developing goals and measurable objectives. Also, additional resources for further detail on community assessment can be found in Guide to Planning, Evaluating, and Improving Health Information Outreach on http://www.nnlm.nlm.nih.gov/pnr/eval/.

URL: http://nnlm.gov/pnr/news/200007/success-2.html