Create the Assessment

Key Actions

• Write clear and specific questions that, depending on your assessment goals, may cover activation, satisfaction and/or community needs.

This step focuses on the kinds of questions you will want to ask based on your goals outlined in step one. Note that we do not discuss how to write effectively worded survey questions. For advice on that front, see NRPA’s Customer Feedback Survey tool which gives tips on how to write brief, specific and jargon-free questions that will resonate with your respondents.

Question Categories for Community Needs Assessments

Community needs assessments typically have one or more of the following question categories (as mentioned in step one), along with demographic questions to ensure that your respondent pool accurately represents your community:

• Community activation with your agency’s facilities, programs, parks and other services   
• Satisfaction with the above
• Needs and priorities for residents going forward

Below we briefly explore common questions in each of these categories.    

Community Activation

Activation questions are straightforward inquiries about how frequently community residents visit your agency’s facilities and engage in parks and recreation programming. You will want to ask about:

• How respondents engage with facilities and programs
• How often they are utilizing these services
• How many different facilities and programs they utilize (i.e., are they primarily attending one location for programming or participating in several different classes at a few different centers?)

In addition to the above questions, you may want to take a pulse on how well your agency is communicating and marketing its offerings. Does the average respondent feel “in the loop” with your organization? A few simple questions can give you valuable data on whether you need to refresh your outreach efforts.

The question below — addressing issues for the fictional Springfield USA Parks & Recreation agency — focuses on facility activation. Other activation questions will explore specifics related to programming as well as communications.

Question Example: Facility Activation

Answers to activation questions will succinctly tell you why and how often respondents engage with your agency and its offerings, and how they tend to hear about the latest events.

Community Satisfaction

In addition to eliciting data on facility and program use, you have a good opportunity to gauge satisfaction levels on a variety of topics related to your agency and its programs. Generally, community needs assessments focus more on current activation and future priorities, but a few satisfaction-related questions can provide you with helpful feedback.

As NRPA recommends in its Customer Feedback Survey resource, ask satisfaction questions that get to specific aspects of your facilities, programs or parks. A general question such as, “Please rate the quality of programming you’ve participated in at our recreation centers,” will give you somewhat useful data. But the feedback will not tell you what was good about the programming. Hence, you won’t get the whole story. The question example below suggests a way to garner more useful feedback.

Question Example: Facility Satisfaction

The question does not just pose a high-level, generalized question about the facility. Rather, it asks about specific aspects of residents’ experiences so that you can see on the back end where you may want to improve the management and accommodations in that location. Likewise, if you are asking about your agency’s course programming, ask specifically about satisfaction with class timing, instruction quality, relevance to residents’ lives and other details related to your course catalogue — not just a single general question about a course.

In addition, a community needs assessment is a deeper-level survey compared to one solely about short-term customer satisfaction. Therefore, ask respondents about the contributions that parks and recreation make toward community health outcomes — from providing safe spaces and job training for teens after school to improving the lives of seniors.

Question Example: Park and Recreation's Contribution to Community Health

Community Needs

Finally, assessments should include questions that will help you determine how well your current facilities, programs and parks are serving the health and wellness priorities and needs of residents. You will want to ask:

• To what degree does the community need specific parks and recreation facilities, programs and services?
• How effectively does your agency already meet those needs? Again, this is a slightly different question from satisfaction — respondentsmight be happy with what already is offered, while needing something else in addition.

Of all the things your agency offers and could be engaged in, what are your community’s highest priorities? Asking respondents to prioritize offerings will help focus your agency’s efforts over the long-term.

Question Example: Needs and Priorities

This list can be as long as you need it to be (the above is just an example). Notice that it combines two distinct concepts in the same question without confusing the respondent. From the left side, you will gain data about whether respondents need the facility in question; from the right side, you will find out how well their needs are currently being met. You can also replicate this question to focus on recreation center offerings/programming.

In addition, ask respondents to identify their three most important facilities and/or programs out of the longer list, so you can hone your offerings going forward.