Take Action on the Assessment Data

Key Actions

Use your data to:

• Inform strategic planning efforts
• Revise your communications/marketing plan
• Improve customer service and offerings
• Inform the community of the needs assessment findings to build trust and engagement

The most important thing you can do with data is use it! There is a mountain of data from focus groups, surveys, maps, the U.S. Census Bureau and other sources that local governments — whether due to lack of resources or competing priorities — never use to improve services for their communities.

Do not let valuable information you receive from your community sit on a shelf (digital or actual). It will become more difficult over time for your agency to engage residents in your parks, programming and facilities if they do not trust that you are taking their feedback into account in order to strengthen those offerings. The same lack of trust and engagement will affect fundraising, volunteer efforts and other agency activities which depend on community participation.

Below we discuss how to take action to inform your strategic planning efforts, revise communications and marketing plans or improve your agency’s offerings and customer service.

Inform Strategic Planning Efforts

A strategic plan sets out multi-year goals and priorities for your agency. It details the results your organization wants to achieve (e.g., “enhance health and wellness through expanded seniors programming”) and provides a game plan for achieving them (staffing, activities/programs, etc.).

Needs assessment data can be one valuable input into your agency’s strategic planning process. You can use the data to answer the following questions:

1.  What are your community’s needs and priorities for facilities, programs and parks?
2. What is your organization already doing well with the above? What needs improving?
3. How are you currently reaching different neighborhoods and community members? What, if anything, in your communications approach needs to change?

Do not, however, rely only on needs assessment data to inform your strategic planning process. By using other data sources, such as those listed below, you ensure that your agency’s direction is based on information that gives a 360-degree picture of your community.

If your agency has a strategic planning goal focused on boosting community health via your recreation center offerings, you could first pull customer satisfaction data about recent programs and needs assessment responses on current health needs and priorities. You also could consider all those survey responses in the context of GIS  mapping and public health data, giving you a third-party picture of who your community members are and where they live in relation to your facilities and parks. Finally, inform your goal setting through the practicalities of budget and staffing numbers so that your agency is setting a goal it can reasonably achieve.

Revise Your Communications and Marketing

As explored earlier in this resource, you can gain a few pieces of information from communications and marketing questions to improve how your agency connects with residents.

• How your community members currently hear from you.
• How they would prefer to receive updates and stay engaged.
• How you currently reach your community members compared to how you could be reaching them.

For example, you may find that community members hear about events at your main recreation center through a monthly email newsletter, but they may prefer to receive updates via social media feeds.

In step three of this resource, we discussed how to elicit responses from underinvested residents such as seniors, those with disabilities and other community members who experience challenges with access to services. Pay particular attention to how these individuals would prefer to stay connected, so your communications reach the widest swath of the community as possible. The more engaged these residents are, the more likely that their health and wellness can improve through your agency’s activities and programs.

The needs assessment can give you an opportunity to ask questions that drill down to a deeper level rather than just updating people on events and upcoming classes. Pose a question or two about what your community members think of when they consider parks and recreation. Do you find that most are fully aware of everything your agency does, or do you need to raise awareness? Greater awareness can lead to increased engagement from the community; the more engaged community members are, the more they can advocate for enhanced funding and staffing for your organization.

Improving Your Customer Service and Set of Offerings

Here are three things you can do in the short term with needs assessment feedback:

• Expand on areas of strength, whether it’s successful offerings or aspects of your facility or parks management.
• Identify things to improve, particularly those that you can easily address in the short term (since they do not require significant time and financial investment).
• Build a culture of continuous improvement through regular monthly or quarterly meetings, where you gather with colleagues to talk through performance data and hold direct conversations that focus on targeted issues. 

See step four of the NRPA Customer Feedback Survey resource, which goes into detail about all of the above.

Inform Your Community of Findings to Build Trust and Engagement

Communicating to your community the results from any needs assessment will give you opportunities in the short term to show residents that you are listening to their feedback:

• Broadcast the results via community members’ preferred channels as indicated in the assessment:
  If you include communications/marketing-related questions in your assessment, this is a perfect opportunity to take action on that new data. If your community would prefer to hear
  from you on Facebook rather than a more traditional method (or vice versa), follow through with this first opportunity.
• Summarize the positives and negatives at a high level:
  Including a list of “here is what you said is going well” and “here is what we are working on to change” will give residents a 30-second highlight that shows you are listening. You can include a more complete, downloadable survey report for those who want to read further.
• Announce a few quick-win actions:
  If you do have some short-term wins that act on community feedback, announce them in communications materials. For example, if it is possible for you to open one of your recreation centers an hour earlier on Sundays, your announcement about the earlier opening would be a great opportunity to emphasize that the decision was made acting on the community’s input.
• Lay out next steps with longer-term items:
  You may receive feedback that your organization simply cannot act on in the short term, because either you are going into a strategic planning process, or the community’s concerns relate to larger shifts in offerings or facilities that will take longer to achieve. It is acceptable in these cases to let the public know that you are carefully considering its feedback on these fronts, but it will take a long period of time to make substantial changes.