Getting Started

With a sound community assessment plan in place, you are ready to design your data collection plan and collect data. This will include contacting the data sources you identified in Step 2 and asking them questions to obtain the information you need. Before you begin administering surveys or conducting focus groups and interviews, however, make sure to identify existing data sources and what information they can provide. By gathering information from easily available internal and external sources first (e.g., your own PIR data or U.S. Census data), you can make sure to focus your more time-intensive data collection methods, such as surveys and interviews, on gathering information that is not available any other way.