Community needs research planner

What goes in and out

You give it

• Population, area, proposed need, existing evidence, research budget, and access or consent limits.
• Document (optional)

You get

• A needs research plan or report, interview or survey questions, provider table, and gap summary.

How the task works

• Define the community. Set a precise population, area, and question, then review what reliable public evidence already shows.
• Listen and map services. Plan accessible surveys and interviews. Map providers, capacity, local strengths, and barriers to access.
• Explain the actual gap. Compare need with current capacity and access. State limits and give leaders clear options.

Full instructions

• Open your AI chat. Paste the skill text or upload the skill folder.
• Tell it who the people are, which area, and what need or service idea you are testing.
• Add any reports, data or budget limits you have (optional).
• Review the plan first. If you will survey or interview people, get consent and ethics review before you collect anything.
• Collect the data yourself, then paste the results back and ask for the report, provider table and gap summary.
• Check the sources and numbers the AI cites before you share the report.

Full instruction file

Nonprofit Needs Assessment

Before you start

Use the material below to do this job. If facts or tool access are missing, explain what you can finish and what must wait.

What you need (use your own material or the linked skill):

• Your question (yours): the decision or problem, and what a good outcome looks like.

Makes it better (optional):

• A document (yours): a finished document, such as a Word file, a PDF or a page of notes.

How to start:

1. Look first. Use what they've already attached, pasted or put in their about-me note. In a coding assistant with file access, look in the project too for these by name.
2. Check what's missing. Look for your question, a document. They can attach files, paste the details, or share a file path your assistant can read. Ask only for missing facts that change the result. If they ask you to start with what they have, complete the parts you can and mark the gaps.
3. Do the job. Follow the skill below with the facts and tools you have. Mark each gap with MISSING: where it belongs and never invent a fact to fill it.

Tools that do this best:

• A chat AI that can read your files: The skill works from records and drafts you provide. Research tasks also need current, checked public sources.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill for research that establishes whether — and what kind of — a community need exists, before or independent of designing a specific program response. Concrete triggers:

• "We want to start a new program — is there actually demand for it?"
• "The funder wants evidence of need in our proposal."
• "Do a landscape scan: who else in the region serves this population?"
• "Run a gap analysis between what's needed and what's currently provided."
• "Plan community listening sessions / focus groups / key informant interviews."
• "Should we sunset this program? Has the need changed?"
• "Build a community needs assessment report for the board or a funder."

Boundary — read before starting:

• Once need is established, building the logic model/theory of change for the program response is nonprofit-program-design — this skill stops at "here is the documented need and the gap," not "here is how the program will address it."
• Tracking whether a running program is achieving outcomes is nonprofit-outcomes-measurement — a needs assessment is normally a point-in-time (or periodic, e.g., every 3–5 years) study, not an ongoing monitoring system.
• If the ask is about assessing a funder or partner's fit rather than a community's need, that is nonprofit-grant-research, not this skill.

Core Frameworks

1. Needs Assessment Triangulation Model

Credible needs assessments triangulate three data types — do not rely on only one:

1. Secondary/quantitative data: existing public data (Census/ACS, county health rankings, school district data, CDC/state health department data, HUD point-in-time homelessness counts, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 211 call data, existing needs assessments from hospitals/United Ways/community foundations that may already cover the geography).
2. Primary quantitative data: surveys of the target population or service providers, structured to produce comparable numbers (Likert-scale need ratings, service utilization/barriers surveys).
3. Primary qualitative data: key informant interviews (service providers, government officials, faith/community leaders), focus groups, and community listening sessions/town halls with the population itself — essential for capturing lived experience that administrative data misses, and for avoiding a needs assessment that speaks about a community rather than with it.

A needs assessment built on secondary data alone is the most common quality shortfall funders and evaluators flag — it documents that a problem exists in the abstract but not that this specific population, in this specific service area, experiences it in a way this organization is positioned to address.

2. Asset Mapping / Landscape Scan

Before concluding a gap exists, map what already serves the population:

• Provider inventory: who else offers this or an adjacent service in the geography (name, capacity/slots, eligibility criteria, waitlist status, funding source).
• Community assets, not just deficits: existing informal supports, cultural/faith institutions, natural helpers — an assets-based (vs. purely deficit-based) framing is increasingly expected by funders and avoids a report that only catalogs problems.
• Capacity vs. demand gap: the actual gap is rarely "no service exists" — more often it's insufficient capacity, wrong eligibility criteria, wrong hours/location/language access, or long waitlists. Name the specific gap type; "duplicative service" is a common and damaging finding if the scan is skipped.

3. Gap Analysis Structure

State findings as: Need (documented) → Current capacity (mapped) → Gap (the delta) → Implication for this organization (fill gap directly, partner/refer instead of duplicating, or no organizational role). A needs assessment that stops at documenting need without this last step gives leadership nothing decision-ready.

Instructions

1. Define the population and geography precisely before collecting anything — "youth in our city" is not scoped enough to find or design data collection against; specify age range, neighborhood/zip codes, and the specific condition/need domain.
2. Start with secondary data to build a baseline picture and identify what's already known — check county/city health departments, Census/ACS, school districts, United Way/community foundation reports, and 211 data before commissioning any primary research.
3. Identify the secondary-data gaps — what the existing data can't tell you (usually: lived experience, specific barriers, why people don't access existing services) — and design primary data collection specifically to fill those gaps, not to re-confirm what secondary data already shows.
4. Run the landscape/asset scan in parallel: inventory other providers, their capacity, and eligibility/access barriers (cost, hours, language, transportation, documentation status, waitlists).
5. Design primary data collection instruments matched to the audience: short structured surveys for broad reach/quantifiable ratings; key informant interviews for providers and community leaders; focus groups or listening sessions for the population itself, held in accessible locations/languages/times and, where appropriate, with compensation for participants' time.
6. Recruit for representativeness, not convenience — flag and mitigate selection bias (e.g., only surveying people already engaged with the organization systematically overstates satisfaction and understates unmet need among the unserved).
7. Synthesize with the triangulation model: look for convergence and divergence across secondary data, primary quantitative data, and qualitative input — divergence is often the most important finding (e.g., data shows a service exists, but the community reports it's inaccessible).
8. Run the gap analysis: need → current capacity → the specific gap → organizational implication (fill it, refer/partner, or stand down).
9. Write the needs assessment report with the standard structure: executive summary, methodology (data sources, sample sizes, response rates, limitations), findings by data source, landscape/asset map, gap analysis, and recommendations.
10. Set a revisit cadence — needs assessments go stale; recommend refreshing every 3–5 years or on a major demographic/funding/policy shift, and say so in the report so it isn't treated as a one-time artifact.

Common Failure Modes

• Secondary-data-only assessments presented as if they establish local, specific need — funders increasingly probe for primary data and community voice.
• Skipping the landscape scan, leading to a program proposal that duplicates an existing, underused service instead of addressing the real gap (access, capacity, or eligibility).
• Deficit-only framing that ignores existing community assets and reads as extractive rather than collaborative — increasingly penalized by funders committed to community-centered/equity-based grantmaking.
• Non-representative sampling — surveying only people already in the organization's database, systematically missing the unserved population the assessment is supposed to reach.
• No compensation or accessibility planning for community participants (transportation, child care, language, timing), which suppresses turnout from exactly the population most affected.
• Stopping at "need exists" without a gap analysis or organizational-implication statement, leaving the board/funder with a diagnosis but no decision.
• Treating the assessment as one-and-done rather than setting a refresh cadence, so program decisions rest on years-stale data.

For Advisors/Consultants

• Scope the engagement explicitly around the triangulation model — clients often request "a needs assessment" meaning only a secondary-data literature review; clarify budget/timeline needed to add primary qualitative and quantitative components, since this is where most of the client's credibility with funders and community stakeholders is actually built.
• When facilitating listening sessions/focus groups for a client, build in a debrief step with the client's staff or board on findings that challenge existing assumptions — needs assessments that surface uncomfortable findings (e.g., "your flagship program isn't reaching the population with greatest need") are the ones most likely to be quietly shelved without a structured decision conversation attached.
• Standard advisory deliverable: a needs assessment report (methodology, findings, landscape/asset map, gap analysis, recommendations) plus a short board-facing decision memo translating the gap analysis into 2–3 concrete organizational options.
• Where the client's real question is "should we keep funding this program," reframe the assessment around a sunset/continue/redesign decision explicitly, and hand off a positive continue-and-redesign finding to nonprofit-program-design.

Standard Deliverables

• Needs assessment report: executive summary, methodology, findings, landscape/asset map, gap analysis, recommendations, limitations
• Data collection instruments (survey, interview guide, focus group protocol)
• Provider/asset inventory table
• Gap analysis summary (need → capacity → gap → implication)
• Board/funder-facing summary memo with a recommended organizational response

After this

When you've handed it back, suggest what they could do next in one short question. It's a suggestion: if they're done, that's fine. Offer these, and say they can type their own:

• The Market research report writer. It takes the plan and audit report. If they pick one and that skill is added here, carry straight on with what you just made. If not, give the link and say what to bring.