Needs Assessments - How to Facilitate

A needs assessment is a tool you can use to identify where volunteers should be placed, and where they could expand or improve your impact. It can also identify where volunteers are actually not needed. Typically, it is a survey completed by your entire staff, which elevates the ‘gaps’ and ‘opportunities’. For a volunteer program, the results can be incredibly insightful. They can identify new volunteer roles, staffing or resource needs, budget discrepancies, and more. In many instances, the volunteer program does not actually align perfectly with the needs of the organization or it’s staff – but a needs assessment can help you course correct. Taking a few hours to run a needs assessment, especially during annual planning, will ensure that your program is lean, effective and impactful.

To manage a needs assessment effectively, establish a committee. This can include leadership, board members, and keyed in staff members. This team will work together to design the survey and facilitate the process with staff.

Start with the goals. Are you hoping to tease out inefficiencies, or to create new positions or programs, or to just take the temperature of how you are operating? Keep this top of mind throughout. It will influence who you survey, and what questions you ask.

Identify who will participate. This should ideally be all staff members and organizational leadership. You may want to include any key long-term volunteers who act as supervisors of other volunteers, as well.

Design your questions. Questions should surround how volunteers are currently being used, if they are meeting the needs, and what needs are not being met. Think of it in two ways: what could volunteers do to alleviate your plate, allowing you to do more? And, what could volunteers do themselves, to actually expand your impact? A question bank is listed here, as well as few linked sample needs assessments.

Create the survey. Shoot for less than 20 questions, and request a variety of response types – ranking, yes/no, comment boxes. If your survey is too lengthy, you will lose participants. If you don’t ask enough questions though, you won’t get enough information to work with. Survey Monkey is a great platform for creating a survey – you can enter the questions, and create a link that can be shared with your staff. You’re able to log in, see responses, and download them into a spreadsheet.

Talk to your staff. Host a short meeting, allowing leadership to introduce the idea of the needs assessment to all staff expected to participate. Let them know the purpose of the assessment, and ensure participants leave with the understanding that the goal is to increase their capacity. Give them the link to the survey, and a deadline to complete it by, as well as a date that you all will meet again to review the results.

Collect Responses. Continue to remind participants to complete the survey, thoughtfully.

Evaluate the results. Once all responses are in, you’ll want to sit down with the committee and review them wholistically. What trends do you see? What suggestions stand out? You’ll want to compile the results in an easily-digestible way (hint: this is a great skills-based project for a volunteer!), so that you can share them with your staff at large.

Share the results. Gather your staff once again, and present the results of the needs assessment. Highlight key themes, successes, gaps, and opportunities. Carve out time in the meeting to allow staff to ideate solutions together – whether in small groups or as a full team.

Continue the work! From here, the committee should continue to meet on some cadence, to begin implementing new ideas and action items. Check out our article here on how to create new volunteer positions, to help you get started.

Read the next section: Needs Assessment - Question Bank