Benton Foundation
 
Strategic Communications ...
... in the digital age 

Table of Contents

Introduction

Establish Leadership

Define Assessment Targets

Assess Nonprofit Needs

Map Existing Resources

Create An Action Plan

Appendix 1: Focus Group Protocol

Appendix 2: Resource Mapping Questions

Appendix 3: Conducting Community Assessment (published with permission from NPower, requires Adobe Acrobat to view the PDF)

BENTON FOUNDATION
950 18th Street, N.W.
Washington DC 20006
ph:202-638-5770
fax:202-638-5771
communicate@benton.org
www.benton.org

© Benton Foundation 2001

 A Project of Benton's Communications Capacity Building Program
Community Toolkit: Defining the Target Assessment Community

Previous: Establishing Leadership

The first step in a community assessment is to get a picture of nonprofits in the community. What is the makeup of the community’s nonprofit sector? How many organizations exist? Into which categories do they fall? Answers to these questions will be useful to both you and your funder. Here are some other key questions to answer:

  • What are the geographic limits of the community?
  • What types of organizations will be included? The 501(c)(3) status covers a wide range of organizations that funders may or may not be interested in, often including schools, libraries, churches and religious organizations, and both national and community-based organizations.
  • Will the assessment focus on a particular type of mission, such as social-service agencies or the arts? The priorities of the assessment funders may determine the answer.
  • Is the size or budget range of the organization a selection criteria? For instance, your target group of nonprofits might include a free health clinic but not a university medical center.
Next, investigate existing directories of nonprofits in the area. Some statewide associations of nonprofits, such as the Colorado Association of Nonprofits (www.canpo.org/fresources.htm), publish nonprofit directories. Such directories may be especially valuable, as they may list the very small nonprofits not required to file with the IRS. The National Council of Nonprofit Associations’ Web site (www.ncna.org/states.htm) provides contact information and e-mail addresses or links to the Web sites of state associations. A local United Way may also publish such a directory.

Another excellent national resource is Guidestar (www.guidestar.org), a searchable database of 640,000 nonprofits nationwide, drawn from IRS documents and sometimes augmented with additional information provided by the nonprofits. The Advanced Search supports a listing of all nonprofits in a specific city or zip code. GuideStar is primarily intended to provide information about specific nonprofits to donors, so its ability to generate statistics is limited.

For more specific criteria, or if no local directory exists, turn to the Internal Revenue Service. Although the ultimate source for nonprofit data is the IRS form 990, it can take several days to translate IRS statistics into a usable form. The National Center for Charitable Statistics (nccs.urban.org) can provide you with the raw data and assist you in sorting through it.

But raw IRS data can be a grab bag. Knowledge of IRS categories will help a researcher sort through the data more quickly. For example, the Michigan effort included IRS categories such as “arts, societal benefit, … youth development, and science and technology” and excluded “education, medical research, international, and religion.” The disadvantage of defining your assessment community by category is that some desired organizations may be excluded, and unwanted organizations included. Jennifer Keller Jackson of Technology Works thought it necessary to go through the organizations manually. “We literally handpicked through [the IRS’s] list of 14,000. … It took us about three days of full-time work to weed out schools, libraries, and churches and come up with 4,000 community-based organizations.”

If the search for statistics will involve intensive data-crunching, consider hiring help for that task. Possible sources of such help might be graduate students, interns, or Americorps workers.

Next: Assessing Nonprofit Technology Humanware Needs

Last updated: 1 August 2001 mff
www.benton.org/Practice/TA/commkitpage3.html