Community Needs Analysis Toolkit

Community Centres SA's Community Needs Analysis (CNA) Toolkit is a great tool to inform your program planning for your community.

The tool is intentionally simple and adaptable yet a rigorous way to inform planning for future projects, identify potential partners in developing a local response to meet an unmet community need, and support funding requirements. Although community needs assessment is a familiar practice to Centres, the approach and frequency in which they are undertaken, varies across the sector and is dependent on Centre capacity, available time and resources. There is a need for a standardised community needs assessment tool to support Centres to adopt a systematic and evidence-based approach to collect and analyse information about their local population and their needs, as well as prioritise these needs for action.

The tool was trialled at 6 Community Centres by 12 Flinders University Social Work Students, providing valuable feedback in real time, that lead to the development of the final version. 

There are 3 stages and 6 steps in this tool. These steps use both qualitative and quantitative data.