Online community needs assessment survey template
Find out what your community actually needs, including from the people your programs haven't reached yet. Collect priorities, barriers, and service gaps across every group you serve.
When you send a needs assessment to your mailing list, you tend to hear from the group of residents your services already reach. The family who never found your program, the resident who doesn't understand English, or the resident without reliable internet—none of them have easy access to your mailing list, and their needs are often overlooked. Typeform's community needs assessment survey runs on a phone in just a few minutes, so the residents you'd otherwise miss can still answer it—at a food bank, a clinic, or wherever a partner organization can share the link.
Residents rate the services that matter most to them, name what's missing, and provide insight on what stops them from accessing community programs that already exist. Someone who's used your services answers about what worked and what fell short, while someone who hasn't is asked what got in the way—whether that was cost, transport, opening hours, or never hearing about it. Their answers tell you why your programs aren't reaching the people they were built for.
You end up with clear priorities from residents themselves, which serves as evidence you can take to a funder or a council. The resident who can't give up a Tuesday evening can still provide you actionable insights from just a few minutes on their phone, so you hear from everyone in your community.
A community needs assessment survey is an online survey that asks residents what a community needs and where services fall short. It collects their priorities, the barriers stopping them using existing services, and the gaps they'd want filled. Nonprofits, councils, and health providers use community needs assessment surveys to plan and fund programs around what residents report rather than what gets assumed.
Without a community needs assessment survey, you plan community changes from the feedback that reaches you, and that comes from people already inside your programs. The residents facing the biggest barriers are the least likely to have the time, transport, or internet to answer something you emailed to a list they were never on. A community needs assessment survey goes to where those people are, so what you learn isn't limited to whoever was easiest to ask.
Cover what shapes community priorities:
- Which services matter most
- Barriers to accessing them
- Unmet needs and gaps
- Household and neighborhood context
- What would make the biggest difference
Meet your residents where they already are, rather than waiting for them to come to you. Put the survey in a QR code at a food bank, clinic, or library, so you reach residents beyond your current mailing list. Partner organizations can also share the link with the households they serve, and event staff can collect community needs feedback on a tablet at an event. Every response lands in the same place, regardless of where the resident completed the assessment.
Yes. Collect responses without names or addresses attached, which matters when you're asking people to describe hardship to an organization that might also be their landlord or service provider. You can still ask for a neighborhood or an age range, so the results stay useful for planning without identifying anyone.
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