Community Needs Assessment for Goodwill® Industries of Southern Arizona

Goodwill of Southern Arizona does a lot of good across the region. And like any good community service organization, Goodwill always has its sights on closer aligning their programming with the emerging needs of the populations they serve.

As a workforce organization that provides programming to the community, as well as actual work experience opportunities, Goodwill wanted to capture community data to power their strategic plan and adjust their services to truly align with emerging community needs. 

In Fall 2023, Goodwill of Southern Arizona contracted with Viable Insights to carry out a comprehensive community needs assessment exploring the topic of workforce development in their served regions. We worked hand in hand with Goodwill to develop a meaningful and timely process to inform intentional workforce programming and resource development for 2024 and beyond.

Just like the name suggests, needs assessments are a great way to uncover the actual needs of a group or population. But digging deeper, needs assessments are also the path to challenging your organization’s assumptions about the work you’re doing.

For a community service organization, there are some obvious downsides to developing programming based on assumptions. For starters, offering services that nobody actually needs can waste your team’s valuable time and your organization’s limited dollars. That means less impact across the board.

But on a grander scale, assumptive programming actively excludes the people you’re trying to serve. Goodwill of Southern Arizona was eager to hear from their community members in order to continue their objective to fuel more purposeful, impactful programming — and Viable Insights was more than eager to help support their efforts.

“Viable Insights knocked it out of the park as our third-party evaluator for the Administration on Community Living grant! They totally got our passion for dementia care, and the synergy and chemistry made us the perfect match. We’re excited to team up again and can’t wait to see what we’ll accomplish together!”

Tara Krantzman // Chief Operating Officer // Oakwood Creative Care

Goodwill of Southern Arizona serves multiple counties across the region, each with their own unique needs. The first step in our needs assessment engagement was to ensure that Goodwill had a finger on the pulse of each of these distinct communities.

Together, Viable Insights and Goodwill developed a community-wide survey that spanned each of their served counties. Viable Insights created emails, digital graphics, and other recruitment materials, as well as handled the scheduling of interviews. We also put together a budget and incentive plan for participants, ensuring that folks were compensated for their time, energy, and insights. 

In addition to the community survey, we also conducted a town hall, staff surveys, and interviews with leaders from Goodwill’s partner organizations. Those insights clued us into the true needs of each county and how to serve them with tailored programming.

The outpour of feedback from Goodwill’s partners and community members gave us a treasure trove of data. Just like every other step of needs assessment, Viable Insights’ approach to analysis is a true collaboration. We worked hand in hand with Goodwill’s teams to compare and contrast understandings from the data and identify missing narratives that challenged the team’s preconceived notions.

We also undertook landscape and secondary data analysis review, where we compiled public data sources to describe Goodwill’s service areas in the words of those they serve. That redefinition ensures that each service area meets community expectations, and will help Goodwill anticipate future needs on a region by region basis.

Thanks to our collaborative analysis on all fronts, Viable Insights’s reporting is deeply informed and uniquely digestible. In the end, our community needs assessment for Goodwill of Southern Arizona resulted in a forty-page document of highly visual insights and takeaways to inform the organization’s programming.

A critical part of those visual insights was an infographic-style executive summary and presentation to Goodwill’s board. This editable document can be adjusted and reused by Goodwill to ensure future presentations are just as easy to understand at a glance.

Viable Insights’ community needs assessment gave Goodwill a comprehensive understanding of what the workforce in their region was experiencing, and what they needed in terms of support and resources. 

As with any needs assessment, Viable Insights provided a number of potential actionable recommendations to kickstart the path forward. The team at Goodwill harnessed these recommendations in a handful of important ways to bolster their mission and their organization at large.

The first course of action was to address the gap between existing services and newly identified community needs. Goodwill used their new data to develop, revise and sustain the current services that held value for members of their community. And where large gaps existed, Goodwill used their data to expand programming to better serve each region’s populations.

Outside of programming, the data uncovered by Viable Insights helped Goodwill drive and support their strategic plan. That data has been embedded into Goodwill’s grant-seeking efforts, so they can better secure the funds they need to continue supporting those in need across Southern Arizona.

Assumptions can make the difference between lip service and actual community service. Needs assessments supply organizations like yours with invaluable insights to overcome assumptions and provide data-driven value for the groups you serve.

Whether you’re trying to better connect with internal teams, external organizations and collectives, or the community at large, you have a collaborative partner in Viable Insights. See how our needs assessment process can help you bridge the gap and bring intentionality back to your programming.