Module 3, Oct 28, Seminar and lab. The Strategy Pitch launches this week.

Community partners and needs assessment

Background

The needs assessment starts today. Each group was matched in Week 5 with a community partner arranged through the instructor’s community partnerships, working organizations with real staff and real constraints, and the intake conversation that set the technology question in motion already happened, by Week 8. Over weeks 9 to 12 you conduct two to three stakeholder interviews, and that fieldwork becomes the needs assessment at the center of the Strategy Pitch. The same relationship grounds your Digital Story, a short video made for the partner’s own use. Its purpose, a program explainer, a testimonial, a recruitment piece, a how-to, or an event recap, was agreed with the partner at that intake conversation, and production starts next week in the story circle.

Self-determination is one of the five NASW values your Ethics Case is graded against, and it supports honoring what a partner explicitly asks for: the partner defined the problem, made the request, and knows its own operations better than a group that just walked in. The app request case below argues the opposite. The interviews that follow a request like this often trace the real problem three steps upstream of the app itself, so giving a partner exactly what it asked for can mean building the wrong fix. Voting “disagree” means arguing that a rigorous needs assessment can legitimately conclude with a process change, staff training, or almost no new technology.

The capacity terrain you are walking into has been measured. NTEN’s analysis of nearly 1,300 Tech Accelerate assessments spanning eight years found micro-nonprofits with under one full-time staff member flagging risk on 65 percent of survey items, against 34 percent for organizations with 150 or more staff, and organizations with no dedicated tech staff averaging nearly 60 percent risk flags against 28 percent for those with ten or more. The gap runs on staffing more than on tools.

Key ideas

Needs and assets

A needs assessment that only catalogs what’s broken produces a deficit picture and a demoralized partner. Asset-based community development, the framework John Kretzmann and John McKnight built at the ABCD Institute and set out in their 1993 book Building Communities from the Inside Out, argues that communities get built from their own capacities and relationships. The framework came out of fieldwork, knocking on doors across more than 20 cities, and it names six asset categories: individuals, associations, institutions, physical environment, local economy, and local culture. The Community Tool Box standard follows the same logic in practice: assess needs and resources together, what’s failing and what already works that nobody wants to lose, across six steps that run from describing community context to selecting priority issues, with listening sessions, focus groups, and surveys as the core methods.

The framework has sector-standard and social-work-native versions. NACCHO’s MAPP 2.0, updated in 2023, is the widely used public health version, a three-phase community health improvement framework whose toolkit includes a Power Primer supplement on power dynamics in multi-partner planning. The Macro Lens publishes a seven-step version written for social workers and nonprofit leaders without research budgets, running from defining purpose and scope through reporting back to the participants themselves.

The method can move real money when the community holds the oversight. Morehouse School of Medicine’s Prevention Research Center surveyed 754 respondents at a 75 percent response rate under a 24-member Community Coalition Board on which community residents hold more than half the seats. The priorities that came back, diabetes at 24 percent, COVID-19 at 23 percent, and mental health at 20 percent, seeded five federally funded projects totaling over $10 million.

The evidence base still lags the framework’s popularity. A 2018 realist synthesis reviewed 29 papers on ABCD and found none that studied its effects on people with long-term conditions, so the claim that ABCD improves health outcomes for that population rests, as of that review, on theory. The authors built an account of the ingredients needed to make ABCD work while noting persistent ambiguity about how to implement or evaluate it. An organization’s existing strengths are usually the raw material of any realistic fix; the outcome evidence for the framework as a whole remains thin.

Realist evaluation

The realist synthesis above uses a method your evaluation plan can borrow. Pawson and Tilley built realist evaluation around the question of what works, for whom, in what circumstances, and why, and its unit of analysis is the context-mechanism-outcome configuration: in this context, that mechanism fired for these actors and produced this outcome. Their argument was that an average effect from a trial tells a decision maker little on its own, because the same program routinely works in one setting and fails in the next.

The method has been run on mHealth. A realist synthesis of mHealth for maternal and child health in low- and middle-income countries found the core mechanisms, motivation and encouragement for pregnant women and easier communication for providers, fired only under specific conditions: women needed phones of their own, providers needed network connectivity, and poor internet infrastructure and frequent power outages blocked use regardless of the intervention’s design. Those conditions are what a needs assessment documents.

The self-assessment instruments

The two maintained tools are NTEN’s Tech Accelerate (engagement, infrastructure, leadership, organization) and TechSoup’s Digital Assessment Tool (technology used, process, training and culture). Tech Accelerate, launched in 2018, runs more than 70 questions and returns a Tech Adoption Score on a four-step scale from Struggling to Leading plus a per-question risk rating; the TechSoup tool covers 6 categories, 27 subcategories, and 85 topics and returns a capability score with tailored resource recommendations. Both are built for organizations to assess themselves; your group facilitates and interprets, and never audits or grades the org.

The reassessment data suggests the instruments do something. Among 181 organizations that took Tech Accelerate twice, 61 percent reduced their risk-flag rate, with the average falling from 44.2 to 40.8 percent, and NTEN’s own reading of eight years of data is that investment in people, training and dedicated staff, moves the scores more than investment in tools. The NTEN Equity Guide adds the equity lens: who builds the technology, who uses it, and who funds it.

Reciprocity

Reciprocity principles govern the engagement, which means starting from the community’s own priorities, recognizing the power differences in the room, and treating the partner as the expert in their own context. The principles have a citable source: Israel, Schulz, Parker, and Becker’s 1998 review set out nine principles of community-based participatory research, including equitable partnership, building on community strengths, co-learning, and long-term commitment, and the Detroit Urban Research Center, which has run Detroit partnerships for over 30 years, formally adopted a plain-language version in 2011. Barbara Israel wrote the review on the University of Michigan School of Public Health faculty.

Community-based researchers have a name for the failure mode, scientific extractivism, in which the researcher arrives, mines, and leaves. Godrie’s account draws on participatory research with Quebec organizations working on poverty, homelessness, and mental health, and the proposed alternatives center on epistemic justice and up-front negotiation of expectations. The organizations on the receiving end describe the problem in specific terms. In interviews with community-based organization staff, one director described researchers presenting community-generated program ideas as their own intellectual work, and staff named the reciprocity they wanted in tangible forms: data they could use for grant-writing, professional development, and being told afterward what the researchers learned. The same study reframes respect, beneficence, and justice as obligations owed to organizations, on top of the individual research subjects the ethics codes already cover.

The stakeholder-mapping step has its own community-engaged rebuild. Allen and colleagues critique the traditional four-step stakeholder analysis as top-down and rework it around NIH’s nine community-engagement principles; their 38 interviews across seven partner groups came back to three themes, community buy-in through authentic relationships, two-way communication, and capacity that outlasts the grant period. Before the first meeting, your group should be able to say in one sentence what the partner gets out of this. Week 2’s protocol applies to the relationship itself: whose problem definition set the agenda, whose data and labor the project draws on, and who bears the risk if it fails.

The semi-structured interview

“Wouldn’t a new database help you?” is a leading question that pitches a solution instead of asking about the problem. The craft this week is the semi-structured interview: objectives, domains, open questions, probes, and a consent script, plus a power/interest map of your partner’s stakeholders to decide who to talk to and in what order. Boundaries come with the craft: this is a course project without IRB review, notes use roles instead of names, and anyone can skip any question.

The practitioner guides converge on a few concrete rules. IDEO.org’s method card recommends teams of no more than three, one interviewer, one note-taker, one photographer, interviews of 60 to 90 minutes run in the interviewee’s own home or workplace where possible, and capturing exact participant language instead of paraphrase, including instructing translators to give direct quotes rather than summaries. The City of Chicago’s design methods card adds the interviewing posture: follow the participant’s priorities instead of a rigid agenda, stay comfortable with silence, and keep asking the open “why is that” question.

The stakes of asking before building are old enough to be codified in government practice. The UK Government Digital Service has kept “start with user needs” as the first of its design principles since 2012, with research over assumption as the stated method; the list is still being revised, with an environmental-impact principle added in April 2025.

State benefits applications

The friction your journey map will document has been measured nationally. Code for America’s 50-state analysis of more than 75 applications for SNAP, Medicaid, TANF, WIC, and LIHEAP found 7 of 10 benefits applications online, 3 of 10 mobile-friendly, and zero states combining all five programs into one application. Completion time ran from Montana’s 30-minute average to Minnesota’s 110, a gap the report totals at over 167 years of aggregate client effort for Minnesota’s 1.1 million Medicaid recipients; Michigan was the report’s strongest performer, with four programs in a roughly 20-minute, 25-screen, mobile-friendly application.

Redesigning against that baseline compounds over years. GetCalFresh’s 2019 rollout to all 58 California counties reached roughly 500,000 newly eligible older adults and people with disabilities, and between 2017 and 2025 the program helped 6.2 million households access $12.8 billion in food assistance.

The app request case

A partner asks for “an app.” The request is concrete, it sounds fundable, and a group that starts sketching mockups in week one will feel productive. Then the interviews happen: client intake runs on a spreadsheet with a broken formula that two staff members quietly route around, nobody was ever trained on it, and the waitlist problem the app was supposed to solve is a data-entry problem three steps upstream. Research on nonprofit technology adoption locates the barriers in exactly these organizational layers: broken workflows nobody owns, missing training, and unclear task ownership. That study’s 20 interviews with NGOs traced technology use along the whole value chain, program design, fundraising, fund management, and delivery, and found the lag behind the private sector concentrated in the organizational layers rather than in the tools available.

The app request has a documented real-world version. Heifer International spent $4,000 and 30 staff hours building an iPhone app in 2010, struggled to drive downloads in a crowded app market, then switched to a mobile-friendly website and saw a ten-fold increase in visits within a year. In the same reporting, NTEN’s Amy Sample Ward and Idealware’s Laura Quinn both argue that nonprofits default to apps without asking whether the audience wants one.

The deeper critique targets the reflex itself. Byrum and Benjamin call it tech solutionism, treating technology as an inherently corrective force, and argue it obscures how algorithms embed the historical bias of the institutions that built them; their prescription is deep investment in people and community-centered visioning before any tool gets built. The interviews in the scenario above support fixing the intake workflow, training the staff, and adding a lightweight tool. Readiness and appropriateness are findings in their own right, and the pattern here previews Toyama’s amplification argument in Week 12: a tool multiplies whatever capacity, or dysfunction, is already in the organization.

Before class

In class

Seminar

Vote, then what a technology needs assessment is, a live walkthrough of Tech Accelerate and the TechSoup tool on sample accounts, and the reciprocity principles applied to your actual partner. An interview methods clinic closes it out, with the room rewriting leading questions into open ones. A practitioner panel is planned for this module (TBC); confirmed speakers will be posted on Canvas.

Lab: the client journey map

Groups map their partner’s client journey across four stages, first contact, intake, service, follow-up, and mark where each stage creates friction using Week 6’s learning, compliance, and psychological cost categories, plus where technology currently helps or hurts. The method takes a page from Code for America’s GetCalFresh work: the paper CalFresh application it replaced ran applicants through over 100 screens of repetitive questions, and the redesigned online version cut completion time from 45 minutes to under 10. Groups then draft their interview protocol straight from the map’s highest-friction steps, using an LLM as a drafting partner and cutting leading questions by hand (disclosed per the course AI policy); another group red-teams the draft and hands back three concrete fixes. Before the interviews, each group pulls a demographic profile of the partner’s service area from Census Reporter. You leave with a partner-specific journey map and a field-ready interview protocol for the stakeholder interviews ahead.