Community Engagement Essentials: A Data-Driven Guide to Gathering Insights that Matter

Whether it’s understanding the needs of the people they serve, building trust with their communities, or ensuring that programs are effective, community engagement is at the heart of many nonprofits’ missions.

In this post, we’ll explore various ways nonprofits can engage their communities - starting with the WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, AND WHY - and how data can enhance their efforts, drawing on some real-world examples and sharing practical tips and strategies that can help your organization gather useful information, make data-driven decisions, and maintain strong, lasting connections with your community.

The Why:

When planning your community engagement, make sure you start with a clear why to ensure activities align with your organization’s goals and deliver meaningful benefits to the community. Do you hope to build relationships and trust? Measure program effectiveness? Gather information to inform program design? The answer will help to inform your other Ws, as well as set clear goals for your engagement efforts, and guide your data capture plan.

Spotlight on the North Missoula Community Development Corporation

Keeping in Touch with the Community

Community engagement helps nonprofits stay connected, relevant, and responsive to evolving community needs. By maintaining an ongoing dialogue, organizations can proactively surface critical problem areas and identify areas to focus their resources and conduct further research to have the greatest impact. Regular engagement also fosters trust and a sense of shared ownership.  When community members feel valued and heard, they are more likely to support and advocate for the nonprofit, building long-term relationships that strengthen the organization’s mission.

One powerful example of using data for community engagement is the work of the North Missoula Community Development Corporation (NMCDC), an organization focused on building community power, thriving neighborhoods, and affordable homes in Missoula, Montana. 

NMCDC engages with residents of Missoula’s North and West Side neighborhoods through social media, community advisory groups, regular community meetings, and other events.  To better understand the attitudes, needs, and challenges of community residents, NMCDC also conducts a periodic neighborhood survey.

Impactful Insights partnered with NMCDC to turn raw data into actionable information by processing complex survey data and surfacing  key insights, including: 

• What residents love most about their neighborhood, and what they would like to see change

• Residents’ challenges related to housing availability and affordability

• Gaps and issues related to infrastructure, safety, and accessibility

This work helped to gauge residents’ attitudes and impacts of completed NMCDC projects in the area, as well as inform future programming.  Soliciting input from those with lived experience also made the community feel heard, particularly as the results were shared back with residents to highlight how their input shaped NMCDC’s priorities. 

Best Practice: Close the Loop to Build Trust and Transparency
Sharing key findings with those who contributed their thoughts and ideas not only builds trust but also encourages continued participation. When community members see how their feedback is used to drive decisions, they’re more likely to stay engaged and contribute to future efforts. NMCDC’s approach demonstrates the importance of closing the loop with the community, fostering transparency and collaboration.

The Where & When:

When using community engagement to gather valuable program data, consider the timing of your outreach - should this happen at specific project stages (like planning, implementation, or evaluation) or on a more ongoing basis? Deciding when to engage can help ensure that community input is relevant, actionable, and aligned with your program’s goals.

If you’ve used a logic model to guide your organization’s programming (learn more here!), consider where in your model community engagement can provide new data or supplement existing data to help measure and improve the success of your program.  

• Inputs: Engage the volunteers, staff, and key partners who contribute to your organization’s work. Collect data to understand their motivations, satisfaction, and ideas for improvement. These insights can help your organization refine internal processes, improve volunteer satisfaction, and optimize resource allocation.

• Activities: Gather feedback on specific program activities, like workshops, events, or services offered to the community. This information is critical to understanding participant experiences and can highlight areas for improvement, ensuring that the activities meet community needs effectively.

• Outputs: While many outputs can be measured using available data on the immediate results of your organization’s activities (e.g. participants served, resources distributed, or services delivered), capturing additional data through community engagement can provide useful context, understanding barriers to accessing services, relevance of offerings, and more.

• Outcomes: Community-sourced data on outcomes offers valuable insights into whether your programs are achieving the intended social impact and where you may need to adjust strategies to maximize benefits.

Spotlight on Jewish Family Service of Greater Dallas

Engaging Volunteers as “Inputs” for Program Success

When nonprofits think of community engagement, they often focus on the people they serve. But in some cases, the community you need to engage is those who contribute to the organization's success—your volunteers.

Jewish Family Service of Greater Dallas (JFS) provides critical support to promote self-sufficiency and well-being within the community, and much of its work relies on dedicated volunteers. To ensure a positive and meaningful experience for these volunteers, JFS partnered with Impactful Insights to collect feedback through an annual survey.   Data captured through this survey helped JFS to surface challenges, understand motivations, and capture ideas from those on the front lines.  These insights led to meaningful changes that improved the volunteer experience, ensuring JFS maintains the volunteer support it needs to deliver its impactful programming.

Additionally, the results were shared with a volunteer engagement task force, who helped to add context, brainstorm solutions, and put new ideas into practice.

Best Practice: Engage Your Inputs, Not Just Your Beneficiaries
Your volunteers, donors, and other key stakeholders are also a vital part of your community. Just as you would collect input from the populations you serve, it's essential to engage those who support your organization behind the scenes. Gathering data from these “inputs” provides unique perspectives, insights, and ideas. By understanding what motivates them and what their challenges are, your organization can identify areas for improvement and ensure they remain enthusiastic contributors to your mission.

The What:

There are many ways nonprofits can engage meaningfully with their communities, each offering valuable insights when supported by data. Surveys, interviews, and focus groups can be powerful tools for gathering direct feedback around community attitudes, needs, and priorities, while social media provides a space for real-time interaction, allowing organizations to provide timely updates, and tap into immediate questions, concerns, or ideas. Holding events in the community - whether workshops, informational sessions, or celebrations - brings people together, offering an opportunity to engage directly with community members and glean insights through informal conversations. 

However you choose to engage, be sure that data is at the core of your strategy. 

• When conducting surveys, interviews, or focus groups, be intentional about the data you want to capture and why. Start with clear objectives—what insights do you hope to gain, and how will these insights drive your decisions? 

• In social media interactions, keep track of impressions and engagement, as well as common themes, questions, or concerns raised by community members.  You can also create quick polls or prompt feedback in comments to capture more structured input. 

• For community events, take note of recurring topics in conversations, attendance patterns, and demographics, which can reveal who you’re reaching and which topics resonate most. 

• You might also receive inbound communications from your community through a web form or directly to nonprofit staff.  Consider setting up processes to track the frequency, volume, and themes of these conversations.

Also consider where engagement happens, whether online, within offices, or in community spaces. The location or platform can impact both participation levels and the kind of data collected. Be sure to choose spaces that are accessible and relevant to your audience.

By approaching each engagement method with a data-focused mindset, you can continuously adapt and refine your programs to better serve your community.

The Who:

Pay attention to who participates in your community engagement, and equally as important - who does not.  

Ensuring representation in community engagement data is crucial for capturing an accurate picture of community needs and perspectives. Over or under-representation can introduce bias in your data and findings, leading to misinformed decisions that overlook the experiences of specific groups.

Identifying gaps in participation can highlight potential barriers faced by underrepresented groups and help refine engagement strategies. For example, analyzing survey or event attendance data by demographics can highlight whose voices may be missing, enabling targeted outreach to ensure all community members are welcomed and included. You can use US Census and other publicly available data as helpful benchmarks of community characteristics.

This commitment to complete and accurate representation allows nonprofits to build truly inclusive programs that reflect and address the unique experiences of their entire community.

Best Practice: Leverage a “Community Advisory Board” for Context and Action

Assembling a small and representative group of engaged community members, like JFS’s "volunteer engagement task force," can provide valuable context for understanding data and brainstorming practical solutions. Involving key stakeholders in this process allows nonprofits to bring in diverse perspectives, identify realistic solutions, and ensure that ideas are implemented effectively.

Incorporating community engagement into your organization's strategy is essential for gathering actionable insights and fostering meaningful connections. By thoughtfully considering the WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, AND WHY, you can ensure that your community engagement efforts support program effectiveness and also build trust and collaboration with the communities you serve.