The importance of community needs assessment
To talk about my current work putting together a countywide community information needs assessment in Yolo County, CA, I have to provide context by describing a process that largely defined non-commercial community media for many years.
Prior to 2006 in California, cable franchises were negotiated between a cable provider and a municipality, one to one. The entire process outlined the agreement between the municipality, which collected a franchise fee from the cable operator in exchange for use of the public rights of way, and it typically also included any sub agreements between city and noncommercial community media centers that manage Public, Educational and Government (PEG) channels on those cable systems. In many communities, these funds have long constituted the backbone of operational and capital funding for CMCs.
Image credit: Davis Media Access
This process could take one to three years, and generally started with a community needs assessment to determine what the community needed and expected from its cable operator. In Davis, CA, where I work, this process was a collaborative effort between the city and the nonprofit community media center (CMC). These negotiations were important to municipalities, who had the opportunity to discuss customer service issues and to negotiate for goods and services for their communities.
In 2006, the CA Legislature passed the Digital Infrastructure Video Competition Act (DIVCA). Pushed through by telecom interests in the guise of “good for the consumer,” the bill mandated statewide video franchising, stripping municipalities of any way to negotiate for their needs in this respect. And without a way to pay for the assessment phase, the bill also effectively ended the practice of community needs assessment around community media in California.
At Davis Media Access (DMA), a nonprofit community media center located in Davis, the last cable franchise prior to DIVCA was negotiated in 2000, and it did include a communitywide needs assessment. Despite DIVCA, DMA’s history with needs assessment didn’t end there.
In 2004, we had the distinction of being the first public access center in the nation to launch a Low-power FM (LPFM) radio station. In the year before launching, we conducted a series of “Community Conversations” to find out what our community needed.
DMA convened several large public meetings to talk about the opportunity to launch a new radio station. We asked our community: what kind of music would you like to hear? What kind of news and public affairs? When would you listen, and how would you listen? How might you like to be involved?
We also surveyed people about where they typically got their news and information, and collected demographic information. Importantly, we went back to them at the close of the process to report on our findings and to say, “this is what we heard, and this is how we’re putting that into practice at KDRT.”
KDRT is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary on Sept. 24, 2024. The station changed not only the face of our organization but of our community, helping to bring about a revitalization of the local music scene while providing a valuable and frequently awarded source of news and information.
In 2021, KDRT was awarded a national Overall Excellence for Small Radio Stations by the Alliance for Community Media. For the past four years, several of KDRT’s public affairs hosts have won multiple awards for their programs. In 2023, ‘“Davisville” host Bill Buchanan swept the Public Affairs category, winning three awards for his thoughtful reporting on a variety of issues.
I’m convinced we would never have been this successful had we not taken the time to do this intensive community engagement, in a manner that was open and respectful about the diversity and needs of our community.
With this history firmly in mind, DMA is currently midstream in developing a countywide information needs assessment as we work towards building a civic information media project. We do so amidst the rapid decline of our local newspapers, the dearth of coverage from the Sacramento media market, and a populace that’s increasingly turning to apps such as NextDoor and Facebook for “news.”
“The key to a robust community needs assessment is robust community engagement, something at which CMCs typically excel. No amount of money can replace genuine, respectful co-creation of community events that have as their foundation care for the community and its needs. ”
Our Davis newspaper in particular made some staffing decisions in June that riled up its readership and the community at large. In the wake of that, reporters and columnists moved en masse to Substack, and there’s been a great deal of chatter about potential new news sources cropping up.
I have no doubt that someone with access to venture capital could pull together something before we can get there with a nonprofit model. But I know just as well that any effort that doesn’t take the time to gauge what the community needs and wants will fall into old patterns afflicting so many media outlets; that money will be the driving influence, and that local outlets born from a desire to capitalize on a public good will ultimately decline when they don’t make enough money.
While they do need financial support to be successfully executed, the key to a robust community needs assessment is robust community engagement, something at which CMCs typically excel. No amount of money can replace genuine, respectful co-creation of community events that have as their foundation care for the community and its needs.