Posts Tagged: needs assessment
Look for needs assessment Aug. 18; Drake reflects on his first year in office
Tomorrow (Aug. 18) you will receive by email a survey created by the UC systemwide Talent Management Consortium with my name in the “From” line. This survey is a needs assessment to gather feedback on UC's local and systemwide training opportunities on leadership and organization development.
Your feedback is important. This survey will present you with several existing, in-development, and potential courses and/or services. Please take this opportunity to weigh in on the value and need of leadership training content and organization development services in our UC communities. Thank you in advance for your participation.
I am also pleased to share with you a video message from President Drake to the UC community as he reflects on his first year in office, thanks the UC community, and shares his optimism for the future. I echo his sentiment of pride and optimism in the work we do every day and look forward to expanding the positive impact we have in communities across the State of California.
Glenda Humiston
Vice President
2019 Central SJV Needs Assessment Survey for Agronomic Crops
The foundation of an effective extension program is an understanding of needs. Although I have...
Learn how to conduct a needs assessment to shape research and outreach
UCCE advisors, UCCE specialists and academic coordinators are invited to attend a training workshop on conducting a needs assessment.
Vikram Koundinya, UCCE evaluation specialist in the Department of Human Ecology (Community and Regional Development) at UC Davis; Chris Greer, IPM area advisor in UCCE San Luis Obispo County; and Katherine Webb-Martinez, associate director of UC ANR Program Planning and Evaluation are hosting training workshops in two locations – Davis and Parlier.
Friday, September 7, 2018, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., at the UC ANR Building, 2801 Second Street, Davis
Featuring roundtable discussion sharing UCCE examples with:
- Betsy Karle, area dairy advisor & county director, Glenn County
- Susie Kocher, forestry/natural resources advisor, Central Sierra and El Dorado counties
- Steven Worker, 4-H youth development advisor, Marin, Sonoma and Napa counties
Friday, September 14, 2018, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., at the Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center, 9240 South Riverbend Ave., Parlier
Featuring roundtable discussion sharing UCCE examples with:
- Ramiro Lobo, small farms and agricultural economics advisor, San Diego County
- Fadzayi Mashiri, livestock and natural resources advisor, Mariposa and Merced counties
- Deepa Srivastava, nutrition, family and consumer sciences advisor, Tulare and Kings counties
Training Overview
- Will help answer questions such as: What exactly is expected for a needs assessment? What is the benefit? When should I do this? How often should I do this? How do I use the information to design my program?
- Covers basic, practical how-to steps, approaches, methods, and how to write good questions
- Designed to be interactive and includes hands-on activities
- Includes a roundtable discussion with UCCE advisors sharing their needs assessment experiences and lessons learned
Participants will gain...
- understanding of position description needs assessment expectation
- understanding of needs assessments basics (what, how, when)
- understanding of and practice writing good questions
- awareness of UC ANR needs assessment examples and resources
- a draft needs assessment plan
Register at https://ucanr.edu/survey/survey.cfm?surveynumber=25314.
For more information, contact Katherine Webb-Martinez, Katherine.webb-martinez@ucop.edu, (510) 987-0029.
View or leave comments for ANR Leadership at http://ucanr.edu/sites/ANRUpdate/Comments.
This announcement is also posted and archived on the ANR Update pages.
/span>One Year In - Assessing Community Needs
As a (relatively) new livestock and natural resources farm advisor, I'm fortunate to have known...
GIS for Needs Assessments
I recently attended a really useful ANR training from the office of Program Planning and Evaluation (PPE) on needs assessment. Incorporating needs assessments into research and extension makes a lot of sense for many reasons. We all want to address issues and problems that are significant and pressing, and develop programs that are effective. A needs assessment can help flush out the challenges in our areas, prioritize needs, and build relationships with key stakeholders. As stewards of public resources, we also want our programs to be as efficient as possible. ANR expects all program staff to do needs assessments as part of program development, and the PPE has put together a great set of training and resources.
How GIS can be useful in a Needs Assessment
During the workshop, it was also exciting to hear how GIS can be a useful tool in many stages of a needs assessment. For example:
Sampling
A needs assessment often requires talking to people in the program area, which can be daunting because we work with a lot of people. GIS maps can sometimes provide a sampling frame, in other words a master list of all the potential people one might want to talk to. For example Margaret Lloyd, Small Farms Advisor for Sacramento and Yolo Counties, described how a Google Map of strawberry farm stalls in Sacramento County was the starting point for a needs assessment tour of strawberry growers. In other cases, you may get a spreadsheet of growers' addresses in a county. These can be turned to points on a map with GIS using a process called geocoding. This can be particularly helpful to an Advisor who is new to an area.
If there are more stakeholders than one can personally contact (often the case), taking a sub-sample may be a practical necessity. A simple random sample is easy to do, but a GIS also allows spatial sampling. This could be useful, for example, if you want to ensure an even geographic distribution across the county, or a distribution across other units, such as watersheds, municipalities, school districts, etc. Even if sampling is more opportunistic (e.g., meeting attendees), a map can show the distribution of the people you talked to, so you can tell if any areas were over or under represented.
Visualizing Results
Maps from a GIS can be an effective way to communicate the results of a needs assessment. Whether a simple map in a report, or an interactive web map, maps can show a lot of information at once by manipulating the size, shape, and color of symbols. Geographic patterns jump out in a way you don't get in a table or regression coefficients.
Data Fusion
With a little more work, the data you collect can be enriched with other useful datasets, such as census or environmental data. Imagine for example displaying the results of an email survey in a map form, overlaid for example with a map layer showing food security, or climate vulnerability. This type of fusion is helpful not only for understanding the nitty-gritty of the challenge, but also opportunities for extension and collaboration.
Building a Foundation for Innovation
Incorporating GIS in a needs assessment may be a little more work for those who aren't familiar with the technology (but see the services offered by IGIS below), however this investment can pave the way for all sorts of additional outreach and analysis. Putting your baseline data in a GIS simplifies ongoing monitoring and tracking, so you can see if your efforts are working. It also enables further technical analyses, such as testing spatially explicit models of a process, which can help you publish your work. On the non-technical side, getting your data into GIS formats dramatically simplifies the process of developing innovative communication tools down the road, such as story maps or web GIS.
IGIS Services