Community Assessment

If a Trade Area Assessment is about finding traffic drivers and ways to drive sales, a Community Assessment is about finding out what’s important in your neighborhood and ways to give back.

Performing a Community Assessment allows you to identify opportunities within your community to build local connections with charities, non-profit groups, and other groups relevant to your customers.

Similar to a Trade Area Assessment, your Community Assessment can be done partially from your computer, but you’ve also got to get into the neighborhood and understand what’s going on in person.

Timing

You can conduct your Community Assessment at the same time as your Trade Area Assessment. We recommend spreading out your Community Assessment over a few days. Do some research on your computer, then visit the places you find in your research.

Community Event Schedule

A second tool we offer allows you to collect dates and information on the local events happenings in your trade area (parades, tree lightings, shopping nights, art nights, etc.). These are opportunities for you to sample, volunteer, donate and advertise to get your business in front of the local attendees.

Here is the Community Event Schedule as a Word document.

Tips

• Use Google Maps to identify the 3 to 5-mile radius around your location. To do this:
  • Type in your location address.
  • Click “Search nearby.”
  • Type in the category of what you’re looking for. Type in community-related words such as charity, schools, parks, police station, fire station, food bank, soup kitchen, theater, etc.
• As you tour, bring business cards, and when possible, introduce yourself to people, give them a business card, and tell them about your business. You could even bring pre-printed invitations with an offer to come to your location.