Advisory groups from the community are critical to designing your partnerships and program. They bring an outside perspective that staff needs to hear.
—Anne Henderson, Director of Education, Frist Center for the Visual Arts
Public broadcasters, libraries, and museums provide products, services, and content that help people stay engaged, informed, and productive. They create public value by strengthening their communities. Target a Need helps you ground partnering efforts in a compelling need and a clear vision of success. These tools help you identify the needs and opportunities that the strengths of partnership could help address.
"Need" is not, by definition, more of what your organization already does. In creating public value, need is a gap between what currently exists and the conditions that you want for your community and all its members. Where does your organization want to make a difference? For example, is creativity flourishing in your community? Does everyone have adequate skills and knowledge to meet their personal goals? Do their goals support them, and your community, well? Are opportunities for family activities and personal growth plentiful? Is there wide participation in community events and decision making? Do people communicate across all age groups and cultures? Are community members as healthy as they could be? Do they know how and where to get good information and help? How about environmental health?
A shared perception of community need establishes a rallying cause and common goals for a partnership. Targeting a concrete challenge will help you envision robust results later in the process. As the Cheshire cat told Allison, "Begin with the end in mind."
What You Should Know
All public broadcasters, libraries, and museums are involved in education, whether our efforts target creativity, strong families and communities, healthy individuals or environments, civic engagement, cultural richness, academic knowledge, or one of myriad other areas of human well-being. Some of our efforts reach classrooms, but our audiences and goals stretch across ages, cultures, and life circumstances. Our audiences come to us through their own interest. We compete with all of their commitments and constraints to reach them—and their engagement is completely voluntary. What does this mean for our partnerships?
Lifelong learning is the active, progressive process through which people transform experiences into knowledge, skills, attitudes, action, and other phenomena that enhance their personal well-being. Libraries, museums and public broadcasts advance this lifelong process by offering content and experiences people can use to develop and enrich their skills and understanding. Beyond all, the voluntary learning opportunities these three institutions provide can give entertainment, satisfaction, and pleasure. These phenomena in turn contribute to healthy families and communities. Imagine the rich, expanded opportunities that become available when the assets of broadcasting, museums, and libraries are leveraged in collaborative partnerships.
The learning landscape is evolving. We need substantial skills, some relatively new, to succeed in private and public life and in work. Most of us face a continuous need to take in new information and adapt to change. We have myriad competing claims on our time and attention. At the same time, individual learners have increasing choices. We control where and how we choose to learn. Almost unlimited perspectives and sources of learning are theoretically available and can seem equally valid.
In this environment, libraries, museums, and public broadcasters offer rich, trustworthy learning experiences, but they must present expertise, content, and resources in ways that attract and engage diverse audiences with differing expectations. In addition, they must create satisfying experiences, and audiences must get the results they want.
Keep these challenges in mind as you consider your community's needs and design your collaborative work.
While your organization's mission may seem unique, it is important to recognize that many organizations share some aspects of their work. Organizations in your community may overlap in the audiences you are trying to reach, the resources you seek to deliver, and the outcomes you want to achieve.
Assessing needs is a good start—whether you are seeking partners or already have a partner and need to identify a cause.
Good decisions depend on good information. Regularly consider the needs you want to meet. Get external validation for your perceptions and gather enough information to make sure that you understand your target audience and the surrounding context. This will help you know what will be required to successfully affect the needs of your chosen audience.
What You Should Do
Needs are a good way to ground a partnership—whether you are seeking partners, or have a partnership in place and need to identify a cause. Good decisions depend on good information. The Community Needs Tool outlines several approaches that will help you identify your community's needs. Each approach has a different degree of depth and focus.
Explore and Assess Community Needs
Click here to view a complete list of partnering resources.
