Our Services - Community Check-Up

Assessing Readiness and Measuring a Community’s Progress

Is your community sinking, firmly anchored, or sailing merrily along?

How do you measure a community’s progress, really? A crucial part of planning and managing local change is to know where you are starting from, so you can figure out exactly where you want to go and how to get there. The Community Check-Up, combined with the Communities Matrix, offers a logical way of tackling this challenge.

The Communities Matrix is a free one page graphic representation of four phases of community development. It has been used on every continent (except Antarctica) as a starting place in communities.

The Community Check-up is a fee-based service that employs an online questionnaire that collects perceptions of community members about their community. CIEL analyzes and scores the results from the Check-up, helping place the community in one of the four developmental phases in the Communities Matrix. The Check-up reveals community strengths and weaknesses in seven key areas including leadership, community connections and the community’s infrastructure capacity. CIEL’s experienced team works with the community to make strategic recommendations about future directions.

"This stuff is amazing. I wanted to say thanks again for your work, insight and knowledge. This appears to be a vehicle that we can use as a launchpad for positive change”

- Yuergen Beck, Councillor, Athens, Ontario

The Community Check-up

When we go to a general practitioner with a health problem, the doctor often sends us to a specialist for specific treatment. The Check-Up is the general practitioner, and the results of the Check-Up process will help the community decide which specialist it needs.

The Check-Up asks participants 61 questions about their community, in seven categories: Connections and Cooperation, Vitality, Inclusivity, Leadership, Strategic Capacity, Sustainability, and Community Entrepreneurship.

The survey also asks participants to give

three words to describe their community
three strengths of their community
directions for improving the community.

CIEL then analyzes the results and presents them to the community in an easy-to-read, graphic format on a zero to 100 scale, allowing the community to see:

its placement in each of these seven areas described above
the averages and range of responses within each of the seven areas
the community’s placement within the four phases of the Communities Matrix
its score relative to an average of other communities.

For a sample of a Check-Up report, click here.

Advantages of the Check-Up and the Matrix

The Check-Up and the Matrix will not single-handedly solve a community’s problems, but they will start productive discussion about where the community is, where it wants to go, and what has to be done to get there.

Easily understood
Quick and easy to administer—an efficient use of a community’s time
Create a common language for community dialogue
An assessment of energy, willingness and capacity to change
A readiness assessment tool

The Check-Up and the Matrix can be used for:

Measuring the readiness of your community to take action
Helping to focus limited community energy into some tangible tools and processes
Setting a benchmark that can be revisited later to measure change
Realizing how far you have come as a community
Identifying what you need to pay attention to in order to foster a vital, thriving community
Launching appropriate planning so the community doesn’t slide backward through inaction
Engaging different sectors to enable a comparison of how they see the community
Creating important dialogue and bridges between sectors in the community
Measuring sub-communities (arts, business, sports sectors, etc.) within a community

"Mike and his tools and processes are wonderful to work with. He knows communities. The depth of CIEL’s tools bring credibility, rigour and confidence to the process.”

- Antoinette Danaher, Uncommon Solutions PL, Bendigo, Victoria, Australia

The Check-Up and the Matrix are not:

A “silver bullet” – they won’t “fix” your community – but they may motivate you to do so!
An action tool. The CHECK-UP and the Matrix are a diagnostic instrument that will suggest an appropriate course of action.

Methods of Administering the Check-Up

For a community to undertake the CHECK-UP, there must be a local organization or individual (a community sponsor) willing to coordinate the process. That group or individual recruits a representative group of individuals to fill out the questionnaire, and coordinates communication with CIEL.

For the questionnaire, a minimum of twelve and a maximum of twenty-five participants will provide enough data to enable a snapshot of the community. For an explanation of CIEL's use of perceptions and small sample sizes, click here and scroll to the FAQ entitled "Why does CIEL work with such small sample sizes?"

The questionnaire can be administered in a number of ways:

Participants are e-mailed the URL and take 10 to 30 minutes to respond online. This is the easiest and most efficient of these three methods.

The questionnaire is e-mailed to participants (in Word or PDF format), printed and returned to a coordinator or facilitator.

Participants fill it out a paper copy at a community meeting.

The data gathered from the completed questionnaires is analyzed by CIEL staff and a 60-page analysis and Powerpoint presentation is returned to the community, identifying the community’s location on the Matrix , drawing some conclusions about the results, and making some preliminary recommendations for action.

We encourage communities to engage in a public discussion and decision-making process upon receiving the CHECK-UP analysis, in order to identify and plan actions that are suggested by the report. CIEL can provide assistance with this process if requested.

"Having worked with communities around BC for a number of years, I feel that the Matrix is easily understandable, very relevant to communities, and a good catalyst to rally community stakeholders around the issue of building on strengths and addressing weaknesses."

- Brandon Hughes, Policy Advisor, Canadian Rural Partnership/Human Resources and Skills Development Canada