Working to focus their efforts in an effective way, community leaders realized that additional information was needed to clarify community needs to residents. Additional data was collected from the database, and along with a trained Community Liaison from the project, community stakeholders began to effectively engage in developing strategies to address a variety of issues. Now that concrete, documented community assets and vulnerabilities are being shared, community issues are no longer being discussed in ambiguous or subjective terms. Presentation of data inevitably leads to questions requiring the retrieving of additional datasets. It is beneficial and more efficient to determine what types of information should be gathered as early in the process as possible.
Information overload is a real occurrence.
Most community residents can feel overwhelmed with an abundance of information from various sources. Try to allow individuals time to digest the information and to process and discuss its relevance to their environment. By focusing on community assets, residents develop a positive frame of reference from which to address issues and are allowed to build upon assets as a means of addressing vulnerabilities. Divide into smaller committees to deal with specific datasets surrounding a topic, issue, or subject. Developing strategies for change is more manageable if subcommittees are created around specific datasets related to selected issues.