What we offer

We can provide a bespoke community profile for your neighbourhood highlighting a range of social factors including health, employment, population demographics and deprivation.  

Community profiles can:

• Support project development, business plans and strategic planning.
• Build a demographic profile for market research purposes.
• Be used to conduct a needs assessment for resource targeting.
• Enhance funding applications with quantitative as well as qualitative research.

User friendly interactive online maps are also provided  - see example here.

You can also view an example of a community profile here

We can provide support to help your organisation engage locally with the community to identify needs, thoughts on proposed projects and to enhance service delivery.   

Community engagement be used to provide:

• Information for evidence-based decision making and strategic planning.
• Stronger evidence to support funding applications and/or funding reports.
• Improved links with people and organisations in the community you are working in.
• An enhanced network of volunteers, supporters and service users.

We can help you find the best way to listen to community voices that can impact your organisation's planning, evaluation and project development.  

Community research available includes:

• Community survey design.
• Conducting surveys in your community.
• Interviews and focus groups.
• Data analysis and reporting of findings in a user friendly format.
• Summarising findings for use within funding applications, business plans and evaluation reports.

We can provide independent evaluation which can be essential in assessing the impact of your project - is it having the desired outcome; does it meet the real needs in the local community?

Inform Research can support your organisation through the development and running of an evaluation programme which can: 

• Help shape decision making and strategic planning.
• Measure the impact you are having locally.
• Identify learning points and key themes to address.
• Provide the basis of funding applications and reporting.
• Increase awareness within your organisation of the importance of evaluation processes.

Securing funding for projects is a time consuming process - taking time away from delivering services. We can provide you with evidence and information to support funding applications.

Successful funding applications tend to be a balance between local knowledge and evidence of need.  The research approach we provide can support you with hard facts to support funding applications including:

• A community profile for identifying local data and summary page.
• Data in support of your project application, including population demographics, health, deprivation, employment, amongst others.
• Community research to evidence support for a planned project.
• Support in writing funding applications.

Inform Research has a number of community development skills to offer, but also recognises the importance of capacity building through effective bespoke training on community research.

We can offer training on a variety of community development and engagement essentials, focussing on:

• Bespoke training on community profiling, accessing and understanding community statistics.
• One to one bespoke training on community research and what methods are best for your needs.
• Training on understanding data around the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation and what this means for your community.