To inform and invigorate your community, you might educate them about the current state of aging globally, nationally and locally.

You might choose to present to your community to inform them. A presentation aiming to inform and invigorate may include:

• Information about how Americans are living longer/at the global, national, and local levels – it is important to talk about the causes of the demographic change and solutions. This helps people to see aging as an opportunity and not a threat
  • A sample slideshow can be found here, which can be modified to reflect the priorities and data for your county and match the purpose and content of the information you are sharing
• Details about the aging population in your county. Data and visualizations with relevant information can be obtained from:
  • UW Applied Population Lab’s Online Tools – especially GetFacts and NetMigration
  • County Health Rankings & Roadmaps
• An activity to help the group think about what life is like for aging community members. For example: 
  • Revealing misconceptions about older adults: Facts on Aging Quiz
  • Pull information and success stories in the Characteristics section

To understand your community members’ perspectives, you and your group may wish to field the survey directly to community members/constituents.

Some things to think about include:

Who to target with this survey:

• The survey recruitment will need to strike a balance between reaching a representative population and reaching a sample that will respond to the survey. Key stakeholders may include:
  • Older adults themselves
  • Family/informal caregivers
  • Individuals/groups that provide services to older adults
  • …among many others!

How to administer the survey. Options include:

• Issue the survey at sites where older adults may already be. This includes places such as meal sites, senior centers/centers of active adults, and programming targeted at older adults and their families.
  • Benefits: Convenient, and staff can help read the questionnaires to the participants and help them mark their answers.
  • Drawbacks: Information from only one segment of the population – people who already know about and use these services.
• Conduct focus groups.
  • Benefits: Provides an opportunity to present information on and discuss the impacts of population aging and the characteristics that constitute an aging-friendly community environment
  • Drawbacks: More time-consuming for both educators and participants; recruiting focus groups may be challenging; obtaining meeting space and refreshments poses additional expenses; smaller sample since focus groups can accommodate fewer individuals.
• Mail the survey to households in the community.
  • Benefits: Collect information from a broad segment of the population.
  • Drawbacks: Cost of postage and mailing supplies; low response rate; some participants may not be able to read, understand, or respond to the survey
• Call or go door-to-door to help people fill out the survey.
  • Benefits: Better response rate than mailed surveys.
  • Drawbacks: Expensive and/or time consuming
• Ask people to fill the survey out online.
  • Benefits: Information is collected automatically.
  • Drawbacks: Only those comfortable with computers and the internet will respond; may not be useful for some segments of the population
• Place advertisements in community newsletters or post flyers about the survey, with contact information to request a survey or a link to fill it out online.
  • Benefits: Broader awareness may improve participation rates, and you may reach a broader swath of the population (i.e., not just older adults and their families, but also other interested individuals who may not be targeted directly).
  • Drawbacks: Many people will not notice or respond to an advertisement or flyer. This strategy is best used in conjunction with one or more other strategies.

Compile the data:

• Choose a format that works best for you and your group
• One option is to enter it into a spreadsheet like this one

Analyze the data:

• Keep in mind your survey distribution method (and their benefits and drawbacks)
• Calculate the average score for each characteristic
• Identify the characteristics with the highest scores – these are the success stories. The county is doing well on these!
• Identify the characteristics with the lowest scores – these are the opportunity areas where the county can make improvements and see change. Try to address why they might have scored low to stimulate structural level solution thinking  
• Calculate the proportion of individuals who identified each characteristic as a top priority on the final survey question (and/or the proportion who identified each characteristic as one of the top 4 priorities, regardless of order) – a pie chart would demonstrate this nicely
• Calculate the proportion of individuals who responded that no planning efforts have been undertaken, some planning efforts, and planning efforts coupled with focused attention

Discuss the findings with the group:

• A sample powerpoint presentation can be found here, which can be modified to reflect the priorities and data for your county and match the purpose and content of the information you are sharing

Help the group discuss/decide on next steps:

• Where do they want to go from here? Invigorate other community groups? Decide on priority areas and create small-groups to tackle them? Incorporate these issues into the next strategic plan? It’s up to them, but we can help them think about and talk about this.
• Encouraging the group to make SMART goals can help keep the ball rolling

To engage community leaders in community evaluation and prioritization, the community may need a workshop which may include:

Prework:

• You might ask each participant to complete the assessment individually first (as “pre-work” for the meeting). This provides an independent opinion of how the community is faring on each characteristic before “group think” takes over.

Warm-up:

• Break the ice and get participants in the right frame of mind by asking them to put themselves in the shoes of older adults.
  • This may include an aging simulation or a thought exercise about how older adults fare in the community
  • A testimonial from an older adult and/or their family
    • If you use a testimonial from an older adult/family member please be mindful to not focus on an extraordinary older person/outlier or to focus too much on frailty. The research shows that using a more positive story about aging is more effective at engaging the audience and building a sense of self-efficacy. (Frameworks Institute, 2019) 
  • Some other warm-up exercises (if you find one that works great, please tell us about it!)

Transition to why this conversation is important:

• • All of us have the right to be included and supported. As Americans are living longer and as we age, our policies, systems, and supports can leave us isolated as older adults. We have the right to live in a more just and inclusive society, and today we will look at ways to make that happen. (Frameworks Institute, 2017). 

Discuss the assessment. In most cases, you will walk the group through each characteristic, one by one. That might include some or all of the following: 

• Discussing initial reactions to the survey
• Data presentations and discussions:
  • Some groups will respond well to data and will want hard numbers to back up opinions. For such groups, you might assign individual participants to come ready to discuss the data for each characteristic (see the characteristics section below). We may think that we are aging-friendly on a particular characteristic, but do the data back that up?
• Activities: During the meeting, you will walk through each characteristic. Depending on time constraints, you might incorporate activities for some or all of the characteristics, with the intention of helping the meeting participants put themselves in the shoes of the older adults in the community (see the Characteristics section for some suggestions). It is also important to remember that we are all aging and this will impact all of us as we age. 
• As the group discusses each characteristic, the goal is to end the discussion by coming to a consensus on the score for that item.

After going through the full assessment, ask the group to reflect on the scores:

• Note and celebrate the areas where the community is succeeding.
• Prioritize the top 3-5 characteristics to address, in the context of the community’s current and future opportunities and constraints.

Facilitate the group’s ability to move forward on these priorities:

• Help them to think about next steps and how to incorporate this into local policy/strategy/improvement.
• This may include sharing success stories from other communities, or other resources and next steps ideas (see the Characteristics section).
• Encouraging the group to make SMART goals can help keep the ball rolling.

To bring systems-level awareness to high-priority characteristics, the community may need workshops. This is best suited for groups that have already identified priority areas (either through this or another process), or groups that have specific “low-hanging fruit” opportunities (e.g., already planning for pedestrian crossing changes).

To help the group progress toward action items on their pre-identified characteristic(s):

• Provide an overview of the characteristic(s). Ask the group to report or reflect on why this is a high-priority area.
• Engage in an exercise or activity relating to the characteristic, to help the group put themselves into the shoes of an older adult in the community (see the Characteristics section for suggestions)

Facilitate a group discussion: what are the next steps?

• Provide examples of success stories in other communities or potential next steps for inspiration.
• Conclude with concrete solutions about how we can create aging-friendly communities.
• Encouraging the group to make SMART goals can help keep the ball rolling.