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• Identifying Your Community of Interest
• Printable Community of Interest Worksheet
• Conducting a Needs Assessment
• Prioritizing the Needs of Your Community

When developing your intervention, familiarity with the community of interest plays a key role in understanding what types of interventions may work best. The community of interest is the group that will be affected by your intervention. For example, you may wish to influence employees of an organization, children at local schools, patients receiving health care services in a health care system, residents of a specific neighborhood or a larger community defined by a metropolitan area or rural county.

It is helpful to start by working with your partners (see creating partnerships) to identify the community of interest:

• What is the community of interest? (e.g., an organization, an Internet community)
• Who does it include? Not include? Are there subgroups within this community of interest? (e.g., children, African Americans, uninsured patients, immigrant populations, pregnant women, people with cardiovascular disease)
• What are the geographic boundaries? (e.g., a neighborhood, a metropolitan area, a county)
• What are the shared social and cultural characteristics of this community? (e.g., similar faith-based beliefs, shared history, common political interests)
• What are other characteristics?

In addition to describing the community of interest, consider how the following may influence the way you design your intervention to best meet the needs of the community of interest:

• Prevention: There are three types of prevention that guide the development of public health interventions, primary, secondary and tertiary prevention.
• Primary Prevention includes those interventions that keep healthy people from developing an unhealthy condition (e.g., getting immunized, using a seat belt, quitting smoking, being physically active, breastfeeding).
• Secondary Prevention includes those interventions that encourage people to detect an unhealthy condition as soon as possible to minimize the impact of the unhealthy condition (e.g., screening for prostate cancer, testing blood lead levels, using carbon monoxide detectors).
• Tertiary Prevention includes those interventions that help people with poor health follow the treatment plan that they have received from their health care provider in order to keep them as healthy as possible (e.g., taking medications as prescribed, rehabilitation from an injury).

When thinking about interventions for primary prevention, you may want to consider trying to influence a large community (e.g., policies requiring physical education in schools to minimize childhood obesity) to minimize the need for secondary and tertiary prevention interventions that can be much more expensive. When possible, with secondary prevention, you may want to narrow your focus to a specific population that is at risk for the unhealthy condition (e.g., screening women over a certain age for breast cancer). For tertiary prevention, you often have a more specific community (e.g., older adults with arthritis), but keep in mind that these adults may experience the disease in different ways (e.g., different levels of pain tolerance) and they may have very different resources or support to assist them in maintaining their health (e.g., ability to afford health care services, a friend or family member to exercise with or access to transportation to get from place to place).

• Health Conditions: Several of the intervention topics in Intervention MICA refer to specific health conditions as well as risk factors for those conditions (e.g., smoking, poor diet, lack of physical activity). When developing your intervention, you may want to address one or more of these health conditions or risk factors. The Intervention MICA is designed to provide you with information to guide you in the development of intervention strategies within different health conditions or risk factors. In some instances, however, you may need to combine information across health conditions and risk factors in order to meet the needs of your community of interest.

• Trans-disciplinary Approaches: Likewise, the intervention strategies within each health condition or risk factor tend to reflect a variety of different approaches that can be used by practitioners, community-agencies, planners, policymakers, researchers and others. The information is best used when you have gone through the process of creating partnerships with professionals in other fields and you draw upon their experience.