Service Insights & Feeding America Client Survey

The Feeding America Client Survey (FACS) will allow the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank and our partners to better understand how food insecurity is being experienced across our service territory. While Service Insights helps us to understand service utilization at a macro scale, FACS allows us to take a deeper dive into select issues by asking for specific feedback on different topics, including housing, transportation, food preferences, and economic security, among others.

FACS provides a validated and customizable survey instrument that will help us consistently measure issues and understand the impact of the services the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank and our partners provide.

FACS results can be used to help:
1) Inform quality improvement efforts through neighbor feedback on products available, referrals, and other service offerings,

2) Increase our understanding of the neighbors we serve and issues that they may face, such as housing and transportation barriers,

3) Gauge client satisfaction with services and quality of produce or other products,

4) Advocate for programs and policies that will help address the challenges our neighbors express in the surveys.

In conjunction with our Service Insights and Community Hunger Mapping efforts, FACS will help us gain a more complete picture of client experiences so that we can better inform our work towards ending hunger.

Feeding America Network (FANO) offers multiple different tools to collect data about clients. These tools include Service Insights and the Feeding America Client Survey. Think of these tools as complementary, as they are optimized to answer different questions and to be administered to different people. You do not need to be doing one before you do the other.

• Service Insights (SI) typically consists of a battery of brief, standardized questions asked of all (or most) clients at intake to an agency or program. Core SI questions include: name, date of birth, gender identity, race or ethnicity, zip code, household member count, household members’ names, household members’ date of birth, household members’ race or ethnicity, and household receipt of SNAP. Food Banks and their partners may also choose to collect additional information from clients and households to better inform their programming, such as employment, income, dietary conditions, housing status, military status, and other benefits received.

SI is an administrative data tool, designed to help with ongoing monitoring and evaluation and to reach as many clients as possible. It is analogous to information provided to the hospital when you are admitted.

Implementation of SI can help with establishing an unduplicated client count, basic client profiles, visitation patterns, and geographic reach.

• Feeding America Client Survey (FACS) is a battery of in-depth survey items that FANO recommends for administration to pantry clients. These items go into considerably greater detail about topics such as: food security, financial wellbeing, client/HH characteristics, health status/conditions, federal nutrition assistance and social services/community resource participation.

FACS is a research tool, designed to answer deeper questions on more complex topics than could be asked within SI. Because the survey items are much longer and often more personal, it is designed to be administered to a small sample of clients, rather than all clients.

FACS can help you understand more in-depth questions about clients you are serving, including their experiences with food insecurity, their dietary intake, their health, and their pantry satisfaction. Depending on the study design, it may also help to determine program impact.

SI and FACS use different platforms for data collection. Currently, FANO does not support linkage of data across platforms due to the risk of a client confidentiality breach. Food banks choosing to try to link their own data should ensure that adequate safeguards are in place to protect sensitive client data. In addition, they should ensure that volunteers without training in the ethical conduct of research (such as intake workers at program collecting data for Service Insights) are not collecting sensitive data or allowed access to sensitive data. For additional guidance on privacy and security, please refer to the Service Insights Network Framework.