This chapter introduces the first of the stages, community assessment, and overviews techniques that are used: community profiling and needs analysis. It discusses the steps necessary to carry out community profiling and needs analyses, and the relationships between community assessment approaches. Community nurses should become familiar with two well-developed community assessment techniques called community profiling and needs assessment. While the are some foundational areas that should be included in any community assessment, the focus and emphasis of an assessment will rely on the purpose of the assessment and the community's and community nurse's judgments what is important. Essentially, community profiling is a systematic approach to gathering information and data that are designed to build up a picture of the characteristics of a community that are related to health. A community health needs assessment is population-based in that it seeks to examine the health status and social needs of a specific population, whether defined geographically or by a common social identity.