An effective environmental scan will improve the quality of community college planning and decision making by alerting institutional leaders to the challenges and opportunities in the environment. Scanning can be done in three ways: (1) establishing a scanning committee to gather and synthesize information to guide planning; (2) sponsoring a scanning conference involving outside constituencies; and (3) assigning the task to the institutional research and planning office. Regardless of the approach taken, six environmental contexts should all be monitored: demographic trends, economic conditions, legal and political processes, relations with other schools and organizations, sociocultural patterns, and technological changes. Various sources are available for keeping track of these trends. The Bureau of the Census is the primary source for national data; state agencies can often provide a wealth of useful planning information; municipal governments, associations, and private sources can provide information on the local service area; and county data can be obtained from government offices, economic development corporations, and local chambers of commerce. From the many techniques available for preparing scans of these six environmental conditions, the environmental scanner should pick the methods that facilitate dissemination of results to top management for their effective use. (ALB)