The purpose of the Faculty, Academic Careers and Environments (FACE) project is to understand who faculty are, what their academic careers look like, and how the environments in which they work shape their ability to thrive as instructors, researchers and public scholars in the community. The goal of the project is to examine and pilot test how best to create a national survey of faculty teaching at colleges and universities of all types across the country. Given the critical role of institutional data collection for the FACE project, we conducted focus groups with institutional researchers from different institutional contexts to inform our institution-level data collection instruments and processes because we were interested in speaking first with the people who would be responding to our requests at the institutional level.