BACKGROUND Collecting community-level data to inform health interventions and monitor health status is critical to improving community health and eliminating health disparities. Ideally, the process for designing and utilizing these data collection tools will include representation from community, service, and academic institutions. The process for incorporating these entities' diverse needs and perspectives, however, can be challenging. OBJECTIVE This paper describes how a community-academic partnership designed a survey in 2003 and 2005 to examine factors influencing the health of residents in an urban city and surrounding county area. METHODS The partnership used community-based public health research principles to guide the development of the telephone surveys. CONCLUSIONS Through these two survey development processes, we learned three key lessons: To regularly examine our partnership and process; to communicate directly with and obtain the support of each individual partner; and to focus on building the capacity of the partners and partnership.