Early in my career, I worked at a nonprofit where I spent much of my time helping to run events and programs focused on community relations and education. I loved my team, believed in the mission, enjoyed the work, and was okay with long hours. But sometimes I felt a bit frustrated. I’d find myself twirling my hair in the back row of a 7:30am breakfast event and wondering: were we accomplishing anything, or just listening to a lecture while eating really good bagels?
The goals of the events were usually things like “raising awareness” and “building relationships,” and I did think both were valuable. But we ran a lot of programs and I couldn’t always connect them back to the goals or mission.
One of the things I loved most in grant writing and philanthropy roles was helping people work through these kinds of connections: What were they trying to do? Why did they choose their approach? How did they think the planned activities would lead to the change they wanted to see?
Program design starts with questions like these. Funders ask them as well.
Finding (or making) time to work through them can be challenging. You may already have 101 things on your plate, and some of them may be on fire. Previous planning exercises for other programs may have produced documents that nobody used. It may just seem unnecessary for small or simple programs where the answers seem obvious.
Working through these questions and writing down your answers can help you:
make sure your program is aligned with your mission and that you have the capacity to take it on;
explain your program more clearly to internal and external stakeholders, including donors and community members;
check assumptions and make sure you’re on the same page with everyone involved about what you’re trying to do, in what way, and on what timeline;
surface things that need more thought and modify your program and budget if necessary;
give staff the information they need to deliver the program or build funding requests; and
set yourself up to evaluate, demonstrate, and learn from results.
This applies to programs of all sizes, from big and complex to small and simple. If you’re a one-woman operation, you’re probably making decisions about goals, activities, resources, and communication yourself. Taking time to think them through and write them down can help you keep track of what you’ve decided and what still needs attention. The amount of planning should fit the program.
I put together So You Want to Design a Program as a starting point. It includes questions you can apply to a program you’re developing or already running, along with an overview of my ten-stage program design framework. You can use it to identify gaps, organize your thinking, or start a conversation with others involved in the work.
I’m developing a manual that will walk through the framework in depth. For now, this introduction can help you figure out where to begin.
