The Integrated Action Plan

With so many threads making it up, the initiative tapestry is all but guaranteed to unravel unless there is a careful plan to keep all the stitches in place. In fact, the simple word plan is somewhat inadequate; because so many elements need to work in unison, a better term is integrated action plan (IAP). The IAP is integrated because it brings together, in one document, all the plans for grantmaking, evaluation, strategic communications, social marketing, bringing to scale, and policy work. The IAP is an action plan because it lays out what is slated to happen, when it is scheduled to happen, and whose responsibility it is to make it happen. And, for all these activities, the IAP includes a timeline and a budget.

One of the prime early responsibilities of the initiative's management team is to create the IAP. One method for doing this is to have each person on the team draw up his or her own “wish list” to cover the parts of the initiative for which he or she is responsible, then to come together as a team to negotiate the reductions needed to fit within time and budgetary constraints. An alternative (and probably preferable) method is to craft the IAP from scratch as a team, building up to the resources available, rather than reducing down to them. Variations on these basic approaches are also possible, but no matter how the IAP is constructed, it is critically important that team members feel that the process is fair and that their values have been understood and respected. If there is dissension on the management team, the initiative will never achieve its full potential.

One of the basic tenets of initiative management is that all activities must be coordinated and that most should begin at the same time. Formative evaluation should begin as close to the start of the initiative as possible. One element of the formative evaluation, a baseline evaluation survey, must be done before any grants are made, so as to set a meaningful fixed mark against which summative evaluation can be conducted later. Strategic communications and possibly social marketing should begin contemporaneously with the project as well, so as to prepare the way for bringing models to scale. Policy groundwork should commence at the very beginning, for usually much preliminary work needs to be done before policy can be affected.

The most difficult thing about writing an IAP is the need to follow single pieces of the initiative chronologically from beginning to end while simultaneously writing about how other pieces of the initiative fit with it. For example, it is necessary to plan the trajectory of projects within the initiative from the request for proposals to the desired policy outcome, while at the same time writing about how evaluation, strategic communications, policy work, and other pieces interact with the projects. One method of doing this is to write about each component separately, then to unify them with a timeline. Another method is to write about time blocks within the project, including inside each block an explanation of how different factors interact within that time period. For this method, too, you will probably use a timeline to provide a visual means of understanding how an initiative unfolds. Naturally, you must include a budget that illustrates the projected cost for every element of the initiative.