The Integrated Action Plan: One Model

There is no best model for working on an IAP. You can work with a variety of formats, and different initiatives will require different formats. The following model is presented as one illustration of how you can organize an IAP.

1.  Program or executive summary. Because IAPs tend to be long documents, it is helpful to start them with a brief (one- to three-page) summary of the initiative. It should concisely explain the goals of the initiative, the actions that will be taken to achieve the goals, and the expected outcomes. It is usually easier to write this section later, after you have written the other sections in greater detail.

2.  Background or context. Every initiative exists in a context. This section should share, in five to seven pages, the key elements of that context, including history, how the initiative meets societal needs (or seizes societal opportunities), and what impacts it may be expected to have on future events.

3.  Strategic or operational plan. This is the heart of the IAP, and it must, in ten to fifteen pages, tell exactly how the initiative will work. What jobs need to be done, and according to what timeline? What outcomes are projected to occur, and by what time? Are there contingency plans in case the stated plan goes awry? The strategic plan must inform its readers of how the initiative will work, so it should be detailed and specific.

4.  Timeline. Although the timeline is described verbally in the strategic or operational plan, it should be presented visually in this section. You may need to create more than one line or to use intersecting lines in order to convey the complexity of an initiative's operations. This timeline should clearly identify all the benchmarks by which progress will be judged. It is ideal to place this on a single page so that the readers can see the whole timeline at a glance. If you decide to include a logic model (about which more later), you could put it in this section.

5.  Procedures. In two to four pages, this section specifies the policies by which the initiative will operate and identifies the major tasks and the people responsible for discharging them. The roles of any consultants and intermediary employees who will be working with foundation employees on the initiative must also be spelled out in this section.

6.  Stakeholder analysis. Stakeholders are those people and organizations that have a vital and direct interest in the outcomes of a project or an initiative. These can be divided into two groups: those inside the foundation and those outside. There will always be at least three internal stakeholders: the board, the executive officers, and the program officers and ancillary staff who are actually working on the initiative. There may be others, especially in larger foundations, such as members of the evaluation and communications staffs. There will likely be a larger number of external stakeholders, such as the people directly affected by the initiative, the grantee organization and its collaborators, policymakers, regulators, and so on.

For each of the internal and external stakeholder groups, it is necessary to identify not only their interest in the initiative but also the desired changes that each will experience as a result of the initiative's programming. The stakeholder analysis should be four to eight pages in length.

7.  Strategic communications. This section, which should be three to five pages long, identifies the basic themes and the important messages that should be used in all communications regarding the initiative. Although these messages will undoubtedly change as the initiative unfolds, it is useful to agree on the basic themes before the initiative is launched.

8.  Dissemination and social marketing. Although these activities are necessarily rudimentary at the IAP-writing stage, it is good to plan for them in the IAP itself. This one- to three-page section should identify target audiences and techniques that will be used to communicate the basic themes and important messages of the projects within the initiative.

9.  Evaluation. This section of three to five pages needs to identify the context in which the initiative will be evaluated, the process by which programming will be assessed, and how outcomes will be judged. It must list the important questions that the evaluation will be designed to answer, delineate the roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders, and make explicit the roles and responsibilities of the external evaluator or evaluation firm.

10.  Public policy education. This section will vary in length according to the policy content of the initiative itself. For those initiatives that contain significant policy content, it would be advisable to create a policy framework. At minimum, this framework should contain the elements explained in Chapter Thirteen: program policy focus, policy change objectives, approaches, leverage points, and resources. If any of the policy foci chosen are likely to be controversial, this section should include a brief analysis of risks and benefits.

11.  Budget. This section obviously needs to detail the costs for each section of the initiative. Ideally, it should be compressed into a single page so that readers can compare all of the costs without having to flip pages back and forth. If the initiative is complex enough, it may be necessary to create a single-page simplified budget and a multipage detailed budget. Alternatively, you might use a simplified budget with explanatory annotations on the following pages. In any case, the budget is presented in line-item form and details expenditures made over time.