Step 4.3:

Write a program plan, including timeline and budget, for each intervention.

What To Do

The backbone of your program’s success is documentation like:

• procedural guidelines
• timelines
• budgets

These documents are useful in:

• building and maintaining your partnerships,
• keeping all players focused on the ultimate goals, and
• providing feedback for midcourse corrections.

Your procedures, timeline, and budget should be flexible enough to respond to what you learn from your periodic testing and other forms of feedback. This feedback may mean that you:

• reprioritize your activities,
• adjust your objectives, and
• seek additional resources.

Allow time for internal review and approval of key intervention decisions and resource allocation. Know who the appropriate supervisors and administrators are; give them notice in advance that you will be soliciting their input at a particular point in time.

How To Do It

Program Plan

In addition to the health problem identified and goals and objectives set previously the program plan should include:

• specific activities
• process objectives
• a timeline
• a detailed budget

These descriptions will serve as a frame of reference for all the activities that follow, including evaluation.

Planning Specific Intervention Procedures

In Phase 3, you:

• considered different intervention approaches,
• selected the best one(s) based on your audience research and risk/resource/feasibility criteria,
• determined benefits your audience wants, the barriers they face, and the exchange that your interventions would offer.

Now you will plan the specific interventions. This step links the resources you have with the activities and tactics you’ll use, and enables you to set SMART process or “service delivery/reach” objectives.

Dig deeper into "service delivery/reach" objectives.

Social Marketing interventions tend to take four forms, reflecting the strategy used to achieve the desired outcomes.

A. Service interventions create or modify services, tests, or treatments to improve health. For example, you might co-locate barber shops and blood-pressure screening clinic services for African-American men.

B. Product interventions create or modify a product that promotes health. For example, you repackage a nicotine replacement device so that it can be distributed through vending machines at bars.

C. Policy interventions lead to regulatory, legislative, or organizational rulings that supports improvements in the public’s health. For example, your coalition might be successful in advocating for city funding for bike lanes.

D. Communication interventions inform and influence individual and community decisions about behavior that enhances health. For example, a radio soap opera might persuade women to discuss condoms with male sex partners.

Not that you have planned the separate interventions, begin to integrate them into an overall plan with a timeline and budget.

Timeline

Working backward from your outcome objectives, develop a timeline that covers all phases of each intervention. Include key deadlines, milestones. The timeline is central to your program plan.

You will launch your intervention components in Phase 6, so include launch schedules into your timeline now. Whether you choose soft or hard launches (see Phase 6 for an explanation), you will want to coordinate the timing of launches of the different types of intervention to support one another.

There are many graphical ways to display timelines, and they often include tasks and personnel (e.g. a Gantt chart) as well. Select or create a graphic that is easy for all partners to understand and makes sense for your goals and objectives.

View a sample gantt chart.

Be realistic about how long each activity will take.

Whatever charting option you choose, ensure that your timeline or management matrix addresses all the important parts of your intervention, including, at least:

• all tasks or activities, broken down into manageable parts or steps (e.g., creating the plan, securing necessary resources, hiring staff, recruiting volunteers, training, pretesting, implementation, monitoring, etc.)
• start and completion dates for each activity, including long-term and repeated activities
• major deadlines, including due dates for deliverables, accomplishments, reports, etc.
• specific personnel or organization(s) responsible for each task or activity
• internal review and approval processes that your agency requires

Budget

Budgets should be “built,” on the basis of the activities and materials necessary for the interventions. Keep you objectives in mind as you decided whether the costs of specific activities are justified.

If you need it, get help in creating your budget. There are many software products that provide standard formats and automatic calculations. Your team should include or consult a finance/budget specialist to ensure comprehensiveness and accuracy.

View a sample budget in Excel format.

If necessary, build your budget so that it tracks separate funding streams. This will help to ensure that money designated for specific activities is spent on those activities, and that encumbered money isn’t spent on activities that are disallowed.

For example, federal funding can be spent on public education, but not on direct lobbying.

Your budget should specify resources including:

• donated products and services
• volunteer time
• in-kind contributions
• matching contributions

Some funders insist on matching contributions; all funders appreciate them.

Your budget should cover all the costs or expenses of the intervention activities.

In general, the expense portion of budgets has two primary sections:

• direct costs - expenses directly related to your project or activity
  • personnel costs
  • non-personnel direct costs
• indirect costs - expenses that don’t directly relate to your project or activity

Digger deeper into expense portion.

Budget narratives or justifications may be required to describe costs, especially any line items that might be perceived as unusual or higher than costs for similar items or services from other sources.

Like the budgets they explain, budget narratives should be based on the goals, objectives and methodologies being proposed. Narratives can be structured as “Notes to the Budget,” explaining line items with corresponding footnotes. Or, if the budget includes unusual line items require more extensive explanation, you may want to attach a separate budget narrative that includes straight text.

Your budget calculations should be done on worksheets. Keep them to remind yourself where the numbers came from. These budget worksheets can also be useful as you negotiate with funders, and as you prepare your reports.

See a sample budget worksheet.

Work with your partners to plan budgets and timelines. Agreement on these issues will solidify a common understanding of program priorities help ensure that everyone works towards common goals.

Take into account any legal or ethical requirements that require or restrict openness in records.

Dig deeper into the concept of openness.

In the next step, when you think through the tasks you’ll need to accomplish for each intervention in your program, there will be an opportunity to refine the budget and timeline.

Depending on the scope of your interventions, you may first need to plan them individually, and then merge them into one plan.

Knowledge Check

Test Your Knowledge

Each of the four substeps that follow takes a close look at planning processes in one of these intervention categories.