Deep Dive: The Program Pages

The Program Pages act as the marketing and operating plan portions of the business plan.

As mentioned in a prior entry, every new plan is generated with a single Program Plan page called 'General Support'. By pressing the plus-sign tab, the planner can add an additional page for each program the charity executes. For example, if the charity is a food bank that has a backpack program for providing weekend meals to students on free and subsidized lunch programs, they should add a page for that. Any program for which the charity wants to seek funding must have its own page in the nonprofit plan. The General Support page is automatically added because every charity seeks funding for ongoing operating support.

The program page contains descriptions of all the major players in the program. There is a description of the population served, including breakouts on key demographics: income, gender, ethnicity and geography. This is essential because a foundation wants to determine if the charity serves the populations they consider important. Other key players are the community partners, volunteers and donors.

Another important section of the plan is the communications strategy. This is broken down into the stories that will act as the content of the communications, and the media that will be used to get that message out.

Perhaps the most important part of the operations plan is a description of the results the charity is committed to achieving, and how they will measure the actual results they achieve. This focus on measurement is not in the DNA of many charities, but it is an absolute requirement of many foundations, particularly those affiliated with large corporations. Business-oriented donors and foundations know that 'what gets measured, gets done', and they want to see this awareness in charities they are considering for grants. Making metrics part of the business plan ensures the charity considers them, whether it is natural for them to do so or not.

In my next post I will talk about the mechanism we use for managing the color-coding that shows the completeness of the plan, and how that is also used to guide formatting decisions in the generated grant proposals.