Work plans might be missing from your box o’ tools, and you might not even know it. They are, in fact, essential for organizing your tasks, tracking your progress, and achieving your program or project goals. A well-designed work plan keeps grant professionals and program staff on track from pre-award work through implementation and grant closeout. We want to be sure you can create your own in a way that is a powerful guide for you and your colleagues and engaging as a method for grantmakers to learn about your work.
What Is a Work Plan?
In programmatic terms, a work plan is a structured document that outlines the key activities, timelines, and expected outcomes of your project or program. Some work plans will also include the associated SMART objectives within their structure. Many of these concepts and plans might be floating around in your head or floating around in meeting minutes or team emails, so the best approach is to collect all of the disparate chunks of expertise and intentions into a single document, your work plan.
Our experience shows that work plans are particularly useful in competitive grant applications, where they help proactively demonstrate your program’s feasibility and impact. We recommend drafting your work plan for a program/project BEFORE you worry about a specific grant application, as it makes writing the application itself much smoother if you are writing from the agreed-upon work plan. Therefore, when you craft your work plan, we want you to include these essential elements in a competitive application:
- Key Activities: Detail the actions that must be completed to achieve each objective.
Example: To improve community health, activities might include organizing fitness classes and offering nutrition workshops. - Expected Outcomes: Outline the measurable results you aim to achieve through your activities, such as improved knowledge, behavior change, or increased participation.
Tip: To brush up on the definitions of outcomes and objectives, you may want to read our blog on the difference between objectives and outcomes. - Measurement Plan: Outline how you will track progress, measure outcomes, and demonstrate success in meeting your objectives and achieving your goal.
Tip: As you draft, keep in mind that your work plan should align with your program’s Theory of Change, which delves into how your activities will lead to the desired results. Learn more about Theory of Change in another of our blogs.
These three elements will help anyone and everyone understand your project’s impact.
And IF you want to include your SMART objectives as a fourth element in your draft work plan as well, it most certainly gives you more mutually agreed upon information, language, and details from which to write the application.
- SMART Goals and Objectives: Your goal is a broad, overarching statement that defines what you want to achieve. Your objectives are your clear, measurable intentions, described thoroughly yet succinctly using the SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound). The objectives contribute to achieving your goal.
Example: If your goal is to improve community health, your objectives might include increasing access to fitness programs and promoting healthy eating.
Tip: You can learn more about SMART objectives from our free toolkit and blog.
Ready to Rock It
An engaging work plan elevates you to the level of being well-versed in all the elements of your project or program. It feels thorough to you and your colleagues as a representation of your plan; it feels powerful and like something exciting to be a part of for grantmakers. With this documented knowledge and information, meetings and drafts are clearer, more consistent, and more focused. Your work plan enhances everyone’s understanding and accountability regarding the project’s impact.
Over time, most of us have heard the phrase “Plan the work, work the plan.” And, cliché aside… planning works. Now you can create a work plan that leads to your organization’s success.