Fit the Pieces Together - What do we plan to do?

With your partners, use the results of the choose strategies step to sort the ideas into an action plan.  The ideas that were highly rated on all four criteria should come first (they are usually rare), followed by those that did well on three of the criteria, and so on.

Section Contents:

1. Make an Action Plan timeline
2. Develop a budget for the Action Plan
3. Select performance measures

1. Decide which of the highly rated ideas you and your partners want to implement this year, which will be included next year and those that would best occur in two to ten years.

   In order to start the highly rated actions in your community, you need to know where they would fit among the existing programs.  To do this, you will need a good, complete description of the services you already have in place.  Some of the low cost or no cost actions may be to help programs work together better.  If you seek certain information, it will be easier to focus these activities  In particular, you might want to find out:

   • which services or activities are hard for people in your community to obtain, and why
   • if people who come from another culture or who speak a different language face particular difficulties in obtaining certain services.
   • where barriers exist between programs and/or what information they might share to make it easier for their joint customers.  Examples might include: moving programs into the same building, working with several programs or services to develop a common intake form, or helping programs to figure out how to share some services.

   When this process is complete, you should have a map of the services system from your customers’ point of view.  The map should show how it works now and how it would work better after your changes are in place.

   As you work on your services description, you and/or your partners may notice a gap and have an idea about how it could be filled.  If you add this idea to your What Works list and use the review criteria, you would have a sense of where you might include it among the ideas that have already been put on your action timeline.

2. After you have decided which highly rated ideas you want to put into place this year, you need to develop a budget for them.  Where will you find the money to pay for the new activities or services?  There are three possibilities.

   1. Look at existing funding, especially spending on ‘bad results.’
      • If the community invested now in programs that would help avoid future costs, what would be saved?  You may be able to find this kind of investment information from other communities or from research.  Ask other program staff or your state or federal program staff for ideas about where to look.
      • Are some people in your community traveling to obtain services that could be provided at home?  If so, developing a local program could offer substantial savings and enriched care.
      • Does the existing services system include services or programs that are less important than the ones that would be added?  This would be a very hard choice, but should be considered.
      • What other, non-monetary, resources can be brought together or traded to help support the new activities?  Could one program use another program’s space when it is presently vacant?  Could one program provide on-the-job training opportunities for another?
   2. Is there alternative funding for an existing program, so that the new activities could be paid for with those funds?  This strategy has mostly been used with federal funding.  For example, if an organization can start being reimbursed by Medicaid for existing tobacco cessation assistance services, it could re-allocate the money that used to be used for tobacco cessation to pay for something else, such as outreach.  This strategy needs to be used very carefully.
   3. Are there grant funds available?
   4. Can policy be changed to support the new activities and/or the population accountability project as a whole?  For example, a new cigarette tax would reduce tobacco use by making it too expensive for some and the funds could be used to support tobacco cessation services.
3. Select performance measures for the new activities.  These program-specific indicators are used to determine the success of the action ideas.  They are used to report progress by program managers to your population accountability leadership team and partners.