Planning For the Future

Establishing Goals
Selecting Strategies to Reach Your Goals
Establishing Objectives
Selecting Activities for Each Objective
Preparing a Financial Plan

4. Establishing Goals

Program-related goals define in general terms the impact that your program hopes to have on its target populations by the end of the time period specified in the planning process.

Example

An example of a program-related goal: "To increase contraceptive prevalence in underserved areas."

Organizational goals define the internal changes and improvements that the organization or program should make in order to achieve its goals.

Example

An example of an organizational goal: "To incorporate measures of quality of care and user satisfaction into the management information system."

Using the SWOT analysis in planning

The SWOT analysis can help the planning team to set realistic goals. For program-related goals, the analysis of internal programming capabilities will yield information on past performance and on the potential for expansion of activities. The analysis of financing capabilities will let you know whether you can expand services or need to reduce them. The analysis of opportunities and threats can explain past performance and highlight the opportunities and threats that affect the likelihood of achieving your goals.

Matching goals to resources

In setting your goals, make sure you don't exceed the resources you have available. Do a few activities well; don't commit your program beyond its capabilities by trying to do too much. Perhaps due to the controversial nature of family planning services in some settings, many organizations involved in family planning make such planning mistakes as setting more non-family planning goals than the program can handle, or planning to open too many new outlets at once. Both mistakes lead to scattered use of the organization's resources and a failure to provide high-quality services in family planning or in any other area.

Establish goals that don't over-extend your ability to provide quality services. For example, if you open too many outlets at once and exceed the resources available to your organization, it will be difficult to deliver high-quality services. If your organization develops a reputation for providing services of poor quality, your program could suffer for years to come.

5. Selecting Strategies to Reach Your Goals

Your strategies map the route that your organization chooses to take in order to achieve its goals. Developing strategies involves considering all the possible strategies and selecting one or more for each goal.

Your planning team can brainstorm to come up with several possible strategies to achieve each individual goal. The team will then evaluate these strategies on the basis of whether they:

Will help to achieve the stated goals of your organization
Are feasible given your organization's SWOT analysis
Will have a positive financial impact on your organization, examining both its potential to raise revenues and its projected cost.

Strategies can be complementary

Draw up, in as much detail as necessary, plans and budgets for each strategy you have identified. Most possible strategies for achieving a goal are not completely independent, but complement one another.

Example

For example, if a major goal of an organization is to lower rates of unwanted adolescent pregnancies, then the most common strategies are:

Post-partum family planning programs, either in hospitals or maternities or with traditional birth attendants.
Community-based peer educator/distributor programs.
Sex education programs in schools.
Adolescent centers with a wide variety of activities and services in addition to family planning.
Providing separate hours or space for teenagers at existing family planning or health clinics.
Using mass media to communicate key messages.
Male-only clinics or clinic hours.

If a program has enough resources, it can achieve its goals even more rapidly by implementing more than one strategy, each of which would reach slightly different sectors of the target population. A program with very few resources, however, would do best to concentrate on just one strategy and do it well, rather than scatter its resources.

Analyzing the competition

As you develop your strategies, make use of the information you collected in the environmental analysis to look at what other providers are doing. This will help you to avoid setting up services where they are not really needed.

Determining the recurrent costs of strategies

Although you will not be conducting a detailed final analysis of the cost of strategies, at this point you will need to consider the financial implications of all the proposed strategies. For example, when you are considering building a new health facility, remember that in addition to the one-time capital expense, you will also have the recurrent costs of operating the facility. You must plan and budget for the recurrent as well as for the capital costs.

As you plan, remember that the cost of a strategy can be reduced if necessary goods or services are donated instead of bought, or if the programs staffed differently. Instead of higher-priced physicians, lower-level staff, such as nurses and paramedical staff, can be trained to provide safe and effective family planning services.

6. Establishing Objectives

Every strategy includes a number of objectives. An objective is a specific statement of the work you intend to carry out.

Example

For example, if your strategy is to set up post-partum family planning services in hospitals, then an objective wold be to staff three hospitals with 30 nurses who can provide family planning counseling and methods.

As with goals, there are both organizational objectives and program-related objectives:

Program-related objectives state the anticipated results in terms of the users or clients of a program, for example, numbers of new users or Couple Years of Protection provided, or numbers of people counseled or informed about family planning.

Organizational objectives state the specific, observable changes in the structure or management of your program that will improve efficiency, sustainability, or effectiveness, in areas such as the ratio of fieldworkers to supervisors.

Your objectives should be SMART:

Specific - to avoid differing interpretations
Measurable - to allow monitoring and evaluation
Appropriate - to the problems, goals, and strategies
Realistic - achievable, challenging, and meaningful
Time bound - with a specific time period for achieving them

When setting objectives for each family planning method, do not set them unrealistically high, which would put undue pressure on providers. Providers who feel pressured to meet extremely high objectives for certain contraceptive methods may ignore informed choice standards and push certain methods on their clients.

7. Selecting Activities for Each Objective

In order to meet an object, you need to determine which specific activities must take place, who will carry out these activities, and when.

Example

For example, if your objective is to employ 30 nurses to provide family planning methods and counseling, one activity would be to arrange for the nurses to attend a workshop on family planning counseling and clinical skills.

In preparing the financial plan, this list of activities will be useful as you determine what resources (human, financial, and material) you will need to meet each objective. You will read more about planning activities in the following chapter.

8. Preparing a Financial Plan

When the planning team members are choosing among the possible strategies, they make rough estimates of the cost and revenue implications of each possibility in order to determine its feasibility. Once goals, strategies, objectives, and activities are defined, the planners can prepare a detailed year-by-year estimate of the revenues and expenses entailed by the entire package of strategies. This detailed estimate, or long-term budget, is the financial plan.

The financial planning process

During the process of preparing a financial plan for your organization, you will:

Analyze current and potential sources of revenue
Make a conservative estimate of the revenue to be received during the period for which the plan is being made
Analyze current and potential expenses for the strategies chosen
Make a conservative estimate of the expenses that will be incurred
Calculate to see whether the anticipated revenues will cover the expenses
Revise strategies and activities as necessary to ensure the financial health of the program
Prepare detailed year-by-year estimates of revenues and expenses.

Once the financial plan has been finalized, you can prepare the next year's budget based on this plan.

Programmatic and financial plans are inseparable

In order to produce a document that is both useful and as accurate as possible, the process of developing the financial plan -- analyzing revenues and expenses, estimating for the future, and making sure that revenues will cover expenses -- involves both program and financial managers. Together, the managers gather data from the program's information system, discuss its financial implications, and discuss the strategies chosen during the planning process.

Throughout the planning process you will have discussed information and made decisions that have a direct bearing on the financial plan. For example, the information on "markets" and "competition" gathered during the environmental analysis and analyzed during the SWOT analysis may have inspired your planning team to implement a new strategy for income generation. During the financial planning process, the team should analyze the implications of this new strategy in greater detail and build them into the financial scenarios.

In the same way, financial considerations will have an impact on all phases of the planning process. For example:

Donor grants for specific programs may restrict the type of work that an organization can do.
In some cases, the need to generate revenue locally will influence the types of services to be provided and the population to be served (for example, necessitating an emphasis on services that generate profits).
New or expanded programmatic goals or targets may demand significant increases in revenues.
Predictions of sharp increases in cost or decreases in revenue may force an organization to plan corresponding decreases in the scope of its programs or to adopt new strategies

Setting programmatic priorities based on the financial plan

The financial plan will give planners a more or less accurate estimate of the amount that might have to be cut from expenses so that revenues are certain to cover them. You may find it useful to prioritize programs and activities so that if financial targets are not met, you know where to make changes.

You should note that up-to-date information on actual revenues and expenses, and the ability to compare these with the plans, is absolutely necessary for you to be able to make decisions based on the priorities set in the financial plan. Managing Your Finances will explore this topic in more detail.

Financial planning differs according to the funding base

There are three main types of funding for family planning organizations: government, donor, and generated revenues.

When an organization is entirely government-funded, the main purpose of financial planning is to forecast income and to identify which program-related strategies will achieve the largest number of program-related objectives for the income received.

When an organization relies on donor-funding (or donor and government funding), the main purpose of financial planning is to estimate the entire cost of a cohesive program and to match the budgets for each strategy with the restrictions and interests of different donors.

When an organization is partially or wholly funded through generated revenues (such as sales of contraceptives and fees), the purpose of financial planning is to estimate accurately the direct and indirect costs of income-gathering activities and to set prices and fees that will cover costs and subsidize other organizational activities as needed.

In drawing up the financial plans, a distinction should be made between the different types of funding since the reliability of each source is different. In the case of generated revenues, it is important to be conservative in your forecasting so as to reduce the risk of overspending.

The final steps in the planning process

Once the financial plan is completed, your program can draw up a work plan and budget for the next year. The work plan will take the strategies and activities outlined in your plan and describe in much greater detail how these will be implemented during the next year. The budget will be based on the financial plan and the work plan and will go into much greater detail on sources and amounts of revenue, as well as on expenses for the coming year.

While predicting future costs is always challenging, it is even more difficult when there is a high rate of inflation. When preparing financial projections in an inflationary environment, adjust your cost projections, taking into account the anticipated rate of inflation. If you prepare your budget in local currency, use the first-year projections as your base cost and adjust each subsequent year by the anticipated rate of inflation.

The next chapter will describe the process of drawing up a work plan. Managing Your Finances, will guide you through the process of preparing the yearly budget.

Example from Ecuador - Developing a Strategic Plan for CEMOPLAF

Planning varies in the public and private sectors

The example above shows how the strategic planning process was used in a private sector organization. The planning process will vary according to whether the organization is in the public or private sector, according to the level in the organization at which the planning is taking place. The box on the following two pages illustrates some of the ways in which the strategic planning process can be used in both the public and private sector.

Tools and Techniques - Adapting the Strategic Planning Process to Various Levels in the Organization

Planning for the Future