I’m working…slowly… on a new book inspired by my experiences on the receiving end of well-intentioned competitions, initiatives, grants, etc.
The lead contender for the book’s title is Don’t Screw Up Your Program.
Hard to get more to the point than that.
DSUYP is being designed for the busy program associate, foundation officer, agency department head and others who have the opportunity to do Something Good, but don’t know how to make sure their program actually does good.
Or doesn’t realize the incredible array of ways that they can screw it up. Which is the bigger risk.
In this book, I am going for super direct, to the point, uber-practical. The sections are short, and there’s a worksheet or guided journal after most of them. So it’s a hands-on way for the reader to … not screw it up.
This section comes early on, and it comes from the fact that too often programs are designed for some idealized user / recipient /partner, who may not actually resemble the real people you will be dealing with. It’s obviously not a Compendium of Every Possible Everything, but it’s intended to get the reader thinking in a direction they might not see otherwise.
And that’s where you might come in.
I’m looking for a small group of people to be on the Review Crew. Review Crew members get a review draft as soon as it’s available (hoping for April). In exchange for your feedback, you get
Two signed print copies of the final version (signed, if you dig that)
A digital version with full distribution rights to share with your team (or your program manager)
Recognition in the final copy.
If you like it, you’ll also have the opportunity to have your recommendation on the cover and in Amazon… and additional benefits. I’ll share more on that with Review Crew members.
Interested? Send me a note. All ages, experience, fields and levels of program-induced twitching welcome.
Personas
If you’ve had any training in marketing, that heading either delighted you or made you twitch. Persona development is a central component of planning a product development or marketing campaign - it gives you a clear and very concrete picture of the person you are trying to impact. But persona development can also veer a little too close to method acting - some gurus will tell you that your personas need to have not only a name, but a detailed backstory, named family members, pets, and so on.
I don’t think most program developers need that level of detail. And I seriously doubt you have time to hone that craft. But I do think that putting some effort into developing personas will help you design and carry out a better program. After all, the success of what you do will largely depend on whether others can play their part. So it makes sense to anticipate at least some of their needs and limitations.
Note that I said Personas. Most programs need at least two, maybe three. The key personas you need to consider in your program design may be:
The people who will benefit from the program - grant recipients, clients, patients, etc.
The people who will do the work that the program enables - consultants, engineers, local organizations, etc.
The people who will make the decisions about who participates and how the program gets carried out.
That might sound like a lot.
It’s kind of a lot.
But think about what happens if the program is way off base for one or more of these. In the case of the program that I opened this book talking about, here’s what:
The people who should benefit from the program either got nothing for their effort, or got only a surface treatment when they were promised transformative impact.
The people who did the work spent a large amount of the time period confused and frustrated, and probably gave the people who make the decisions a lot of things that they didn’t want.
The people who make the decisions were faced with a massive mess of proposed projects that may not have anything to do with what they thought the program existed to do - and they may find themselves having to make their decisions with less than adequate information.
You don’t want any of those.
So let’s create some first draft personas. You can use the worksheet on the next page to help you do that.
And don’t worry if you feel like you’re guessing. You’re actually not guessing, you’re creating your hypotheses, just like in science. We will work on testing those hypotheses soon. And if you know your program area, chances are your hypotheses are pretty decent.