Before You Launch Another Program, Ask These 7 Questions

A funder asks whether you could add a component. A board member has a strong idea. A partner organization proposes a collaboration. Each request is reasonable on its own, and a year later the organization is running a program nobody fully designed, staffed by people who inherited it, measured by numbers that were easy to collect.

These seven questions take a few hours to work through and prevent most of that. If you cannot answer one of them, that is the finding. Do not design past it.

1. What problem are we solving, and what is the evidence?

Not what program do we want to run. What problem exists, for whom, where, at what scale, and what does it cost the people affected and the wider community?

The test is whether the statement rests on evidence or assumption. "Young people in our county lack job skills" is an assumption. "Of the 1,400 county residents aged 18 to 24 who are not in school or employment, our intake data and the county workforce report indicate transportation and credentialing are the two most common barriers" is a problem statement. The second one can be designed against. The first cannot.

Ask also what already exists to address it, and where those efforts fall short. If three organizations serve the same population, the useful question is not whether the need is real but what specifically is missing.

2. Have we talked to the people we intend to serve?

Before the design is finished, not after it is built. And not as a validation exercise where you present a plan and ask whether people like it.

The questions that matter are what they have already tried and what happened, what gets in the way of the obvious solution, and who is excluded by the way you are planning to deliver this. A program offered on weekday mornings at a single site excludes anyone working a daytime shift without transportation, which is frequently the population with the greatest need.

3. Does this fit our mission and our strategy?

Two different questions. Mission fit asks whether this is the kind of work the organization exists to do. Strategic fit asks whether it is what the organization should be doing next, given finite capacity and the priorities leadership has already set.

Plenty of proposed programs pass the first test and fail the second. They are consistent with the mission and still the wrong use of the next six months. The discipline is to say that out loud rather than adding the program because no one could articulate an objection.

The hardest version of this question: if we do this, what are we not doing? A program added to a fully committed staff, with nothing removed, gets delivered at the expense of something else, usually something nobody decided to sacrifice.

4. What outcome are we claiming, and how will we know?

Name the outcome before the activity. One primary outcome, no more than three supporting ones, each describing change in people or conditions rather than services delivered.

Then be concrete about evidence. What result would count as success? What result would tell you the program is not working? Decide the second one now, while it is still an abstract question, because deciding it later, when the program has staff and participants and a funder, is enormously harder.

Design the measurement before launch. Which indicators track outputs and which track outcomes, who collects each one, using what instrument, at what interval, and where the data will live. Establish a baseline or a plan to establish one. A program that begins collecting data in its second year can describe activity but cannot demonstrate change.

5. Who delivers this, and what does it require of them?

Specify the model precisely enough that a qualified person who was not in the design conversation could run it.

• Dosage. How much, how often, over what period. A participant who attends twice is not receiving the same program as one who attends twenty times.
• Sequence. What happens first, and why the order matters.
• Staffing. Which roles, at what share of their time, with what qualifications and what training.
• Setting. Where it happens, and what that location requires in space, technology, accessibility, and cost.
• Referral and intake. How participants arrive, who is eligible, and who decides.

Distinguish the essential elements from the locally adaptable ones. Some parts of a model can flex to context without damaging results. Others cannot, and staff need to know which is which before they start making reasonable-seeming adjustments.

6. What does it actually cost?

Fully loaded, not marginal. Salary plus benefits and payroll taxes for every role at its real share of time. The supervision the program consumes. Facilities, technology, insurance, materials. The cost of measurement and reporting, which is real work performed by real people.

Then ask the staffing question that organizations avoid: what happens to this program when the founding staff member leaves? If the answer is that it stops, you have designed a dependency rather than a program. Documentation, cross-training, and a written model are what convert one into the other.

7. What happens when the initial funding ends?

Answer this before launch, not in the final quarter of the grant period. There are only a few honest answers: another funder continues it, earned revenue supports it, it gets absorbed into the operating budget because the organization has decided it is core, or it ends on a planned date.

All four are legitimate. A time-limited program that ends as designed is a success, not a failure, provided participants and partners were told the timeline from the start. What damages an organization is the unplanned version, where a program limps along on fragments of funding, understaffed, while leadership avoids the decision.

Pilot before you scale

Whatever the seven answers produce, run it small first. A pilot needs three things: a written question it is designed to answer, an end date, and a named person with the authority to continue, adapt, or stop it.

Without those, a pilot is just a launch with a softer name, and the first cohort absorbs every design flaw you did not catch.