The best way to get started is by gathering information: about the brand, products and services, people, and the impact you want to make. You’ll use this information later as you work on generating ideas. Revisit your mission, brand positioning, value proposition, and core values. You’ll want to be able to show how you’re qualified to lead in this particular area.

You can also find natural ways to serve others directly through your products. Or you might find an opportunity through a SWOT that you can build upon. Engage your employees in the discovery process as well through surveys to find out how they’d like to give back.

What to do in this stage:

• Conduct an employee survey. Find out how your employees want to give back and what causes they’re passionate about. Because they’ll be sustaining the program, it’s important that employees participate in the process.
• Form a task force. Have employee volunteers join a task force to create some structure and governance for the program.
• Revisit brand pillars. Revisit why this company exists in the first place. What drove you to begin? How might those reasons help create a compelling idea for a program?
• Products and Services. What products and services do you offer that you can build from? How might those be used in a service capacity?
• SWOT. Conduct a SWOT analysis to get a feel for your company’s strengths, weaknesses, and threats and think about what opportunities exist externally that can be used as part of your program. The program can also be used to address external threats, too.
• Create boundaries. This is also a good place to begin creating boundaries for your own financial and time investments, what you won’t do, and the other resources you’ll put toward the program (physical space, expertise, etc.)
• Have the difficult conversations. Explore how your company might be contributing to making a problem worse or creating conditions that don’t reflect the intention of the brand. This is a prime space to be thinking about potential program ideas.
• Define success. Explore the statement: We will know this program is successful when…

At the end of this stage

You’ll have reconnected with your brand and what it stands for. You’ll have worked with employees to learn more about their own wants and ideas. You’ll have explored the brand attributes, internal and external factors, and the products and services that can potentially map to a service program. You’ll have an idea of the boundaries, and you will have even explored how your company or brand might need to change fundamentally in order to create a truly authentic program.

Tools & Resources

At this point, there’s no wrong way to ideate. After you’ve gathered as much information as you think you need, begin to organize it. Go through the employee survey and see what stands out to you. Look for wild opportunities. Think about who you want to help, how you want to help, or a combination of both.

Use mind maps, or exercises like provocation, lotus blossoms, question assumptions, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…”, and mashup ideas to get ideas flowing. Explore beneficiaries with empathy maps. Don’t make any decisions yet though. You’ll evaluate your ideas in the next stage and continue to refine them.

What to do in this stage:

• Idea generation. There are a lot of ways to do this. There are some tools and activities listed below to help in this process.
• Organize your ideas. Think about your ideas in terms of which ones are completely wild, practical, and obvious. Don’t just get rid of the obvious ideas. Think about how to pivot them to be less expected.
• Ask for outside help. If you have ideas about who you want to serve, you can better understand their needs, pains, gains, and opportunities by enlisting the help of a subject-matter expert. You’ll do this later anyway, but now is a good time to bring them into the process to help make sure you’re doing the right things for the right people in the right ways.

At the end of this stage

You’ll have lots of ideas. More than you know what to do with. You should know a lot more about who you want to serve, how you might serve them, or both. The next step will be to narrow down your ideas and select a final one.

Tools & Resources

Here, you’ll take all of the ideas you’ve generated and begin to evaluate them for how feasible they are. Ideas that have deeper roots yet may not be all that unique or differentiating shouldn’t be thrown out completely. This stage is all about evaluating and refining ideas.

What to do in this stage:

• Evaluate your ideas. As an end result, you want to have a program that is unique, active, authentic, maintainable, and unexpected. You also want to evaluate your ideas in terms of how significant and permanent they are, how much impact you can make for your investment, and how well the program meets the needs of both external and internal audiences.
• Refine your ideas. Just because an idea isn’t immediately perfect doesn’t mean it needs to go away. Some of the best ideas need to be refined. You need to sleep on them. You need to look at them through the lens of a framework like Blue Ocean Strategy and ask what you can eliminate, reduce, do more of, or add to the idea in order to make it a winner.

Evaluation matrices

You can use the following matrices to begin evaluating and refining your ideas.

At the end of this stage

You’ll have selected a single idea to begin refining, planning, and documenting. You can plan your idea out on a canvas, in a spreadsheet, on a virtual whiteboard, or however you’d like. It’s important, however, to be thinking now about the program’s governance and leadership, your expectations, how it maps to the brand, the resources needed, the action plan, who you’ll partner with, estimates of both cost and time commitments, how you will move the program, its cadence, how you’ll measure success, what the impacts might be, and how it might also benefit the company.

It’s important to note here that bringing in outside subject-matter experts is a critical piece of creating a service program. Unless you have someone on staff who is an expert in the area where you’re focused, bring in someone to help you evaluate your ideas.

Tools & Resources

Organizing your program details is important. Now, you’ll need to document the program’s governance and leadership, your expectations, how it maps to the brand, the resources needed, the action plan, who you’ll partner with, estimates of both cost and time commitments, how you will move the program, its cadence, how you’ll measure success, what the impacts might be, and how it might also benefit the company.

What to do in this stage:

• Program Impact Statements. Program Impact Statements are ways of standardizing the way you talk about the program’s impact by creating specific impact statements. Statements consist of: Measure + Metric + Beneficiary + Context
• Measurement Criteria (KPIs). How will you measure your program? In participation? Money raised? It all depends on what you’re doing, but it’s important to know what you’re measuring and then be able to establish a baseline that you can then work to raise.
• Feasibility Blueprint. What needs to be done in order to make this program feasible? What are the visible things that others will see happening? What needs to be done behind the scenes in order to make the program possible?
• Change Management. It’s a big one, but the Knoster model for managing complex change is a great framework. It’s part of the resources below.

Program Canvas

You can use the following canvas to organize your program.

You can access the Google Sheet version here

At the end of this stage

When this stage is over, you’ll be ready to implement the program. You’ve done all of the ideation work, you’ve evaluated the program ideas, and selected one. You’ve documented the ins-and-outs of the program. Now, you’re ready to go!

Tools & Resources

This is the tactical plan. You’re not longer speaking solely in hypotheticals any longer. You’re moving the hypotheticals closer to validation as we build the first iteration of the program. Think of this as a project plan. Do you know the scope and requirements? Who does what, and when?

What to do in this stage:

• Scope and Objectives. Make sure you’ve fully defined the scope and objectives. You have to know what you’re implementing, when, where, and why.
• Budget. Make sure you’ve allocated any budget and time requirements for the program’s implementation. This takes both money and peoples’ time.
• Roles and Responsibilities. A RACI or accountability matrix is a critical tool for documenting who is responsible for certain aspects, who is held accountable, who is consulted in the process, and who is informed.
• Project plan. A good project plan will detail out the way you will implement the program. It should include a Gantt chart, milestones, internal reviews, meetings, deliverables, and timing.
• Meeting Cadence. If you want to stay focused on the end goal, meet frequently. Daily, if possible. It doesn’t have to be for long, but it does need to happen frequently, and with a pre-determined agenda, decision
• Task management and organizational tools. If you’re not working with a task management or project management tool, find one that works for you and adds in a layer of accountability.

At the end of this stage

You should be humming right along now. You’ll have a project plan, meetings on the calendars, and all of the shared knowledge in order to stay on target. You should be actively implementing your program now and getting ready for launch.

Tools & Resources

If you were able to test your prototype with real people, you will have observed whether they correctly interacted with your prototype. As your audience grows and becomes more diverse, observe how they interact with your program. Don’t be surprised if you discover things that need to change. Flexibility and adaptability are important.

Ongoing observation and measurement are critical in making sure your program flexes and changes to best meet others’ needs. Plan on optimizing as a rule of thumb.

What to do in this stage:

• Gather feedback. Conduct interviews with the entire ecosystem of people. This includes internal stakeholders, beneficiaries, and subject-matter experts. Look for room to improve. Use surveys to gather feedback, too. You can blend qualitative and quantitative measurements and create benchmarks to work toward exceeding.
• Observe. Look for pain points and opportunities to do things differently. Listen for the success stories. Listen for verbal feedback; watch for non-verbal feedback. See where there are inconsistencies in your assumptions and change them. See if people are making mistakes and address the experience.
• Test the program, not people. Remember that you are testing the program and observing people—you’re not testing people.
• Share your learnings. Communicate what you observe in actionable insights after performing your analysis

At the end of this stage

You will have watched your program and how it’s playing out. Ideally, you’ll have conducted some research to see what works and what doesn’t. And you should have a healthy amount of insights, observations, and ideas for improvements. Share those with the team and work on ways to solve problems and implement your changes.

Tools & Resources

Credibility is built by communicating about both your impact and what you’ve learned. You don’t need to position your learnings as mistakes. You can address them as part of the story, which is always evolving and changing.

What to do in this stage:

• Hold a team discussion. Discuss what you observed in the first iteration of the program.
• Start/Stop/Keep. Discuss what you should start doing. What should you stop doing? What should you keep doing?
• Discuss expert feedback. What do subject-matter experts have to say?
• Get the data. Look at what you were able to measure and determine how you can report out on those metrics.
• Decide how to make it public. Should you create an annual report? Microsite? Email campaign? All of the above? What’s the best way to communicate what you’ve been doing and what we’ve learned?
• Open-source it. Consider packaging up your program so you can give it to others to learn from, build on, make their own, and improve.

At the end of this stage

You will have decided how you’ll communicate to the world what you’re doing, what you’ve learned, and where you’re going next. You’ll also have decided if you want to make your program open-source so others can build upon yours and make it their own.

Tools & Resources