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Phase 2: Design and Manage Goals

The middle phase of the behavior integration process you will use to achieve your social and behavior change goals teaches you how to operate a behavior-focused program.

We have identified three priority goals that ensure you create and run a strong, impactful program.

Carrying out the steps to achieve each goal (using robust tools), you will:

  • develop a 30,000-foot view of behaviors for cohesive program design,
  • infuse a whole ecosystem approach into program strategies and narratives, and
  • run a program with an airtight focus on behaviors.

The three main goals of the Design and Manage phase of the Think | BIG process are to summarize, design, and manage.

Let’s dive deeper into the next three goals.

4. SUMMARIZE

The first goal in Design and Manage is to summarize your priority-behavior-specific decisions (from your Behavior Profiles in the last phase) to highlight:

  • the most critical, crosscutting factors to address,
  • supporting actors to involve and what they should do, and
  • program strategies that work for multiple supporting actors and influencing factors.

To achieve this goal, you will synthesize your Behavior Profiles across factors, supporting actors, and program strategies.

Though other approaches analyze specific behaviors, they seldom pull together individual behavioral analyses to do an overall program analysis. That creates disjoint perspectives, which can lead to disconnected programming and patchwork outcomes.

BIG shows you how to maximize your impact and your resources by helping you synthesize your individual behavioral decisions (whether three Behavior Profiles or 20) into one document – a Behavior Summary.   This way you focus on addressing the most essential elements to change your priority behaviors.  And you stay on your pathways to change throughout the lifecycle of your program.

5. DESIGN

The second goal under Design and Manage is to design your behavioral-led strategy, including a framework and narrative.

Now you build from your Behavior Summary.  You re-interpret its behavioral information into something more traditional that acts as a program foundation.

To achieve this goal, you will use your Behavior Summary (from summarize) to create a starting strategy results framework.

The new strategy maintains a focus on behaviors, but also gives donors what they expect to see.

BIG knows that a results framework is a must for your program strategy.  You have already put in the hard work to be sure that your program will be behavior-led.  So how do you maintain that behavioral focus as you continue to develop your program?  You use the tools built in to behavior integration guidance.

BIG provides you with samples of Behavior Summaries and shows you how that information can be re-organized into a Behavior-Oriented Results Framework.  The examples walk you through how to take your Behavior Summary information and write your results, intermediate results, and sub-intermediate results so they focus on behaviors and critical factors to address.

Once the results framework is in place, you can write the strategy narrative. BIG also guides you through developing your Workplan.  Roll out activities around your priority behaviors, not just around getting tasks done. We mean it when we say Think | BIG is a “whole ecosystem approach”: cohesive effort means holistic impact.

6. MANAGE

The third goal of Design and Manage is to manage and implement your program around the priority behaviors that you carefully selected and analyzed.

This means some of your traditional thinking on implementation might need to change.  “Meet the future of social and behavior change” also means be part of that future: old ways get old results; new ways get new results.  Do something new with BIG.

To achieve this goal, you will take your selected program strategies (from design) and detail how to implement them while keeping a behavior focus.

Many programs start out thinking about behaviors.  But by the time they get to implementation, they’ve lost sight of the behaviors they wanted to change.  Instead, the focus becomes: “Just do this.” “Just do that with so-and-so.” “Do it for this total cost.” Just because that’s what the budget from 6 months ago, or the leadership team not familiar with the field, said….  No behaviors in sight anymore.

We know managing multiple sub-partners can be especially challenging.  Often they are focused on meeting their own organizational output or process indicators, written in their contracts in cold hard ink. They can be less worried about, and attentive to, behaviors. 

Keeping sight of your priority behaviors is easier if you map and coordinate your partners through a behavioral lens, along with continuing to manage your activities using the Behavior Profiles and Summary.  BIG was purpose-built to help you do just that!

From here you are ready to move on to phase three of the Think | BIG process, Track and Adapt.

Ready to go further and start achieving the Design and Manage goals we talked about here?  

Intrigued, but want to learn more before you dig into the work?  

Have a question? Let us know!