Your Service Plan
Once citizens have had an opportunity to review and comment on the various action plans, it is time to write the final plan. The final plan may not include all of the details from each of the action plans for the priority issues.
The written plan should include:
- Summary of the needs assessment process including identified priorities
- Summary of the asset mapping process including major assets organized by priority
- Summary of the action planning process organized by priority including:
- vision
- goals
- major strategies
- timelines
- budget
- measurements of success
- Implementation Plan
- communicating volunteer opportunities
- keeping the plan aligned with the community’s vision
- timeline for reviewing and revising the plan. Committees should plan to regularly revisit, revise, and update the plan.
Below are links to two sample service plans. These examples may help you make a comprehensive service plan that works best for you.
- We Are Dublin, Dublin, Ohio – a small city with a council system form of government
- NYC Service Blueprint, New York, N.Y. – a large city with a mayoral form of government
Communicating Volunteer Opportunities
As part of the written plan, you should be prepared to provide citizens with general responses to the following questions:
- What are volunteer opportunities are available to citizens as a result of this process?
- How will you get the word out about new opportunities available to citizens? Will you use an agency-by-agency approach, a coordinated effort, or both?
- What methods will be used to keep citizens and potential volunteers informed?
Involve Community Members
- Ask people to do something that they already want to do. (Don’t assume that they will want to volunteer in a position that is their profession, such as an accountant doing the books).
- Ask for short-term volunteer commitments in the beginning.
- Don’t make it a goal to have a long-term volunteer; utilize people for the time they are willing to give.
- Offer volunteers food and beverages.
- Some people will offer financial support rather than time; have a mechanism for this. Visit GiveMN.org for an example of how this can be done.
- Find out what peoples’ gifts and talents are. Find out what their interests are,– how can they be stretched. People love self-discovery and realizing how they can improve themselves and their lives.
- Develop a volunteer pipeline. Don’t spend too much time trying to keep volunteers. Have a plan for recruiting, retaining, acknowledging, and transitioning volunteers. Every volunteer is temporary to some extent.
Communicating Success
As you implement the service plan, regularly report on success to your constituents, and share your success with other cities of service and with the national audience. See Communicating Results for information on how to do this.
