6 Common Mistakes in Program Design (and how to avoid them)
You’ve secured funding for an exciting new initiative, and your team is energised and ready to make an impact. Fast forward 18 months: despite your best intentions and hard work, the program isn’t engaging the audience you hoped for or delivering the outcomes you expected.
Sound familiar?
Over the years, I’ve seen (and yes, sometimes made) the same avoidable program design mistakes crop up again and again. The good news? These missteps can be avoided with thoughtful design, strategic planning and strong foundations. Here are six of the most common issues I’ve seen and how to avoid them.
1. Chasing Funding That Doesn’t Align with Your Strategy
In the not-for-profit world, funding is competitive and often scarce. It’s tempting to go after every opportunity, even those that don’t clearly align with your organisation’s purpose or strengths. But doing so can stretch your resources, pull staff away from core work and ultimately deliver programs that don’t contribute meaningfully to your long-term impact goals.
The fix?
Before pitching for a grant or tender, ask:
Is this opportunity aligned with our strategy or theory of change?
Do we have the skills and systems to deliver it?
Does it take us closer to our intended impact or distract us?
Quick tools like a business case template, strategy alignment checklists, or plan-on-a-page summary can support faster, more strategic decisions under pressure.
2. Jumping to Solutions Before Understanding the Problem
Time pressures, whether from funding timelines or internal momentum, often push teams straight into thinking about activities and outputs without fully understanding the problem they want to address. Without this, you risk implementing solutions that miss the mark, ignore key audience needs, or duplicate existing efforts.
The fix?
Build design time into your proposal and frame it as best practice. Funders increasingly recognise that strong programs are grounded in evidence, lived experience and community wisdom. Engage an experienced consultant to support situation analysis, community and stakeholder engagement and partnership opportunities.
Programs that start with curiosity, not assumptions, are bound to be more sustainable.
3. Overlooking Community Wisdom
Designing for communities without designing with them remains a common mistake. Even well-intentioned programs can miss the nuance, relevance or trust needed to succeed, especially when working with marginalised or underserved groups.
Co-design is more than consultation or validation. It’s about sharing power and genuinely engaging those most affected in shaping the solutions that affect them.
The fix?
Build co-design and community engagement into your program timeline and budget. Reach out early to community leaders, grassroots groups and lived experience representatives. Compensate participants for their time, use their input to meaningfully shape your program’s direction, and make sure you close the loop by letting them know how their insights were used.
Programs that embed community voice are more impactful, more relevant, and more sustainable.
4. Underestimating Project Setup and Staffing Needs
New programs often mean new roles, which can stretch internal capacity during recruitment and onboarding. When early months are spent getting people in place, you risk losing valuable time and momentum.
The fix?
Engage project management or strategy support early. A consultant can help develop your project plan, set up internal systems, initiate early engagement, and prepare your program for when your staff are in place. This ensures they're not starting from scratch, navigating a new organisation, new colleagues and setting up a new program.
5. Setting Unrealistic Timelines
It’s tempting to promise bold outcomes in short timeframes, especially to secure funding. But complex social change doesn’t work on a 12-month timeline. Underestimating the time required to build trust, shift behaviours or influence systems can lead to stress, burnout and unsustainable results.
The fix?
Be honest about what’s achievable within the funding period. Build in room for learning, iteration and sustainability planning. Consider how your work can lay foundations for ongoing change, even if the project is time-limited.
Using tools like a theory of change or logic model can help you clarify short, medium, and long-term outcomes, and communicate realistic impact expectations to funders.
6. Treating Evaluation as an Afterthought
When evaluation is viewed merely as a funding requirement, it often gets relegated to the end or underdone. But if you’re not tracking your progress or learning as you go, how will you know if what you’re doing is working? Or if it could be working better?
The fix?
Integrate monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) into your program from the beginning. Develop a clear logic model and MEL framework that outlines your evaluation questions, success indicators, data collection plans and learning processes. This not only supports better reporting, but it also drives continuous improvement, builds team capacity, and increases your chances of long-term success and future funding.
The Strategic Difference
Programs that avoid these mistakes share some common characteristics:
They align tightly with strategy and purpose
They invest in upfront program design
They centre community voices and stakeholder insights
They prepare for implementation before day one
They plan for long-term impact, not just quick wins
They treat evaluation as a learning tool, not a checkbox
I help organisations build strong program foundations - through program strategies, theory of change and logic model development, stakeholder and community engagement, program management support, and more. Let’s talk about how I can help your next program start strong, stay strong and make a real impact.
