Flight plan template for Healthcare

The flight plan with three columns a clinic, provider or health product needs: which service line this week's spend is pointed at, how much capacity stands behind it on the Monday, and the reference of the review that cleared the creative running in it.

Everything else is the general flight plan, unchanged. One row per week of one line of spend, a phase on every row, a share of the flight on each, and a decision point at the end of every phase.

Use it whenever advertising and capacity have to be kept in step, which for a provider is always. Appointments free up and fill up week by week, and a plan that sets the weight once at the start will spend its heaviest week against a service that has nothing left to give.

Write it after the media plan is approved, and read it every Monday alongside the appointment book. That pairing is the point of the document.

A provider's constraint is not attention, it is capacity, and capacity changes week by week. Appointments free up when somebody cancels and disappear when a practitioner takes leave. A plan that sets the weight once at the start of a flight will, somewhere in the middle of it, be buying enquiries for a service that has nothing left to give.

That is the case for a weekly plan here. One row per week per line, with the capacity behind the service written into the row on the Monday, read from the appointment book rather than remembered. The two documents are then read together, which is the only way either of them stays honest.

The consequence is that the share of budget column is not fixed at planning time in the way it is in other categories. The shape of the flight is planned, and then each week's weight is confirmed against what the service can see. That is a slightly more demanding rhythm and it is the one this category actually requires.

The service line column sets the claim review, the audience type and the definition of a result at once. Two services in one row produce a cost per appointment that describes neither and hides the one that is struggling.

It also sets the capacity that matters. A practice may have plenty of room overall and none at all in the service being advertised, and an aggregate view of availability is precisely the view that permits the mistake this plan exists to stop.

The most valuable decision this document forces is what to do in a week where capacity has run out.

Three honest options. Move the weight to another service line that has room. Move it to another catchment where the same service is quieter. Or hold it at a lower level with a message that states the wait, which keeps the service present without promising something it cannot do.

The fourth option, spending through it, is the one that happens by default and the one that costs the most. Enquiries that are answered late, or answered with a six-week wait the person was not expecting, do not simply fail to convert; they produce a worse reputation and a worse audience for the next flight.

Every row carries the claim review reference of the creative in market that week, with its date and reviewer.

The reason is the same as the reason a media plan carries one, with more urgency: services change what they offer, practitioners join and leave, evidence moves, and platform policy is revised without warning. Any of those can make a cleared claim wrong, and the weekly reference is what turns the resulting audit into a filter rather than a reading exercise.

Where a claim is narrowed or refused, note it on the row with the date. Those notes accumulate into the most practical record a provider's marketing team can keep of what its own services may say.

The phases here are usually not a launch curve. A provider's flight is more often a steady presence with deliberate variations, and the phases are named for what is being tested or pushed.

A build phase where a new service is being introduced and the message is doing all the explaining. A steady phase where the weight tracks capacity. A recovery phase after a quiet stretch, or after a practitioner returns. A wind-down where a service is being retired or absorbed.

Naming them matters for the same reason it does anywhere: a chart of weekly spend with phase names on it can be read by somebody who was not there, and a chart without them cannot.

The questions worth writing here are about who is arriving rather than how many.

Whether the enquiries are for the service that was advertised, or for something adjacent the clinic does not do. Whether the people booking are attending. Whether the catchment is producing people who can realistically travel to the location. Whether the wait quoted on the page still matches the wait in the book.

Each of those is answerable within a week or two, each of them changes what the next phase should do, and none of them appears in a platform's reporting.

One more column belongs in the notes rather than in the sheet, and it is the wait quoted on the booking page.

A provider's landing page usually states how quickly somebody can be seen, and that statement is the most checkable promise in the campaign. When the book fills, the page is stale, and every week of advertising after that is sending people to a number that is no longer true. The weekly review is the natural place to catch it, because capacity is already being read for the row above.

Where the wait has grown, the honest move is to update the page and let the creative say so. A message that states a realistic wait converts a smaller number of people and converts them into appointments that are actually attended, which is the only conversion a clinic can use.

Every week of every line has a row. Every row names one service line and the capacity behind it, with the day it was read. Every row carries the claim review reference of the creative in market that week. No week carries more weight than its capacity can absorb. Every phase names its first week, its last week and its intent. Every dependency has a due date before the week that needs it. And every phase carries a decision point about fit rather than volume.

A flight that passes those seven is not necessarily a good flight. It is a flight that cannot quietly promise appointments that do not exist, which is the failure this category produces most often and notices last.