Page Sections

This page has many sections. They are individually small and can be usefully read in sequence, or you can jump to the sections of interest to you.

Background (Steps 1-6)
Starting (Steps 7-10)
Planning (Steps 11-16)
Context (Steps 17-19)
Compliance (Steps 20-24)
Wrap-Up (Steps 25-27)
Video Resources

BACKGROUND: Become familiar with your context and Departmental BPC Plans and expectations

In this section you will review your local context and the requirements for Departmental BPC Plans. You will not start drafting your plan until Step 7 in the Starting Section.

Your Departmental BPC Plan will help you make your context more inclusive and equitable and ultimately broadening participation in computing. Before beginning, it is useful to understand the breadth of participation you currently have.

  • Compare the demographics of your institution (usually available online) with recent graduates from your programs (available at https://bpcnet.org/research-data/, select Postsecondary Computing Degrees Awarded (IPEDS)).
  • If your department or institution has performed a climate survey recently, review its results to learn how different communities within the department viewed the department’s culture and inclusivity.
  • Share information about your intention to write a Departmental BPC Plan and inquire if any of your colleagues want to contribute to the process.
  • Request a meeting with a student-facing staff member (e.g., an undergraduate advisor) to learn what they think are challenges and opportunities for BPC.

BPC is a specific part of the larger work of Diversity, Equity, and inclusion (DEI). Your institution likely has many resources and allies in the DEI space that can help you in your BPC efforts.

  • Identify the offices at your institution that may have ongoing activities aligned with BPC (e.g., a Dean of Students or Diversity Office). Contact individuals to get more information about relevant programs you find.
  • If available, visit the website of your institution’s center for teaching and learning and look for DEI-related programs, such as inclusive teaching workshops.
  • Some popular BPC activities are only successful when supported by existing relationships and programs. Check with your department to see if you have established relationships with recruiting, admissions, schools that students transfer from, or K-12 institutions.

It is not necessary to be an expert in BPC to write a good BPC plan or to contribute meaningfully to BPC, but it is helpful to understand what BPC is. NSF has other initiatives, such as broader impacts, that can also have some overlap with BPC but there are some distinct differences.

Plans must have the following required content: required header information, Context, Goals, Activities, Measurement. However, they vary in the space they allocate to each of these. Some plans nest the relevant activities under their related goal. Other plans separate the goals and activities and indicate which goals each activity aligns with.

  • Visit the list of Verified Departmental BPC Plans and review several plans there, noticing the similarities and differences between their organization and structure.

There are three sets of checklist requirements: “Document Structure Checklist”, “Tone and Clarity Checklist”, and “Departmental BPC Plan Content Checklist”. Departmental BPC Plans must be verified by BPCnet consultants using these checklists before they can be used in Connected Project BPC Plans. The checklists have evolved over time, so not all previously verified plans may fit all of the current criteria.

The words that are used to describe certain identities change across time and are often contested. Terminology is important because the words we use can hurt or help, exclude or welcome. Some terms reinforce stereotypes and disadvantages, invisibility, and dehumanization. New terms are created to resist this dehumanization, fight invisibility, and highlight realities as a means to challenge and dismantle disadvantage. Most plans need to refer to the communities they aim to support; you’ll revisit how to do this in step 18 after you write your goals.

STARTING: Write your first goal and activity.

In this section you will write a specific kind of goal and matching activity. This should help get you started; you will add other goals and activities later on. The objective here is for you to better understand the pairing of goals and activities, while constructing a goal that we feel could be used in any Departmental BPC Plan.

The template ensures you use font and spacing that satisfies the NSF formatting rules, a header that satisfies BPCnet.org rules, and an outline of sections to help scaffold your writing. 

While they are referred to as “Departmental” BPC Plans, these can be written at any organizational level within an institution and there can be multiple plans within an institution. For example, you could have a plan for the whole institution, a college, a school, a department, a center, or a specific research group.

  • Decide on the organizational affiliation for your plan and use it to fill in the “department name” and “institutional name” lines of the template.
  • Add your contact information (a name and email address is sufficient).

Departmental BPC Plan goals are narrower in their definition than you might be used to. To get started, we recommend writing a goal related to faculty engagement first because it is a goal that every Departmental BPC Plan could include. The Four Common Goal Patterns section in the BPC Plan Goals page provides example templates for goals. Goals are required to be specific and time bounded. We have customized two of these templates to focus on faculty engagement. If you already know the proportion of faculty engaged in BPC activities you can use Version 1. If not, use Version 2.

  • Version 1: “By [YEAR] the proportion of faculty participating in BPC activities will improve from [CURRENT VALUE] to [NEW
  • VALUE].”Version 2: “Measure and improve the proportion of faculty participating in BPC activities by [YEAR].”

As noted in the Four Common Goal Patterns section in the BPC Plan Goals page, for ongoing activities, “by [YEAR]” may be replaced with a frequency such as “every year.”

  • Add a goal to your plan related to faculty engagement in BPC.

BPC plans and activities do not need to be novel. There is a list of 60+ example activities at Example Activities to Use in BPC Plans that can be included in any BPC plan. Many plan writers find that it is helpful to customize these existing activity descriptions to align with their current and proposed activities. Many of the example activities include links with more information. You will eventually need to remove the links that are provided (to adhere to the NSF formatting rules), but we encourage you to read the additional information before removing.

  • Read through the first two subsections of activities on Example Activities to Use in BPC Plans (these relate to Teaching and Mentoring, and all can support a faculty engagement goal).
  • Add a first activity to your plan that can align with your first goal.

PLANNING: Create the core of your BPC Plan: goals and activities.

In this section you will compile a set of goals and activities for your Departmental BPC Plan. This section focuses on how to write goals and activities, but not on the specific goals and activities to pick; those should be selected based on your context and the interests and abilities of your faculty. We encourage you to not worry about the 2-page page limit yet. At this stage you will likely have more goals and activities than will fit in your two page Departmental BPC Plan.

In the next steps, you will focus on what activities will be included in your plan. Pause here and make notes about what other goals you hope to achieve. Goals come in many flavors; read the Common Goal Topics section in the BPC Plan Goals page, for several common topics.

  • Read the Common Goal Topics section in the BPC Plan Goals page and create an informal list of ideas for other goals.

You may have members of your department who are engaged in BPC activities already.

  • Email or meet with faculty, staff, and students to compile a set of ongoing BPC activities. Gather information about what each activity involves, its goals, its success thus far, opportunities for engagement, and a contact person.
  • For each activity related to BPC, write a brief draft of the activity (often 2-3 sentences) that meets the following two items in the Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans: “Includes a clear description of what will occur as part of each activity” and “Includes an explicit connection to BPC for each activity.” Identifying likely faculty roles in the activity can encourage faculty involvement, but some activities can be more clearly explained without that.

Most plans will include new activities as well as current ones. Pick activities that will help achieve your goals and that take advantage of your local context as noted in Steps 1 and 2. 

In the process of drafting a Departmental BPC Plan, it is common to have activities that are not aligned with any goals and goals that have no supporting activities. However, this alignment is required by the Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans.

  • For each activity, identify the goal it is intended to help achieve. Sometimes, that goal is not already in your plan so you’ll need to write it as a SMART goal or remove the activity from the plan.
  • For each goal, identify at least one activity that will help achieve it. Sometimes, no such activity is already in your plan so you’ll either need to add one or remove the goal.
  • For each activity/goal pair, make sure the connection between the two is evident from the text you have written. Sometimes you’ll need to add.   

SMART goals are required for plans to be verified on BPCnet.org and subsequently submitted to the NSF as part of a Connected Project BPC Plan.  See SMART Goal Requirement section in the BPC Plan Goals page, for a brief definition of SMART goals.

  • A good goal describes what you hope to achieve; if your goal also includes how you plan to achieve it, that part should be moved to an activity.
  • Making a goal specific (the S in SMART) can be easier if you break broad goals into several smaller goals.
  • If your goal is to do some specific activity, making that an activity instead with a more general goal can make the plan easier to read.

Common ways to phrase SMART goals is to use one of the four goal patterns noted in the Four Common Goal Patterns section of the BPC Plan Goals page.

  • Re-word each goal as a SMART goal 

One item in the Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans is “Identifies how outcomes will be measured for each activity” with this addendum: “Some intended outcomes may be difficult to measure; in such cases, it is sufficient to measure an intermediate outcome. For example, it is sufficient to measure the number of students who receive funding to attend a diversity conference instead of the long-term impact of their attendance.”  Many plans include collecting measurement data as a BPC activity in itself. 

  • For each activity, describe how its outcomes could be measured.
  • If measurements are similar for multiple activities, the measurements can be grouped in their own section of the document.

CONTEXT: Help others understand your environment

In this section you will draft your Context section. You have a lot of flexibility in what you include here and the steps guide you to providing typical content. You can review Verified Departmental BPC Plans for other examples.

The context section helps plan readers understand the size and general demographics of the department. Some plan writers like to add additional information about the college or institution or brief summaries of past BPC successes, which is welcome but not required.  

  • Start the context section of the document with basic contextual information about your institution.

The Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans requires that communities be identified with terms from NSF CISE’s definition of BPC, but many plans mention those terms only once to define another term to use in the rest of the plan. There is no single recommended term for referring to such groups of communities. See the Terminology Guide: Referring to Communities Underrepresented in Computing in BPC Plans for additional information. 

  • If you have goals or activities that address particular communities, add a definition of the term(s) you use to describe those communities to your context section.

Demographic information about your students may be found in your institutional data reporting system or at https://bpcnet.org/research-data/ under Postsecondary Computing Degrees Awarded (IPEDS). Some goals might also benefit from demographic information of a broader context than the department itself, such as university, state or regional demographics, or you can use the K-12 data available from https://bpcnet.org/research-data/ under K-12 Enrollment (CCD). 

  • Add (to the context or the appropriate goal) any demographic information that you have a goal of changing.
  • Add (to the context or the appropriate activity) any local resources that may help an activity succeed.

COMPLIANCE: Format your plan as a Departmental BPC Plan 

In this section you will prepare for your plan to be Verified by BPCnet. The steps below guide you to revisions that will eventually be required for verification.

Since Departmental BPC Plans can be submitted to the NSF as part of Connected Project BPC Plans, it is required that Departmental BPC Plans also meet the NSF formatting rules, which prohibits the inclusion of links.

  • Remove all hyperlinks within the document. 

Since Verified Departmental BPC Plans can be used in Connected Project BPC Plans submitted to the NSF (see Connected Project BPC Plan ), it is necessary to have an identifier by which PIs can refer to each activity. This is also required in the Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans.

  • For each activity, label it with a unique identifier.

The Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans includes a requirement to identify “a contact person for each activity”. Many plans do this by providing the name of an individual (or a role such as “Director of Graduate Studies”) in parentheses at the end of each activity. Some plans include a sentence explaining that the contact for the Department BPC Plan is also the contact for all activities. The contact person should be available to help new people join the activity and answer questions about it.

  • Add contact information for each activity or group of related activities.

There are many aspects of a Departmental BPC Plan and it is easy to overlook some things while working on others. A pass to look for things that often get overlooked can improve the quality of your plan. BPC consultants will also help ensure that you meet all of the requirements.

The Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans is used by BPCnet consultants as the criteria for if a plan is ready to be verified and published on BPCnet.org. Reviewing each item in the checklist before submitting it can help the verification process go more smoothly.

  • Review your plan against each item in the Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans, editing it as needed to meet each item in that checklist.
  • If you need to shorten your plan to meet the page limit, consider removing details from the context section that are not directly related to the goals and activities; merging related activities; or removing descriptions of activities that few members of the department expect to engage in.

WRAP-UP: Collect feedback and submit final draft for verification

In this section you will finalize a draft of your plan and submit it to BPCnet for verification. 

Because Departmental BPC Plans may appear on BPCnet.org and in NSF grant proposals, there may be institutional policies about what they can include and who has to approve them before they are published. This may require input from administration and legal counsel within the institution.

  • Identify who should review the plan before it is published on BPCnet.org as an official document about your department.
  • Identify who should approve the plan for it to be accepted by your unit as the official Departmental BPC Plan.

Internal feedback and approval are important to ensure buy-in from faculty and others who will be performing the plan’s activities. It is common that most faculty, staff, and students are unaware of many of the BPC activities within a department. Sharing a draft of the plan for feedback can be an additional way to provide transparency about the ongoing BPC activities. You may find it helpful to label activities with (new) or (ongoing) to clearly communicate with internal stakeholders; such labels are not needed on the submitted plan.

  • Disseminate a link to your plan with requests for individuals to share ongoing activities that are missing and any new activities that they would like to see added. 

You will receive confirmation that your plan has been received, after which it will be routed to a BCPnet.org consultant to review and verify, using the Checklist for Departmental BPC Plans and the consultants’ expertise. Typically, it will be returned with some suggested revisions before being verified and published on BPCnet.org. After your Departmental BPC Plan is Verified, BPCnet will not post your plan online without your confirmation. This means that you can seek final approval from your unit after your plan is Verified. Additional changes can likely be Verified quickly.

Video Resources

BPCnet.org has compiled a series of videos that explain different aspects of a Departmental BPC Plan. The videos go into detail about types of BPC Plans and their activities, context, goals, evaluation, and measurement.

Dr. Burçin Campbell (Director of Data and Evaluation, CRA) gives an overview of BPC Plans.
Dr. Colleen Lewis (Associate Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) discusses how activities can be used in BPC Plans.
Dr. Gretchen Achenbach (BPCnet Consultant) speaks about types of information and context in BPC Plans.
Dr. Luther Tychonievich (Teaching Associate Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) discusses having SMART goals in BPC Plans. 
Dr. Wendy DuBow (Director of Strategies for Education Research & Evaluation, NCWIT) measurement sections in BPC Plans and using evaluation resources.