Planning is pivotal to prevention success. Planning will increase the effectiveness of prevention effortsby focusing energy, ensuring that staff and other stakeholders are working toward the same goals, and providing the means for assessing and adjusting programmatic direction, as needed. If done carefully, planning will also make future evaluation tasks much easier. Prevention practitioners at the state and jurisdiction levels engage in these planning activities: Prioritizing risk and protective factors: Establish criteria for prioritizing risk and protective factors associated with the identified priority problems, focusing on their importance and changeability. You should have touched on this briefly in your assessment project, but you need to have a more formed conclusion of what your prevention priorities will be based on your assessment, which then should lead to your decisions about your prevention program