Getting started: the key elements of a robust expedition plan

Planning can be one of the most exciting and rewarding stages of an expedition or field project. It is where your initial idea starts to take shape and where dreams and ambitions evolve into a practical and achievable plan.

For newcomers, however, the process can feel daunting. Good news – the Royal Geographical Society has supported expeditions for nearly two hundred years, and many principles of good expedition planning have remained remarkably consistent!

This article outlines the key elements of a robust and comprehensive expedition plan. While these elements are listed chronologically, expedition planning is an iterative process. Consider it a set of starting points for further reading, rather than a prescriptive process – when the reality of expedition planning is often anything but!

1. Clarify your purpose

A clear purpose is the foundation of any successful expedition. It guides your decisions, helps you shape your team, and provides the clarity that funders, partners and other stakeholders expect.

Achieve clarity by spending time early on:

• distilling your primary aim into a short, clear statement,
• identifying the objectives that support that aim,
• assigning priorities so your core aim can still be met if plans shift,
• avoiding ‘scope creep’ and pruning away conflicting goals.

This distinction between a primary aim and supporting objectives is longstanding Society guidance for achieving clarity of purpose and defining the success of your venture. This 'back of a napkin' approach suggests that the key tenets of your project should fit on a single side of paper (or perhaps into a single social media post).

By whatever means you achieve it, refining your expedition purpose allows you and your team to build consensus around the mission and its component parts at an early stage, laying strong foundations for the evolution of your plans.

Read more about the purposes and values encompassed by modern geographical exploration.

2. Understand the context and seek early advice

Every expedition takes place within a particular cultural, environmental and logistical setting, and on a timeline that may be longer than you initially realise. Taking the time to understand the wider context will help ensure that your project is realistic, safe and respectful. This is a good moment to:

• research locations, activities, questions or themes,
• find out in whose footsteps you will be walking – who has gone before, and what work has been done,
• talk to people who have relevant experience, and study the reports and outputs of comparable expeditions,
• identify any permits or permissions you might need to acquire, and
• engage with local organisations or communities whose insights will help align your project with local needs and the perspectives.

The Society’s varied resources in support of expedition planners will be invaluable at this early stage:

• The RGS Expeditions Database records over 10,000 expeditions made in recent decades, many with digitised post-expedition reports available to view online, and covering almost every imaginable location and activity on Earth.
• With access to a network of over 17,000 Fellows and members, the Society will respond to requests from the public for advice and information as part of our charitable purpose.
• Consider attending the annual RGS Explore Weekend or related events throughout the year.

3. Build the right team

Your team will be central to the experience and success of your expedition. A good team brings together people who have the skills, attitudes and resilience needed to support one another in potentially challenging environments and achieve your expedition’s objectives. This is especially important when – as so often happens on expeditions – things don’t quite go to plan.

As you shape your team, consider:

• the expertise needed to reach your objectives and achieve your aim,
• personal qualities such as adaptability, communication and initiative,
• how the diversity of members will affect the spread of strengths and perspectives,
• how different personality types will work together and deal with pressure, and
• the value of shared preparation, training, or short practice journeys.

Regular conversations during planning help build trust and ensure that everyone feels informed and consulted. This is where the culture of your team will be formed – it will set the tone for interactions in the field and in the aftermath of your return.

Leadership and team dynamics are well-established areas of knowledge and the subject of ongoing study in the context of expeditions, particularly in youth development and volunteering settings.

4. Assess feasibility, risk and safety

Responsible expeditions begin with a thoughtful and realistic assessment of feasibility and risk. This helps you assess if your plans are achievable and your team can operate safely.

Good practice includes:

• reviewing the feasibility of intended routes and locations, including local security risks and seasonal considerations,
• creating a structured risk assessment covering activities, travel and transport, accommodation, the environment, medical considerations, and equipment,
• planning risk reduction measures and contingency options, and
• establishing communication and emergency protocols based on credible local and international support.

Taking a broad look at the feasibility of your project in this way will help you understand the scale of the challenge and identify any gaps before you move into detailed planning. You do not need to produce a military-grade risk assessment at the outset, but assessing major risks early will help you establish the team’s appetite for risk and put pre-departure mitigation strategies into action while you still have time.

Read more about essential safety and risk management for expeditions and how to incorporate these concerns into your planning.

5. Plan your budget and resources

Creating a detailed and transparent budget helps you better define and understand the scope of your expedition by representing its key elements in financial terms. It will also support decision-making by allowing you and your team to calibrate your aims and objectives against the financial resources required to achieve them and demonstrate financial competence and realism when seeking funding for your expedition.

You might begin by:

• listing and categorising all your expected costs,
• determining costs that will be fixed and those that will vary with the scope of activities,
• identifying possible income sources, including personal contributions from team members,
• documenting all of these as budget lines in a spreadsheet or table,
• adjusting the scope of your project until you find a good fit with the financial or other resources you expect to be available, and
• deriving approximate fundraising targets from these calculations.

As with many other elements of an expedition plan, budgets should be built iteratively and refined over time, ideally in consultation with other members of your team, including any local collaborators whose participation may be represented in your budget.

Defining the costs of certain tasks, such as securing permissions, sourcing and shipping specialist equipment, and organising logistical support on location, can take longer than expected. Certain ‘hidden’ costs, such as insurance, pre-departure medical services, local guide and interpreter support, and the costs of delivering post-expedition outputs, are typically overlooked by inexperienced planners. Identifying and budgeting for such elements early will help avoid problems later.

Read more about expedition budgeting, or search the RGS Expeditions Database to find real-world budgets from recently returned expeditions.

6. Prioritise ethics, sustainability and community collaboration

Expedition planning today places strong emphasis on respectful, reciprocal and sustainable engagement with the people and places you visit. This is partly in acknowledgement of the ethically questionable history of exploration and its intertwinement with extraction and exploitation, but it is also based on the understanding that expeditions are inherently disruptive exercises that do not exist in a vacuum.

In practical terms for expedition teams today, good practice here involves:

• any form of collaboration with local partners being done respectfully, transparently and equitably, acknowledging their roles and expertise,
• planned activities not just contributing positively to the communities and environments they encounter, but being actively planned with their wellbeing in mind,
• the environmental footprint of travel and fieldwork being minimised and carefully justified by the potential benefits of the journey and its outcome, and
• a culturally sensitive approach being taken to the collection and dissemination of data, images and stories, and the co-creation and sharing of outputs with local collaborators.

Collaborative planning and execution create stronger projects that spread their benefits more generously and help ensure that expeditions support, rather than disrupt, local priorities, including those that may not be immediately obvious or may be challenging for outsiders to understand.

Ethical approaches to fieldwork have been the subject of long debate in the academic community, leading to the establishment of ethical norms and frameworks for those planning field research projects. Some of the basic precepts of current good practice are described in our guidance for Society grant recipients.

7. Plan your outputs, legacy and communication

Useful expeditions produce knowledge, insights or stories that benefit participants, collaborators and wider audiences. Planning your outputs early helps ensure that you have the time and resources to create them and that the legacy of your project can endure. This is particularly important if you enter into partnerships (funding or otherwise) that introduce post-expedition delivery obligations.

Whether for your own purposes or those of your collaborators, you might consider:

• real-time updates for your supporters and audiences during the expedition,
• durable outputs beyond media exposure, including field reports, articles, photographs or films,
• published academic papers if relevant to your expedition’s purposes,
• in-person talks, seminars or workshops after you return, or
• agreements with partners on how information and stories will be collaboratively produced and published.

Whether formal research and data collection is one of your objectives, building time into your schedule to write, record or reflect on your experience during the expedition will ensure that you have the raw material from which to later craft a range of communications outputs.

Finally, always remember to plan ahead for the time and resources you’ll need upon return to digest, describe and disseminate your findings – a process often longer in duration than the expedition itself!

8. Create a realistic planning timeline

An expedition planning timeline – even if only a chronological list of steps – helps you organise tasks, manage deadlines, provide you and your team with helpful urgency, and keep your project moving forward.

A helpful timeline:

• identifies the milestones between concept and departure,
• allows for tasks to take longer than expected,
• includes ‘hard’ deadlines beyond your control, such as those for grant applications, permits, shipping, or seasonal access,
• leaves space for delays, decision-making and adjustments.

Many tools and techniques exist to help you map tasks, activities and deadlines to a timeline. Visual planning tools such as Gantt charts can help you see how different parts of your project fit together. Simple shared calendars can help keep track of key milestones.

9. Develop a planning approach that works for you

Expeditions being so enormously varied in scope and ambition, there is no single correct way to plan one. What matters is finding approaches that help you stay organised, make good decisions, and move your project forward as a whole. You might:

• employ cloud-based spreadsheets, shared documents, or collaborative project management apps,
• develop mind-maps, flow charts, operational maps, or other visual frameworks,
• use group role-play or other techniques to visualise a range of future scenarios,
• work through ideas in conversations with mentors, peers, or RGS staff and members, or
• combine several tools and approaches depending on the stage of planning.

Beware of over-complication and of imitating the strategies of others that may prove a poor fit. Choose methods that feel intuitive and support your team’s preferred ways of thinking and acting.

Like any other skill, planning improves with experience, and the approach you use for your first expedition will evolve through trial and error – a necessary part of learning something as complex and challenging as planning an expedition!

Bringing everything together

These core elements are the foundations of a robust expedition plan and the process by which you’ll develop it. As your thinking evolves, expect to move back and forth between them, refining your purpose, updating your budget and timeline, collaborating with your evolving team, deepening your understanding of the contexts you will be working in, and finding approaches that work best for you.

The RGS Explore Resource Hub contains much more in the way of detailed articles and expert advice to support you throughout the process. And when you feel ready to take your idea to the next level, consider attending the Society’s annual Explore Weekend, which takes place each November in London – the only gathering of its kind, with a half-century legacy of inspiring and empowering new generations of explorers.