Building an institutional strategic plan
Key takeaways
- The strategic planning process is a chance to assess changes in student needs, institutional focus, and community expectations.
- The process should include soliciting input from across the campus and local communities.
- A strategic plan should guide all departments on key focus areas.
Institutional strategic planning is a critical opportunity to imagine a better version of your institution, gather ideas from a wide range of stakeholders, and get specific about how to achieve institutional goals with collaborative decisions about where, how, and why to prioritize resources.
When State Fair Community College (SFCC) launched a multi-phase strategic planning process last year, leaders had those key goals in mind. The college set out to clarify SFCC’s mission and values, classify its current state, decide what the college should be in the future, and identify how best to reach that future state.
Over the course of the planning process, conducted in partnership with Ellucian Strategic Consulting, SFCC invited a range of perspectives from across their campus and local community. Now, following a successful completion of their five-year plan, some of SFCC’s college leaders and community planning team representatives reflect on the process, each from their own unique perspective.
Perhaps the most important value in developing our plan was that it allows us to be forward-thinking to leverage limited resources to achieve desired outcomes with measures that ultimately hold us accountable to our students, taxpayers and patrons.
Joanna Anderson, President, State Fair Community College
