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Strategic Planning for Your Center
Overview | Guides | Campus Examples | Documents to Download
Many organizations offer resources and approaches to campus and center strategic planning. Below are a few sources we might recommend.
Visual Planning and Facilitation Resources
The Bonner Foundation has found visual planning and facilitation resources to be especially helpful for strategic planning. These approaches work well to involve various constituents -- including administrators, faculty, students, community partners, and alumni -- in an engaged way. These approaches allow for more inclusive, equitable collaboration - honoring and incorporating the knowledge and perspectives brought by each person. They are assets-oriented and fit with the Bonner Foundation and Bonner Program's philosophies, Common Commitments, and work.
The Grove Institute offers a number of resources and tools that your center and/or campus may be interested in purchasing. We have used these resources to develop and lead facilitated strategic planning meetings that kick off the planning process.
1. Introduction to Goals, Expectations, and Framework
2. Sharing History
3. Context Map (Discussion of Economic, Political and other key factors, as well as national trends)
4. SWOT Analysis (or EEMO2 - Elements of Effectively Managed Organizations)
5. Visioning
6. Stakeholder Map
7. Five Bold Steps
8. Action Plan/Work Plan
Templates
Here are some other resources (agendas, supply list, and template for a plan) from the Bonner Foundation's strategic planning with campuses.
1-day/consolidated sample agenda: Widener Strategic Planning Consolidated.pdf
2-day/more comprehensive sample agenda: WaynesburgStrategicPlanningPhase2.pdf
Template for Strategic Plan Draft (which then uses information drawn out of the planning process): Template Strategic Plan.doc
Supply List: SupplyListHigh-ImpactStrategicPlanning.pdf
Maryville College Plan Draft.pdf
Worksheet
Recommended Literature
- Academic Strategy: The Management Revolution in American Higher Education by George Keller
A chilling, instructive, literate, compelling discussion of the staggering problems facing U.S. higher education and the management strategies required to cope with them. -- Washington PostGeorge Keller's best seller allows us to understand how techniques of strategic management can help deal with future uncertainties and shows how a number of campuses have faced hard times creatively. -- Higher Education
- From Strategy to Change: Implementing the Plan in Higher Education by Daniel James Rowley and Herbert Sherman
From Strategy to Change shows how to take the next step after a strategic plan has been formulated. The authors clearly show how to implement a strategic plan that will meet the myriad challenges of today's complex higher education environment and spell success for the academy. "It is amazing that while sports teams of colleges and universities meticulously plan their contests against their opponents, their institutions' administrators don't spend nearly enough time or effort in creating andimplementing a strategy. Institutions of higher education seem to be missing the requisite tools to develop and activate their 'play book.' With this new age of globally available real-time information, it becomes increasingly more essential to have a map to help go over and around obstacles, avoid the ever-present pitfalls, and effectively aid in selecting the best route. Rowley and Sherman provide such tools in this exciting and comprehensive new book. I wish that when I was a department chair, president of a faculty senate, and dean that this superb work was available. My function in planning would have been so much easier and more rewarding."--Barry R. Armandi, Distinguished Teaching Professor, SUNY - Old Westbury
Developed as a companion workbook to John Bryson's best-selling Strategic Planning in Public and Nonprofit Organizations, Visual Strategy: A Workbook for Strategy Mapping in Public and Nonprofit Organizations, goes beyond making the case for good and effective strategic planning to making strategy visual through effective strategy mapping. Strategy mapping prevents groups of people from talking over one another and going around in circles. It helps people speak and be heard, produce lots of ideas and understand how they fit together, make use of causal reasoning, and clarify ultimately what they want to do in terms of mission, goals, strategies, and actions. Strategy mapping can join process and content in such a way that good ideas worth implementing are found and the agreements and comments needed to implement them are reached. The result is living strategic plans that act as useful guides to action.
- Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations: A Guide to Strengthening and Sustaining Organizational Achievement
"This is an immensely valuable resource for leaders, professionals, researchers, and other participants in public and nonprofit settings. Anyone professing competence in public and nonprofit management needs to know what Bryson says about strategic planning and management." —Hal G. Rainey, Alumni Foundation Distinguished Professor, University of Georgia; author, Understanding and Managing Public Organizations
"John Bryson recognizes that strategic management is what is called for today—meaning strategic planning must be linked to leadership, stakeholder involvement, the budget process, system redesign, and performance management. This is a tall order, but John's updated book delivers the goods and comes at just the right time!" —Beverly Stein, president, Public Strategies Group; former chair, Multnomah County Board of Commissioners (Oregon)
- "Strategic Planning for Centers: Fostering Pervasive, Deep, Integrated, Developmental Community Engagement by Ariane Hoy and Mathew Johnson.
This chapter, available in Deepening Community Engagement in Higher Education: Forging New Pathways, draws upon the first year of strategic planning with institutions in the Bonner network that was conducted in 2011-2012. It offers some practical lessons and advice for setting up and facilitating these sessions and developing a plan for a center. It addresses themes about involving community partners in these processes.
