Where Are You Going: Aligning Mission & Market
While the days of the 10-year strategic plan are no longer, the importance of planning remains the same as it was in 1950 when General Eisenhower remarked, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” We need to look no further than the events of the past two years to see this demonstrated firsthand.
So what does strategic planning mean for a school in 2022? To be sure, many strategic plans include important information about fulfilling the school’s mission through several targeted initiatives.
These typically involve:
Faculty hiring and retention
Financial sustainability
Diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice initiatives
Strengthening the academic program
Branding and marketing
However, often these plans overlook perhaps the most important steps in the long-range planning process: discovering who you are, how your market perceives you, and what families value about you today.
Landon School, Spring 2022
Although well intentioned, strategic plans oftentimes chart a course for the future of a school without having a firm grasp of your current location. Without knowing where you are, how can you accurately determine where you want to go and successfully navigate getting there?
Put differently: how can you predict what current and future members of your community will want from your school if you do not know why they value it now?
A brand discovery process is one focused on understanding your community and the “why” and “what” they value about your school. This process uncovers your institution’s brand strengths and disadvantages, along with other data points that influence and impact most every facet of school life from enrollment, parent satisfaction and fundraising, to student life and academic program. Collecting, analyzing and understanding this information is critical to not only understanding your schools market position, but to keep school leadership abreast of the internal community’s aspirations, frustrations and satisfaction at a specific point in time.
While most strategic planning processes involve dozens of people from a school’s community and countless hours of committee meetings, efforts to understand a school’s market and value often do not receive this same level of attention. Creosote’s in-depth discovery process features primary and secondary data collection and analysis to understand why your community values your school. This understanding is critical in developing messaging that will resonate with your most important audiences. It provides information that can, and should, lay the foundation for strategic planning.
It stands to reason that before you plan for the future you should understand why your audiences value your school to ensure that your mission, and your market, align.
Written by Peter Mason, Ph.D., Lead Researcher at Creosote Affects
Creosote Affects helps school, colleges and universities nationwide find their brand voice in highly competitive markets. We are a comprehensive branding firm—executing research, strategy and creative.