Building the Plan and Transitioning From Strategic Enrollment Planning to Strategic Enrollment Management

This post is the second in a series on strategic enrollment planning. Read our previous post, How Your Data Turns Into Strategies to Advance Enrollment.

“Our transition from strategic enrollment planning to strategic enrollment management was an important one for our campus. Not only have we started to leverage tools and mechanisms created by our SEP implementation teams to try to realize enrollment goals, we have also seen cross-campus solutions emerge to problems outside of the enrollment realm. That may not have necessarily happened without the ‘all hands on deck’ structures we put in place through our SEP/SEM process.”
—Dr. Allen Guidry, Interim Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, East Carolina University

The RNL Strategic Enrollment Planning (SEP) process encourages our campus colleagues to envision the end goal throughout the SEP project.We start the project by documenting the ideal outcomes, planning assumptions, and institutional priorities for strategic enrollment planning. The best strategic enrollment plans do not actually have an end.SEP includes a written document, but the project is not about the document and the document should never accumulate dust.

SEP is designed to be iterative and dynamic. As mentioned in other posts in this series, the SEP project includes:

• Organizing for SEP
• Identifying key performance indicators for SEP
• Developing a comprehensive situation analysis that couples the institutional context with environmental realities
• Identifying strategies
• Developing action plans to support the strategies
• Prioritizing strategies using a return on investment approach
• Developing quantifiable goals then funding, executing, evaluating and modifying the plan

After the college or university has developed multi-year projections, we set strategic enrollment goals and then determine how to shift, re-frame and fund strategic enrollment priorities as they transition from SEP to strategic enrollment management (SEM).

Implementation fundamentals

The best written strategic enrollment plans require intentional implementation. As campuses transition from SEP to SEM, there are a few fundamental actions that will help to ensure SEP success.

• Sunset the SEP Steering Committee and sunrise an SEM oversight group
• Identify implementation teams for the SEP strategies
• Develop and provide access to dashboards
• Determine the reporting structure and data distribution timeline
• Provide clear campus communication regarding progress and adjustments
• Adjust and refresh

Successful SEP implementation requires accountability.Colleges and universities have to determine if the SEP Steering Committee should be repurposed to serve as the SEM Council or how to evolve with new membership.The SEM Council should determine when they will review strategy progress and assess the plan.Structures that clarify when the strategy team reports are due with report templates will help to ensure consistent evaluation and modification of the SEP.Report templates and pre-determined timelines also will help the strategy implementation teams to stay focused and deeply analyze initiative outcomes.

Investing in dashboards that provide a visual representation of the key performance metrics and strategy performance indicators ensures that the SEP is a living document that connects the mission, current state, and the changing environment to long-term enrollment and fiscal health. SEP participants often identify greater levels of campus transparency as they access and analyze data together. KPI dashboards support the institution in their quest to remain data-informed and transparent.

The SEP should be updated annually. The SEP project helps to create a culture of strategic enrollment across the campus. Campus leadership needs to ensure that the strategic enrollment culture continues to be fostered. Institutions are well-served to clearly communicate the SEP nomenclature, assumptions, successes, and adjustments. Institutions need to consistently renew the SEP and operationalize a cycle approach to strategic enrollment. Strategic enrollment organizations renew the SEP regularly which includes: monitoring, assessing and evaluating, and updating the action plans. As the external environment and the institution shifts and evolves, the situation analysis will need to be refreshed and new potential strategies should be developed and vetted. With each year of the SEP, the SEM council should integrate new enrollment strategies and sunset or pause on strategies that become less relevant with environmental change. Enrollment goals should continue to be an extension of the alignment between the institutional mission and the external environment and as both entities change over time the goals and projections will need to be reset accordingly.

Dive into creating your SEP plan at the 2022 Strategic Enrollment Planning Executive Forum

I encourage you to join campus leaders and my RNL colleagues at the 2022 SEP Forum April 6-7 in Las Vegas. For more than 15 years, this annual gathering of enrollment leaders has helped campuses of every size, type, and mission get hands-on experience building a foundation for an excellent strategic enrollment plan.

We have had two great virtual SEP Forums during the pandemic—you can watch my session with Dr. Allen Guidry and Dr. Kimberly Brown below—but the extra interaction we have in person really takes the discussions and plan-building to another level. I hope you will join us April 6-7 for the SEP Executive Forum and get a head start on your strategic enrollment plan.

This session with Allen Guidry and Kimberly Brown offers additional insights into SEP and also displays the kind of exploration we can have at the 2022 SEP Executive Forum.