2025 Strategic Planning Executive Forum

Explore the essential elements of campuswide strategic planning

How do you create a strategic, data-informed plan that meets enrollment goals, diversifies revenue streams, and achieves long-term sustainability? How can you take a holistic, institution-wide view that includes key areas such as organizational structures, academic program planning, and technological innovations in addition to enrollment and fiscal management?

Explore these critical topics at the 2025 RNL Strategic Planning Executive Forum. This interactive event for campus leaders will offer two days of key strategies, innovative ideas, insightful discussions, and candid exchanges on the challenges that leaders face. Our time together will lay the foundation for data-driven strategic planning that paves the way for your institution’s growth and longevity.

Who should attend?

• President or Chancellor
• Chief Enrollment Officer/Vice President for Enrollment
• Provost or Chief Academic Officer
• Chief Student Success Officer/Vice President of Student Affairs
• Chief Fiscal Officer

For maximum benefit, bring your entire cabinet or executive leadership team to evaluate high-impact strategies that cross divisional lines.

Tuesday, April 1, 2025

7:30 – 8:30 a.m.
Forum Check-In and Breakfast

8:30 – 9:00 a.m.
Welcome and Introductions

9:00 am – 10:15 a.m.
Beyond Planning: Ensuring Strategy

This session will review the higher education landscape, identifying internal and external factors challenging colleges and universities. We will examine priorities for higher education in 2025 and how strategic, innovative, and dynamic institutions are strategically positioning their organizations for the future.

10:30 – 11:45 a.m.
Organizational Awareness and Transformation

See how institutions have successfully and strategically transformed as well as the key elements that institutions need to employ to foster transformation and achieve their mission.

11:45 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Hosted Lunch

1:00 – 2:45 p.m.
Illuminate: The RNL Strategic Planning Framework

During this interactive session, participants will engage in the RNL Strategic Planning Framework and draft customized outlines for strategic planning projects.

Discovery

• Ensuring institutional readiness
  • Plan objectives, focus areas, key stakeholders, and leadership engagement
  • Key performance indicators
• Environmental scanning
  • Consider data sources
    • Market insights
    • Institutional positioning
  • Document key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
• Draft a quick situation analysis
  .

Action Planning

• Build a strategy action plan
  • Determining the strategy impact, cost, ROI, effort, and probability for success

Prioritizing

• Develop an aptitude for aligning opportunities with institutional mission, capacity, and resources
  • Understanding net impact
  • Establish protocols to guide timing, investment, shifting resources, efforts, and calculating risk

Implementing

• Ensuring accountability
  • Dashboards
• Agility
  • Continued assessment and environmental scanning

3:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Breakout Sessions by Institution Type

Share high-level, candid insights with other campus leaders and generate momentum for your team. RNL will provide examples of institutional strategic planning challenges and successes at four-year public, four-year private, and two-year public.

5:00 – 6:00 p.m.
Networking Social

6:00 p.m.
Free evening to enjoy Chicago

Wednesday, April 2

7:30 – 8:00 a.m.
Breakfast

8:00 – 9:00 a.m.
President Panel Discussion: Transformative Leaders in Higher Education

During this virtual panel discussion, you will learn from higher education leaders how they set a vision, fostered change, reversed enrollment declines, improved student success, and positioned their institutions to achieve its mission. This session will be facilitated by Dr. Steven Drew of RNL who will share how RNL is supporting partner transformation and the power of AI.

9:10 – 10:10 a.m.
Strategic Enrollment Planning Case Studies

RNL has supported hundreds of institutions in developing strategic enrollment plans and has published three editions of the definitive book on the topic, Strategic Enrollment Planning: A Dynamic Collaboration (which all attendees will receive). RNL’s strategic enrollment planning experts will highlight how partner institutions have achieved record-breaking enrollments, improved student success, generated new revenue, and positioned their institutions for long term growth.

10:20 – 11:20 a.m.
Academic Program Revitalization Case Study

Program review has historically served as a challenging task within academic planning efforts. Learn how RNL integrates external demand market research and an understanding of the institution’s program market share with the strategic planning framework to help our partners optimize their portfolio of academic program offerings.

11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Institutional Planning Case Study

The institutional strategic plan (ISP) serves as the organization’s road map and guide for decision-making and resource allocation. The ISP should be foundational to all the institutional strategic planning efforts. Learn how to collect institutional perception feedback, engage in market research that informs the institutional vision, and conduct a robust SWOT analysis from a variety of focus areas:

• Enrollment and student success
• Academic excellence
• Research and innovation
• Financial sustainability
• Campus infrastructure and technology
• Community engagement and partnership

You will also see how to identify and track key performance indicators, provide clear and transparent communication, and develop strategies that ensure long-term sustainability.

12:30 p.m.
Wrap-up and Adjournment

All forum agenda session topics, dates, and times are subject to change.