Identifying Funding Sources to Achieve Your Academic Unit’s Strategic Plan

Last updated March 3, 2023

Identifying Funding Sources to Achieve Your Academic Unit’s Strategic Plan

Last updated March 3, 2023

Develop your unit leaders to think strategically about aligning funding sources with strategic goals.

Overview

Academic deans, center directors, and their leadership teams can spend a considerable amount of time developing a detailed and action-oriented strategic plan for their college or academic unit. Identifying and implementing achievable goals not only requires the appropriate stakeholders, accountability measures, and communication plans, but also a clear understanding of the funding sources available to actualize a strategic vision. Aligning funding sources to strategic goals requires knowing the relationship between funding and strategic planning, your role as a “doer” vs. “guide,” and methods for building that knowledge in others through worksheets and reporting.

Join us for this online training to develop skills in establishing a strategic planning and budget alignment process and supporting the development of your leadership team to achieve their strategic goals by allocating funding. This process will provide leaders with a tactical approach to guide strategic thinking and budget alignment.

Who should attend?

This training is designed to help academic deans focus on strengthening budget alignment and decision-making related to the execution of a college or unit-level strategic plan. Members of your leadership team, including associate and assistant deans or center directors, may also find benefit in doing this training with you. Development officers who work in partnership with academic leaders are also encouraged to attend to increase understanding of how fundraising efforts can be an integral part of the budgeting process.

Agenda

May 31, 2023

2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Eastern

This hour virtual session will feature discussions around the following topics:

The Role of an Academic Leader in Building a Culture of Alignment

Higher education is facing challenges to its financial models as enrollments decline and other revenue sources are stretched to address the impact of COVID and shifting demographics. If academic cultures are to evolve in response to the shifting higher education landscape, academic leaders must be equipped to develop their leadership team’s ability to make strategic budgetary decisions that align with their institution’s future goals. You will learn how to:

  • Articulate the relationship between funding and strategy
  • Differentiate between when this process requires “doing” and “guiding”
  • Identify the benefits of alignment


Aligning Strategic Goals with Budget for Long-Term Impact

To assist you in implementing this knowledge, you will review a worksheet template that academic deans, center directors, and their leadership teams can use to plan, document, and assess the use of funding to achieve strategic goals. You will also have the opportunity to practice how you might utilize the worksheet yourself.