Developing a strategic plan dashboard at Eastern Mennonite University

Sara Halteman

Director of Institutional Research & Effectiveness, Eastern Mennonite University

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of EAB.

My Rising Higher Education Leaders Fellowship capstone project was to develop a strategic plan dashboard for my university. Our university recently adopted a new strategic plan, and university leaders are looking for ways to track our progress on this plan. As a new director of institutional research and effectiveness, I oversee assessment efforts and data reporting on campus. Developing a dashboard for our plan was a natural fit for my position and a great way for me to practice skills that are newer to me. My goal was to have a finalized dashboard developed to share with stakeholders and to develop a data review cycle proposal for when and how to use the data presented in the dashboard.

My intended approach was to review strategic plan development resources, resources on visualization best practices, and samples from other institutions. My focus was on the deliverable, and making something accessible, accurate, and easy to understand. The actual work on this project ended up being different than I expected. While we had adopted the strategic plan and draft outcomes, there was work that needed to be done to revise these outcomes so they would be measurable, and to define the metrics that we would use. My work on this project ended up being much more relational, engaging with leaders to articulate what we would measure and the data collection gaps that needed to be addressed in order for us to measure some of our outcomes.

While I had hoped to have a finalized version of a chart-rich dashboard by the end of the capstone project, the current result is a draft dashboard in table form of primary and secondary measures. This has been shared with our strategic plan leaders for their review and feedback.

I am currently working on a data collection plan to clearly define the metrics that were chosen by the strategic plan leaders, including data gaps that still remain. Early in the coming semester we will meet together with all strategic plan leaders to review the draft dashboard, data collection plan, and make final revisions. I will then use this feedback to finalize the dashboard for use by the Board of Trustees and Executive Leadership Team. The dashboard will include historical data when available and an opportunity to see data annually throughout the life of the strategic plan, building on prior years so there is a record of the progress we’ve made.

The resources that were most useful to me were my meetings with EAB research expert David Attis, a board-level dashboard collection shared from EAB, and an EAB article on impactful financial dashboards. David helped me articulate the scope of my work and provided valuable feedback on the dashboard draft. The collection of dashboards provided a wide variety of examples for me to consider as I compared our metrics to those being shared. And the Impactful Financial Dashboards report helped identify several ways of presenting metrics—for example, metrics that are best presented in chart form with historical data.

I appreciated the opportunity to work on this dashboard project in this setting. The process looked different than I anticipated, and having resources and support to turn to was valuable. While I didn’t get as far along in the project as I anticipated, the learning experience was valuable, and I have a strong draft to build on in order to provide valuable strategic plan progress information to our university’s leaders.