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A university mission statement is a concise public-facing proclamation of the institution’s purpose and what it wishes to achieve, the community it serves, and how it fulfills its educational purposes. The mission statement is the foundation of a strategic plan.
A university vision statement is an inspirational, public-facing statement about the institution’s goals and aspirations for the future. It helps to unify a campus by articulating a shared purpose and guides university decision-making. The vision statement is essential to a strategic plan.
A university’s core values express what is important to the work that it does and conveys how institutional actors will conduct themselves in their work on behalf of the institution.
Priorities are broad areas of focus in a strategic plan, like cultivate student success or advance scholarship, creativity and innovation.
Goals and objectives are sometimes used interchangeably and sometimes used separately to distinguish the target reached from the ways in which the institution will reach that target.
Goals are a “specific achievement, a target reached and ‘checked off'” (Hinton, 2022, p. 9) whereas objectives “[help] set a course by giving a general direction” (Hinton, 2022, p.9).
Strategies are plans for achieving a goals or objective. Tactics are specific actions taken to enact a strategy.
The strategic plan is a public-facing document where priority areas, goals and objectives are articulated. The implementation plan is an internal-facing dynamic document with the goal of detailing how goals and objectives will be actualized through strategies and tactics. The implementation plan also includes the resources (people, time, space, technology, and funding) necessary to execute those strategies and tactics, and a timetable for doing so.
Key performance indicators (KIPs) are performance measures. KPIs are developed to measure progress on goals. They can be quantitative or qualitative in nature and complementary of each other. KPIs are used to gauge how well we are doing or if there is room for improvement with respect to our goals whether they are strategic or operational in nature.
Environmental scans are used in planning processes to understand how the broader environment is (or may) impact an organization (current and in the future) by examining social (demographics), technological, environmental, economic and political factors.
Source: Hinton, Karen E. (2022). A Practical Guide to Strategic Planning in Higher Education, Second Edition. Society for College and University Planning (SCUP).