Democratizing Your Campaigning Party: Tacking Strategic Planning as a Team

Short Session Description.

Faced with another strategic planning cycle, W&L University Library harnessed this opportunity to glean staff feedback on institutional priorities, augment decision making transparency, and foster interdepartmental team building—i.e., we democratized our campaigning party.

With the support of library administration, a small group of library faculty organized anonymized survey response data, garnered from library faculty and collected by an outside facilitator, concerning potential strategic planning initiatives. This group analyzed qualitative data using grounded theory and shared their work with library faculty and staff, along with an appeal for individual and departmental feedback. This highly iterative process transformed a traditionally centralized administrative task into one that values individual voices and often competing priorities.

Session Format & Style. 

Lightning Talk

Takeaways.

*By the end of this talk, attendees will be able to outline strategies for democratizing library strategic planning and apply those strategies to unique institutional situations.

*Attendees will be given a handout that outlines the iterative strategic planning process taken at Washington and University Library and a Zotero bibliography that documents the literature concerning the democratization of strategic planning across fields.

Organization.

Pre-exhibiting duo:

• Emily Cook, Research and Outreach Librarian, Washington & Lee University
• Paula S. Kiser, Digital Scholarship Librarian, Washington & Lee University

Contact Information.

Emily Cook, cooke@wlu.edu