by Tim Amyx, Vice President, AACRAO
In an earlier edition of Connect, members of the AACRAO Board of Directors shared some of their goals for this upcoming year: their AACRAO New Year’s resolutions. Well, what about five-year resolutions? Do those count too? I hope so.
Over the past year-and-a-half, the AACRAO Board of Directors has been actively engaged in the strategic planning process for the association. The process began with a review of our guiding documents and the current strategic framework. The result of that review in September 2019 was the clarification of the association’s values and an awareness that the time had come to take a closer look at the remaining documents in addition to creating a new strategic plan.
Timing
The timing of the new plan was to coincide with the year 2020, allowing for a clean five-year cycle. Little did we know that 2020 had different plans for everyone. Regardless of the challenges presented by a global pandemic, the board felt strongly that the process should continue as scheduled.
Process
With the belief that the structure we teach to create a SEM plan via AACRAO Consulting should also work for the association’s strategic plan, the board engaged AACRAO Consulting to shepherd us through the initial stages of the process.
Consultants helped the board better understand the framework of goals, strategies, and tactics that would ultimately make up the final plan. After that, the next step was to do a community scan. Over the summer of 2020, via Zoom, scans were conducted with the board, the membership, and AACRAO staff. Information about associations similar to AACRAO was also taken into account.
Results
Results from the community scans were shared with the board in September 2020, and a first draft of the goals was developed during a day-long workshop, along with draft revisions to the vision and mission. It is often a challenge to look at things from the level of a goal when in our professions we spend much of our time focused on strategies and deploying supporting tactics. From there, the consultants handed the work off to the board’s strategic planning committee. After additional refinement, a final draft was presented to the board during the October 2020 meeting for approval to solicit member feedback.
We appreciate all of you who took the time to read, comment, email, call, and participate in webinars. All of the information you provided was taken into consideration and almost entirely incorporated into the final language proposed by the strategic planning committee to the board for approval in December 2020. What you see here is the approved vision, mission, and goals for the 2021-2026 AACRAO Strategic Plan.
Next Steps
We’re now ready for the next step. So what is that exactly? AACRAO staff has already started crafting the accompanying short and long term strategies and tactics for the association. You told us where you think we should go, and the board built that into the goals.
Join us for a
Coffee Break on Feb 11 at 3pm ET to discuss the new goals and share your thoughts with the staff and board members on next steps--the development of strategies and tactics.