Priority four: Ensure institutional sustainability

Priority four

Ensure Institutional Sustainability — Embrace sustainable campus operations that ensure wise stewardship of our resources. 

Objectives

• Adopt agile and lean business practices and systems that ensure efficiency, maintain a focus on solutions, and meet or exceed industry standards. 
• Invest in and expand our operational focus on the efficient use of energy, reduction of waste and consumption, sustainable development, sustainability, and environmental responsibility. 
  
• Strategically invest in and rebalance our portfolio of educational offerings to meet current and future learner, employer and societal needs while remaining accessible and affordable. 
  
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement and informed risk-taking through reinvestment of funding into either new programs that create impact or into ideas that create efficiencies. 
• Implement strategies for new and diversified revenue streams with a focus on enhancing advancement and fundraising activities and identifying mutually beneficial partnerships with other organizations to further the goals of CMU. 

SMART goals

• Foster a university-wide culture of continuous improvement with a focus on:  
  • Creating a system to review policies and processes that result in inefficiency or stymie innovation, and appoint a cross-divisional team to carry it out.  
    • Measure: Number of policies reviewed, changed or deleted and new processes created by August 2025.  
  • University stakeholders expanding the portfolio of new non-traditional educational offerings.  
    • Measure: Initiate tracking and transcription systems to count learners pursuing credentials and the number of offerings successfully launched by April 2025. 
  • Pursuing additional opportunities for partnerships with other organizations to further the goals of CMU.  
    • Measure: Develop the plan to generate and evaluate opportunities by August 2025. 
  • Creating and implementing a comprehensive technology plan to identify and prioritize academic and operational needs.  
    • Measure: Develop the plan, with annual goals, by August 2025.
• Review, clarify, and revise division roles, responsibilities and organizational structure with a focus on removing barriers, improving efficiency and accountability, and enhancing customer service.  
  • Measure: Number of internal processes mapped/reviewed and identified for enhancements by August 2025. 
• Initiate a comprehensive review of programs and strategies targeted towards student retention.  
  • Measure: Establish the criteria to evaluate return on investment, and impact by June 2025. 
• Continue to develop and implement the planning phase strategies for a comprehensive capital campaign. This includes efforts for staffing, technology, university priorities, prospect identification and qualification, case statement development, etc.  
  • Measure Year One: Determine the feasibility of the campaign and next steps by August 2024.
  • Measure Year Two: Finalize and implement campaign strategies while remaining flexible and nimble to integrate the vision and ideas of the new president by June 2025.

2024 Progress

Successes

• Established a policy review governance structure and prioritized policies for cyclical review. 
• Overhauled CMU’s administrative policies page to make policies searchable and easier to find and understand. 
• Adopted a new software platform to improve the process for reserving space on campus for events. 
• Achieved a two percentage-point increase in first-to-second-year retention rates, moving from 72.9% to 74.9% retention. 
• Surpassed fundraising goals and marked CMU’s best-ever year for philanthropic giving by securing more than $29.5 million in contributions. 
• Implemented a new donor engagement solution and designated additional resources to increase advancement team staffing. 

Ongoing efforts

• Continuing to review and update or eliminate policies that do not improve efficiency or bolster innovation.
• Compiling a comprehensive list of non-credit options offered across the university, including those from academic colleges, Innovation and Online, and non-academic units.
• Developing technology plans to support all divisions of the university.
• Collecting organizational structure data from all divisions, including synopses of office responsibilities.
• Conducting a university-wide inventory to capture all retention efforts underway at CMU; developing an assessment tool to determine the return on investment of all efforts.
• Planning and preparing for the next CMU comprehensive campaign.