At Montana State, Springboard built the planning process around broad stakeholder engagement. We interviewed and facilitated public forums with more than 150 stakeholders representing 12 groups, including faculty, staff, students, alumni, community leaders, and governance leaders. We synthesized those perspectives and then facilitated six planning committee sessions over eight months to translate that input into institutional direction. Town halls brought the emerging strategy back to the campus community to strengthen understanding, participation, and support.

At the University of Montana, we began in a different place. Rather than creating another plan, Springboard worked with the new Institutional Effectiveness Office to connect work already underway. We reviewed existing planning materials, interviewed key stakeholders, and facilitated a series of working sessions with representatives of institutional effectiveness, the President's Office, budgeting, and other key areas.

The University of Montana work focused on developing a strategic, planning, and accountability structure that connected institutional priorities with an annual planning cycle. The work addressed how elements of the strategy connected, who owned different parts of the process, how planning and budgeting would work together, how accountability would be established, and how the approach would be communicated and adopted across campus.

In both engagements, Springboard's role was not to arrive with a predetermined higher education framework. We helped each institution build on the work already underway, engage the right voices, challenge assumptions, make complex issues more manageable, and create an approach suited to its particular environment.