Institutional Optimization

How Can You Optimize Your Institution to ensure financial viability?

As a trusted higher education partner on strategy projects, we have found more than a strategic plan or academic review, a comprehensive 360-degree assessment of the university is critical to success. Together with your leadership, faculty, staff, and extended community, we accomplish meaningful goals and ensure your campus has what it needs to continue the good work.

PRioritizing Impact & Maximizing SUccess

Your institution is unique with needs and priorities that shift and change. We often build roadmaps for these key institutional priorities and we can tailor your project map to include specialty areas unique to your campus.

Enrollment goals
Organizational structure
Aligning finances and resource allocations to meet net revenue goals
Programs Review: can include Academic Programs Review, Co-curricular Programs Review, Comprehensive Program Review
Growth and optimization opportunities
Brand and value proposition

To optimize your institutional priorities we:

Identify

the most impactful priorities for growth & sustainability

Examine

impact on your institutional health & future

Design

roadmaps for success, inclusive of your unique institutional priorities

Equip

campus-based teams to successfully execute the milestones from the roadmaps

Institutional Optimization focuses the entire institution on our collective priorities in a series of projects that lock arms to create solutions we would never have uncovered without Credo’s help. We are moving past the status quo by working together on collective solutions. It should come as no surprise that we actually are better together, but it’s thrilling to see that we are.   
Dondi E. Costin, Ph.D. President at Charleston Southern University

How Do We Get There?

Credo is a strategy partner and facilitator throughout our work together, supporting and engaging appropriate campus bodies and constituents to ensure cultural buy-in and accountable progress through campus engagement and consistent leadership touch points.

Outcomes

Realignment of institutional priorities
Innovative mapping for sustainable change management
Talent development and training for supporting team members
Prioritized, ambitious, achievable milestones for continued institutional development and sustainability
Institutional growth and viability

A Deeper Dive Into Strategy & Priorities

We’re eager and equipped to address the challenges with these common institutional priorities and work together to create actionable and realistic roadmaps. With students at the center, Credo leads with "no margin, no mission," and partners with you to ensure the financial health of your organization. Open each review area to decide which priorities might be most important at your institution.

Enrollment
The enrollment assessment will evaluate the overall health of your admissions function through quantitative data analysis and qualitative interviews designed to identify areas of particular strength on which to build and discover the most significant opportunities for growth and improvement. Together we can identify early opportunities, and you will receive a longer term roadmap based around these possible areas of exploration:
- Campus Guest Experience
- Enrollment Systems and Processes
- Roles and Responsibilities
- Data-Driven Decision Making, Mobilizing the Campus
- Recruitment Marketing
- Admission and Recruitment Strategies
Marginal Revenue Analysis

Credo will conduct a Marginal Revenue Analysis (MRA) with our partners from CFO Colleague, designed to review financial implications from an academic program perspective, or the "business of running academics."

The MRA is intended to provide the leadership team with information to help make decisions about the appropriate allocation, effective use, and productive investment of your institution's resources, and to identify the most promising academic growth opportunities with customized data for specific markets and segments in those markets.

Find out more about CFO Colleague in the Partnership Focus below.
Market Analyzer Tool

We partner with UQ Solutions to integrate a Market Analyzer tool to identify potential new programs, predict and estimate program size and growth, analyze job market and student outcome data, and identify market leaders. We provide highly specific analyses of growth opportunities, and current programs, with dashboards, tables and reports that are quick to deploy and easy to use. We support the data tools with training, interpretation, and ongoing support.

Find out more about UQ Solutions in the Partnership Focus below.
Organizational Structure & Efficiency

The organizational structure assessment will be conducted via a two-part information request requiring both qualitative and quantitative inputs. Through a series of roughly a dozen questions, we ask you to share narrative-form responses that inform our understanding of the effectiveness of organizational structure, how schools and departments are managed, roles and responsibilities, levels of relationship and collaboration, alignment with institutional goals, and current realities of institution-wide functions and investments such as benefit features and retirement programs.
Program Review
A Program Review can include:
- Academic Programs Review
- Co-curricular Programs Review
- Comprehensive Program Review
The program review can utilize any existing program marginal revenue data you have. If you do not have this information, the Credo team can provide a marginal revenue analysis to consider marginal contributions of existing programs against industry benchmarks and explore areas for the greatest programmatic growth, development, and sunsetting.
Space & Place

Credo’s in-house campus master planning experts will review any recent classroom & space utilization data for classrooms and learning-ancillary spaces such as academic building spaces beyond classrooms, student and academic support spaces, recreation/wellness areas and common areas in residence halls.

The Credo team will visit campus to identify greatest areas of need and impact across your built environment and create integrated, prioritized recommendations based on findings of the physical environment.

Credo Team

Our team is our greatest resource. Each client is connected intentionally with thoughtful professionals who utilize their combined experience in leadership, strategy, change management, and client engagement to deliver the highest level of integrity and service. Learn more about our dedicated team here.

Christina Logan, Ed.D.

Associate Consultant for Leadership Strategies

David Cannon

Affiliate Consultant

Jan Haas

Affiliate Consultant

Michael Schuchert

Affiliate Consultant

Mike Donnelly

Project Manager for Leadership Strategies

Myriah Davis, Ph.D.

Senior Consultant and Operations Executive, Leadership Strategies

Seth Houston, DMA, MBA

Affiliate Consultant

Partnership Focus

CFO Colleague

CFO Colleague is a financial and operational advisory firm specializing in higher education. After years of working on the financial front lines of private colleges across the country, we’ve amassed a collection of best practices, smart metrics and time-tested forecasting tools to help you get your financial house in order.

Visit CFO Colleague ->

UQ Solutions

UQ Solutions provides data and strategy tools to help colleges and universities align the value they offer with the opportunities that today’s students, and tomorrow’s, desire and need. This makes college a better value for students, and a better business for colleges and universities.