Griffin School Strategic Planning | Use Case

The Challenge

A first-year superintendent at Griffin School District faced the daunting task of developing a comprehensive strategic plan while still getting to know the community. Traditional strategic planning meant hiring expensive outside facilitators, spending months collecting and synthesizing data, and hoping the final plan actually reflected stakeholder priorities. The district needed a way to hear from everyone, including the school board, students, staff, parents, the local tribe, and the broader community, without the heavy lifting that typically strains new leadership.

The Approach

• The Ask: Griffin surveyed the entire community using multiple participation channels. Stakeholders could respond by text message, automated phone call, an AI-powered chat agent, or traditional online survey. The survey remained open for two weeks, ensuring broad access and participation across all groups.
• The Add: To deepen community engagement, Griffin held a community café. Student Story seamlessly integrated the café feedback with survey data, creating a more informed plan while eliminating the complex manual work.
• The Analysis: Instead of spending months synthesizing data, the planning team had immediate access to the strategic plan framework, executive report, and the full power of the strategic dashboard. The team could disaggregate data to any grade, demographic, or stakeholder group, deeply understanding the voice of their community. They could ask complicated strategic planning questions and receive answers linked directly to their voice data and reports.
• The Action: The planning team received evidence-based goals generated by the platform and immediately got to work on solutions. The school board, having participated themselves, could see how their vision related to other stakeholder groups and trusted the process, knowing the strategic plan was anchored to authentic stakeholder input.

Tools Used

• Strategic Planning Platform (For real-time analysis, data visualization, and deep exploration of stakeholder voice)
• Student Story Support: Guidance from a PhD qualitative researcher as a thought partner, as well as personalized support from a dedicated point of contact throughout your process.

The Outcome

From Months to Weeks. When the survey closed, the superintendent had a complete strategic plan framework in hand, built directly from community voice. The intuitive process eliminated the need for outside facilitators, protecting the district's budget while maintaining full control over the timeline.

The school board gained confidence in the plan because they could see exactly how stakeholder input shaped every priority. The planning team spent their time designing solutions rather than drowning in data synthesis. Griffin School District now has a strategic plan that authentically represents the voice of their community, from students to tribal partners to parents, all achieved without the traditional barriers of time, cost, and complexity.

How to Replicate This Success

Follow these steps to streamline strategic planning in your district.

• Expand Your Reach: Use multiple participation channels with multilingual support to ensure every stakeholder group can respond in their preferred format. Conversational text, automated phone system, AI agent, and online surveys remove barriers to participation.
• Craft the Right Questions: Student Story allows you to collaborate directly with a PhD-trained qualitative researcher to craft questions that capture what matters most to your community. You also get access to our specialized tool to help you brainstorm and refine questions that elicit meaningful, high-quality responses.
• Set a Clear Timeline: Keep your survey open long enough for broad participation, then move directly into learning and discovery with immediate access to your strategic dashboard. You get full control of your timeline with no outside schedule conflicts or interference.
• Build School Board Buy-In: Include your school board as participants. When they see how their voices are truly heard and how their perspectives relate to other stakeholder groups, they trust the process and champion the final plan.
• Multiple Sources, Zero Hassle: Griffin hosted a community café to expand engagement and gather more perspectives. Student Story combined the café feedback with the survey data, creating a more informed strategic plan framework. More data means better insights, and Student Story excels at integrating multiple complex sources, ensuring your strategic plan reflects the full breadth of community input.
• Deep Exploration Simplified: An intuitive dashboard allows you to drill down to the smallest level of detail, with unlimited flexibility to create custom reports on any topic or category and to ask questions that return insights directly linked to your data, all within an easy interface that anyone can use yet is powerful enough for data professionals.
• Start with Framework in Hand: Student Story provides an evidence-based strategic plan framework with goals and recommended priorities based on the voice of your community. Your team can skip the burden of synthesizing data and immediately focus on refining goals and designing solutions.
• Finish Strong: Once your pillars are in place, Student Story blends your goals and refinements with community feedback once again, producing an updated framework for the final stage. From here, your team adds the finishing touches that reflect your district's unique priorities, keeping community input at the heart of your strategic planning from start to finish.