Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) in Vancouver, British Columbia, offers a unique blend of hands-on training, experiential learning, and traditional academics.

With 20,000 students and 1,400+ employees across four campuses, engaging everyone at Kwantlen and getting feedback is no easy task. However, that was the challenge KPU President Dr. Alan Davis and his team took on when they set out to create a new strategic plan for the next five years.

“We serve every culture you can imagine and have a very complicated political system at every level,” explains Dr. Davis. “Kwantlen is a complicated place, at the best of times, to get a message out to—and more importantly, to get feedback from.”

In the past, KPU used conventional methods like standard surveys and focus groups to engage with people about strategic planning. This time, they wanted to take a different approach and partnered with ThoughtExchange to help make it happen.

“We wanted to focus our time and energy on getting the right goals and the right strategies, and really understand what was going on in the trenches,” Dr. Davis explains. “We were looking for a technological solution that would be very easy to use and open to everybody, including students, and that people would be drawn to.

The KPU team used ThoughtExchange to set up an engagement that would meet their goals, and launched it to the entire organization. Everyone could confidentially share and rate others’ feedback at any time and from any device.

“It only took a few seconds to figure out how to click on things, maneuver, and drill down,” Dr. Davis adds. “And people participated with enthusiasm. They told us they were looking forward to the next round.”

Their initial strategic planning process five years earlier employed a task force of 25 people that engaged 700 people over two months. With ThoughtExchange, KPU employed a team of four people and engaged more than 1,300 people in just a few weeks.

“The quality of engagement was also clearly at a higher level,” notes Dr. Davis. “People were making thoughtful comments and then adjudicating each other’s comments in a way that gave us a rich database of information we can use from now on. The data can be sliced and diced in all sorts of ways.”

For Dr. Davis, the most important result from the exchange was better insight into the day-to-day experience of students at KPU.

“We learned very actionable, important things and got insight into what it’s like to be a student here,” Dr. Davis says, adding that they put student experience at the top of their plan as a result. “We’re confident we hit the nail on the head and, quite frankly, we wouldn’t have got to the student experience issue if it hadn’t been for ThoughtExchange.”

He adds that ThoughtExchange took what is usually a complicated process and turned it into a fun exercise that led to a better strategic plan.

“ThoughtExchange was really valuable to us. It saved so much time. It increased the level of engagement,” Dr. Davis explains. “It increased the excitement about what some people would consider a huge task: developing a strategic plan for such a large institution. And it gave us results that are very actionable and clear.”