“With the limited resources that we have, these tools have really helped us think about what will have the most positive impact on student outcomes.”
“This project helped us take an award-winning initiative to the next level and helped us to better understand how to allocate funding to serve all of our students while closing equity gaps so they can all thrive.”
“The use of the NACUBO Budget Builder Toolkit helped us to discover and address barriers beyond our initial expectations. Yes, requests were funded. But other ideas that were put forward that did not receive innovation funds were still able to happen because of interdisciplinary conversations that occurred through this process. I could call them secondary outcomes, but they had an equally significant impact.”
“The key to addressing budget challenges and preparing people for change across the institution is to help people understand more about planning, budgeting, and finance activities. People need to understand and have confidence in budget office processes and communications, and see that we are not hiding anything, so my team and I needed to figure out what people knew, and where we had to do a better job at sharing information.”
“This resource and our improvement project helped us realize what is possible when we work across departments toward the same goal. We plan to use this tool to determine new initiatives and evaluate the performance of existing ones.”
“This work is important so that we can better support our guided pathways and transfer priorities, equity work, and strategic goals for the college. We need to ensure that we have the financial means and resource allocation process to support the ideas that will move the dial on equity and equitable student outcomes.”
“The more specific you can be about the costs and the benefits of an initiative, and the more you can breakdown the details and show the benefits of a program, the more likely you are to make better decisions about what to fund, and how to prioritize funding.”
“We are privileged to work at an institution where people are interested in learning and discovering what we are doing, having conversations, and considering how we can be even better at what we are doing on behalf of students. The NACUBO tools have supported our conversations and our work in many ways.”
“The Funding Allocation Matrix has enabled us as an institution to focus on the student first during the budget and strategic funding allocation process. Using the tool, we can set priorities to invest in the resources that our historically and currently marginalized students need for better outcomes.”
“As the CBO, I see all these pieces that come together, but I also see how those pieces aren't always put to best use because of changes in funding, evolving workforce development needs, and the challenges we have because we are so small. Our students have so many barriers to accessing our programs. Our job is to serve the people of the state of Montana.”
“I have seen people change their thinking about the role of the CBO as we've had more conversations about what they need to help them make decisions. They no longer just see my role as 'bean counter'. Instead, they understand that, working together, we can make decisions more transparently and collaboratively.”
“One of our strategic goals is to be able to forecast and prepare for future learners, and to holistically support their educational goals. And when we identified targets for the goal, we realized that we really need to have data governance in place to be able to assess that.”
“There was major interest from finance and budget colleagues, and others within NMSU strategic goal teams, to utilize these questions to spark mindset shifts for working groups and departments. The tool will be disseminated to additional teams at NMSU for consideration.”
“We had a lot of anecdotal stories about this student or that student. But there wasn't a lot of data that we had that would point us in the direction of why students weren't retaining. Is it a financial issue? Is it a preparedness issue?”
“We're required to have participatory governance which means that our budgeting process is very involved and very inclusive. This project helped us identify a need for defining common budgeting terms as well as tools to assist those that aren't necessarily budget professionals.”
“With NACUBO's support, RU-N transformed the budget process into one that places the needs of our students at the forefront of our priorities and aligns our budget requests with a commitment to equitable outcomes for all.”
“We recognized we needed to be more transparent about the dollars available to be allocated, and to honor people's time by providing them with better guidance in advance of, and throughout the budget development process.”
“There are opportunities that exist when there are challenges that must be addressed. There was a need to look at the needs and expectations of the students and the labor market and re-envision the institution collaboratively with academic leadership. The NACUBO tools served as catalysts for so much of our work here.”
“We plan to continue using the Budget Process Assessment during each budget cycle to gain insight on how the budget process is working, how communication is working and how well we are able to tie the budget to our student success strategic goals.”
“There are two mindsets around grants. One is that any money is good money. The other acknowledges that grant opportunities and activities need to align with the organization's goals and the outcomes we're trying to achieve. We are trying to operate with the second mindset.”
“The assessment ignited an awareness that piqued stakeholders' interest and motivated them to leverage data insights.”
“The IPEDS dashboards provide Tarleton with standardized data that enables our leadership to visually compare Tarleton to our peers and aspirants. Tarleton is rapidly growing. Therefore, it is very helpful to compare staffing and expense data for different enrollment levels.”
“We had data for days. That data had been cleaned up and validated. What we were missing was a way to visualize that data that could be shared with the hard-working people at Wiley who are on the front lines of serving our students.”
