Campus planning: Guide to involving students, staff, and other stakeholders

Whether you're working in a university planning department or consulting for a campus design project, you will face challenges in the planning process – there are so many different stakeholders, goals, and needs to balance.

Every student, employee, alumnus, visitor, and neighbor has ideas to improve the physical campus. The process needs to be inclusive, integrated, and interactive.

Society for College and University Planning 

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But these are challenges you can face. You can learn what the campus community needs and where they need it. You can visualize and balance the needs of students, employees, and other community members. You can find direction for an inclusive, accessible, and safe campus. You can show decision-makers a well-grounded planning process. 

This is the potential of community engagement. Let's unpack what that means and how planners and designers can unlock that potential.

Why engage the community?

In campus planning, community engagement is the process of involving students, employees, and other community members in decision-making about the physical campus. Community engagement and stakeholder engagement work hand-in-hand. Broad, inclusive engagement complements focused tasks between planners and key campus stakeholders. 

The campus can be a college or university campus, as well as a research or medical campus. And while campus planning usually brings to mind long-term master plans, community engagement will play a valuable role in many kinds of campus plans and projects, such as:

• Campus master plans
• Campus land use plans
• Landscape architecture plans
• Campus design guidelines
• Green infrastructure plans
• Campus strategies
• Facility management plans

In all kinds of campus planning, community engagement can help with project buy-in, generate valuable ideas, and empower the community.

Guide to involving students and the community

Since 2011, we've worked closely with planners, architects, and landscape architects who use our Maptionnaire Community Engagement Platform in their campus planning work. This guide brings together the campus-specific insights we've collected over the years and the tried-and-true principles from our Guide to Citizen Engagement in a Master Planning Process. 

This step-by-step community engagement guide will help prepare you to assess campus needs, set inclusive project goals, get planning feedback, and finalize your campus plan. Before diving in, here's a few tips to get started: 

• Scheduling: Adapt the steps from this guide to fit your project timeline, but involve the community as early as possible and continue to interact throughout the project's different phases. 
• Methods: This guide offers several ideas for how to involve the community. Since each method has strengths and weaknesses, pick a few complementary methods, including at least one digital approach. → Learn more about the benefits of online community engagement and how to combine digital and in-person methods.
• Communication: Work closely – and early – with the school's communications or marketing team. Using the campus' best communication channels will make a big difference in your outreach. ‍
• Audience: In addition to the community members and stakeholders listed in the guide, be mindful of vulnerable or difficult-to-reach groups in and around campus, who may need special outreach.

Step 1: Assessing campus needs

A needs assessment identifies the campus' perceived problems, service gaps, and development priorities, informing the overall direction for a campus plan. When planning or designing a physical campus, community mapping methods will visualize those needs on a map or plan. Map-based engagement is also fun for participants and produces useful data for planners. 

Inclusive results that represent the diverse community are a strong foundation for campus planning, so make it easy for people to participate. Here are three tips for increasing the volume and diversity of respondents:

1. Cater to the time and location needs of students and other community members. Between long commutes, family obligations, and packed schedules, few will go out of their way for a campus planning activity. It's up to you to find them. 

• Go where they physically are: student events, alumni gatherings, department meetings, dining halls, classrooms, etc.
• Go where they digitally are. Promote digital and in-person engagement activities in the community's most popular social media channels, forums, and newsletters.‍
• Either way, give options for quick, low-threshold engagement, like a quick chat at a pop-up booth or a fun map-based questionnaire, like a maptionnaire (What's that? Come see for yourself!)

2. Make it accessible. An accessible community engagement platform can overcome many typical in-person engagement barriers, such as language, mobility constraints, or hearing or vision impairment. Accessibility also means word choice and images should be straightforward and familiar. Look for a platform that:

• works smoothly across multiple languages 
• is screen-reader friendly
• is both desktop- and mobile-friendly
• offers multiple formats of media (videos, subtitles, text, maps, plans, and images)
• enables using familiar campus maps, logos, and other branding

3. Scale it up. Workshops are invaluable, but they just don't scale. Complement your in-person engagement with a digital engagement option so you can reach thousands. Then communicate it like crazy so you do reach thousands. 

→ Check out this campus planning case study that engaged 3700 students, alumni, staff, and faculty. In the Citizen-Centric Approach for Master Planning webinar, Ryan Mottau (Director of Digital Engagement, MIG) shares insights from the Point Loma Nazarene University Campus Plan.

Step 2: Setting inclusive project goals

Set goals in an interactive and collaborative setting. Bring together planners, stakeholders, and decision-makers to review the needs assessment results and agree on a direction for the campus plan. "Direction" can be a vision, goals, a map of priority areas, or whatever else you need to start planning.  

Pay attention here to the aggregate results of community engagement as well as the breakdown of results (e.g. based on demographic questions from the survey). Staff, students, and alumni will invariably have different feelings – and strong feelings! – about their campus. Don't overlook this. An analysis showing the priorities of different groups will bring clarity and accountability into the goal-setting process. 

Step 3: Getting planning feedback

Once you have some feasible options for the plan, it's time to check back with the broader community. Earlier in the project, the campus community put effort into providing input – they will want to see how their input was used. Be transparent about the design process and explain it using plain language and non-technical images. 

At this point, the feedback you ask depends on the project. For example:

• General feedback ("Which places do you like/dislike in the proposed campus plan?")
• Preferences ("Do you prefer option A or B? Why?")
• Priorities ("Of these 10 campus development projects, which 3 would you most like to see?")
• Budget priorities ("Of these 10 campus development projects, how would you allocate $1 million?)

→ Learn more about designing community engagement survey questions and best practices for survey design

Step 4: Finalizing the plan

Campus decision-makers can more easily reach a consensus when the campus plan clearly reflects the community's wishes. So, get together with key stakeholders and decision-makers to review the results and impacts of your engagement work, such as:

• Volume: Share the number of respondents
• Diversity: Showcase how representative and diverse the respondent pool was
• Differences: Highlight the different needs of different campus users 
• Impact: Don't just say it. Show how community engagement informed each step of the planning process.

If you've already compiled responses in a map-based or GIS-based format throughout the planning process, showcasing community impact will be much easier. For example, in the Point Loma Nazarene University Campus Plan, planners used maps of questionnaire results to inform their planning process.

Summary

After reading this step-by-step guide, you should be well-equipped with tips and insights to involve students and other community members in your campus planning process. Each unique campus and project will shape your community engagement approach, but you can start with these four steps:

• Assess the campus' needs by reaching out to as much of the diverse community as possible
• Set inclusive goals with stakeholders that fulfill the different needs of students, employees, alumni, and others
• Get broad feedback on campus planning concepts to check if you're addressing the community's needs
• Finalize the plan with decision-makers by showcasing how an inclusive community engagement process influenced the plan