Not every school can give ten months to a planning process. A principal is already doing three jobs. A board turns over in the spring. Enrollment decisions cannot wait another academic year.
The Abbreviated Strategic Growth Plan is ISPD’s six-month process for exactly that situation. It is the same methodology as our full Strategic Growth Plan — the same Assessment, the same Planning Area Teams, the same five-year plan at the end — run on a compressed schedule.
It asks less of your calendar. It does not ask less of your community.
months, start to finished plan
Planning Area Team workshops
year plan, same as the full process
Catholic school plans behind the method
When six months is the right call
When it isn’t
Your community is divided. Where there is real disagreement about direction, the shortened process does not give you enough room to work through it. Take the ten-month plan.
You need to reach people you have never reached. Broad new engagement is what the longer versions are built for.
You are choosing it to save money. The three versions are priced within a narrow band of each other. A compressed timeline concentrates the work rather than reducing it — six months is a decision about your calendar, not your budget.
A parish is planning alongside you, or the work spans a diocese. Those are different processes.
How the six-month plan differs from the full process
We would rather you know exactly what changes than discover it in month four.
Exactly the same
What changes
Three Planning Area Team workshops instead of four. Teams move from SWOT to Challenges to solutions on a tighter arc, with more work happening between sessions.
No school-wide Convocation. This is the real trade. In the ten- and eight-month versions, roughly two hundred people — about sixty percent of them new to the school — spend an evening solving your Challenges. The six-month plan does not include that evening.
Priorities are set by two barometers rather than five. Three of the five measures come from the Convocation. Without it, prioritization rests on the Planning Area Teams’ own rankings and the Steering Committee’s multi-vote.
A tighter meeting cadence. Committees meet more often, and less time sits between sessions for reflection.
Success Story — Greater New Orleans
St. Matthew the Apostle
St. Matthew came to ISPD in the fall of 2021 with no campaign in view. What it wanted was a plan.
The process ran the way an abbreviated plan runs — an Assessment, an Executive Committee and Core Team, the Ultimate Question Survey answered by hundreds of parish and school families, planning workshops, and a Convocation. Nine Challenges emerged and were ranked against five barometers. The Collaborative Plan of Action was delivered in March 2023.
Then the plan did what a plan is supposed to do. Its second-ranked Challenge set out a sequence — a site master plan, listening sessions, surveys, a demographic study, and a Financial Feasibility Study. St. Matthew followed it in order.
The resulting campaign closed above goal: $3,428,000 in pledges from 491 donors against a $3.2 million target, with 42% of registered parishioners taking part.
A shorter plan is still a plan that works. Read more ISPD success stories.
Questions school leaders ask us
No — it is a shorter engagement, not a smaller document. You receive the same five-year plan: mission and vision, Planning Areas with purpose statements, Challenges and SMART solutions, prioritized recommendations, implementation charts, and budget projections.
What you give up is reach. The ten- and eight-month versions bring roughly two hundred people into a Convocation, most of them new to your school. The six-month version does not. If your goal is a sound plan, six months delivers it. If your goal is also to widen your community, take the longer road.
Not meaningfully. Our three timelines are priced within a narrow band of one another, and the six-month version carries the highest monthly fee of the three — a compressed schedule concentrates the work rather than reducing it.
Choose six months because of your calendar, your board cycle, or your community’s capacity. Do not choose it to save money; that is not what it does.
In most cases, yes, and schools sometimes do. Many communities also return to ISPD for a full Strategic Growth Plan when the next five-year horizon comes around — by then the school knows the process, and the second engagement goes deeper because the first one built the habit.
The eight-month plan is the complete process, simply accelerated — all four workshops, the full Convocation, with committees meeting roughly twice a month instead of once. Nothing is removed.
The six-month plan removes one workshop and the Convocation. If your constraint is the calendar but your community is ready to show up, eight months is usually the better trade. See the full Strategic Growth Plan for all three timelines side by side.
Let’s Make Things Happen!
Tell us your deadline and we will tell you honestly which timeline fits.
Contact us today to learn more.
