November 12, 2024 – Soaring to Thanksgiving
November 12, 2024
Dear Colleagues,
As the fall semester races to Thanksgiving, I am continually grateful for our community. Our students, faculty, staff, alumni, and the communities we serve—our people—continue to support and propel Georgia Southern toward our stated goals.
To that end, we are progressing in the development of our new institutional strategic plan. Guided by our vision of “People. Purpose. Action. Growing Ourselves to Grow Others,” we have completed campus-wide listening sessions that engaged faculty, staff, and students across all campuses. These listening sessions and focus groups explored how we might “Soar Beyond” through our focus on people and our purpose of transforming lives and communities. The Strategic Planning Steering Committee is synthesizing these valuable insights to develop a feedback survey for the broader campus community. We anticipate administering the feedback survey in early spring to ensure we are on the right path, with the goal of finalizing the strategic plan by mid-spring.
Having launched our new brand refresh, “Soar Beyond,” the next essential step is the institutional website redesign. University Communications and Marketing (UCM) is currently migrating nearly 1,200 webpages to a new hosting platform as part of Phase I of the redesign, focusing on academic degree programs, colleges’ sites, admissions, and financial aid—key areas related to student recruitment and enrollment. These top-level and many secondary pages have been completely redesigned with student-focused content, including impactful feature stories, dynamic photography and video, and animated templates for a more engaging and streamlined user experience. The launch is scheduled for Dec 6, 2024. Phase I will be followed by the launch of our new Alumni website in mid-December. Phase II, which includes student affairs sites, research centers, and non-business-related offices, will be optimized and migrated to the new hosting platform by the end of February 2025. Phase III will occur in early May 2025, to include the remainder of the offices and current sites, marking the end of the public/external phases of the project. The goal of our website redesign is to streamline the user experience, provide optimized and relevant content to our audiences (as the number one marketing tool for student recruitment and overall University brand), and support the University’s strategic initiatives. I want to give my sincere thanks to the UCM team members who are working around the clock to execute this project!
Since August, we have been working through our FY2026 budget prioritization process, culminating in the submission of our budget narrative to the University System of Georgia (USG) on November 1. As a reminder, due to enrollment growth from FY2023 to FY2024, the USG provided an estimated formula funding increase of $4.131M for Georgia Southern to model. Throughout our institution-wide prioritization process, we focused on ensuring our investments directly aligned with USG’s growth priorities and regional economic needs. Detailed budget narrative documents and presentations will be available on the MyGeorgiaSouthern portal in the coming weeks and will be presented to Faculty Senate and Staff Council throughout November. In addition, we will share prioritizations of Phase II (April 2025) investment strategies based on projected earned tuition revenue for FY2026.
Soaring Beyond, Because of You!
Finally, in my monthly letters, I have the great honor of highlighting the success of our faculty, staff, and students. This month, I celebrate and applaud Dr. Joe Kardouni and his team for being awarded a $5.58M grant from the Department of Defense’s Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium to establish the Tactical and Occupational Performance Institute at Georgia Southern! This institute will focus on injury prevention through multidisciplinary research, teaching, and hands-on labs tailored to the physical demands of service roles and will leverage the University’s proximity to military installations and our existing programs focused on tactical athlete performance and readiness. Congratulations, Dr. Kardouni and all who contribute to this important work!
As we head into Thanksgiving and time with family and friends, I remain grateful and thankful to be leading this great institution. Hail Southern!
Sincerely,
Kyle
People. Purpose. Action: Growing Ourselves to Grow Others!
Last updated: 11/12/2024