VISION 2012

AREA PLANS

Activities

• Encourage staff and student engagement with new suggestions/feedback scheme and hold a joint officer and staff team away-day each year to review suggestions.
• Develop a strategy to communicate innovation and responsiveness.
• Expand Society Surgeries, monitor and record outcomes and communicate to all student groups.

Central Services

• Ideas generation either in Team Meetings or in staff re-training session.
• Set up a central services group to review specific areas.
• To facilitate an ‘away day' used to identify creative advancements.

Children's Services

• Build on parent / staff interaction.
• Have an ‘item' on the plasma screen system within the Students' Union building that changes regularly showing activities of children from the 3 services.
• Within our 3 annual training days have slots for innovation / responsiveness in our childcare services.

Commercial

• Idea generation session to include both full time and casual staff.
• Meet with the Commercial Services Committee to discuss performance and to capture ideas from the membership on commercial opportunities.
• To facilitate an ‘away day' used to identify creative advancements.

Democracy & Representation

• Introduce an online, participative mechanism for students to bring about change through e-petitioning for both Students' Union Council motions and referenda.
• Empower our representatives to lead changes through increased staff support (i.e. more time spent with Councillors outside of formal training and meetings and course reps offered increased support through new staff post) and facilitate student access to the new ‘innovation fund' through Students' Union Council (building on the ideas of participative budgeting).
• Develop, implement and facilitate cross departmental annual away day on democracy and representation (include both commercial and non-commercial managers, officers and student representatives).

Entertainment

• Continue to run and develop a membership consultation and research strategy within Entertainments, involving Entertainments Committee and Technical Services Committee and widening participation in this, to include a diverse sample of the student membership. Work with the Marketing Department to develop strategies to publicise how ideas are actioned.
• Develop ideas and understanding of the potential for new or one-off events, specifically targeting under-represented groups. Successfully apply funding from the innovation fund to the development of these projects, as appropriate. Balance the impact of turnover and attendance across the Students' Union in the development of all new event projects.
• Facilitate away day, focused on future planning & creative ideas generation.

Marketing

• Develop a communications plan as part of the system protocol on how we feed back information to all our users about initiatives that are taking place due to feedback. This plan needs to fit within the overall communications strategy.

• Staff: Train staff on how the system works, create staff resource within the marketing department to deliver timely management information from the system, including connecting the information to other research findings where appropriate.
• Students & customers: promote the system.

• Develop a communications plan as part of the system protocol on how we feed back information to all our users about initiatives that are taking place due to feed back. This plan needs to fit within the overall communications strategy.

Resources

• We will feedback on actions taken as a result of ideas that are generated through various routes (A new technical solution to be introduced in conjunction with Marketing).
• Department away days.
• Opportunities to take risks as appropriate.

Corporate

• Establish an innovation fund of £10k per annum, a panel to consider applications and process will be formed, drawn from staff and Student Officers.

Student Advice Centre

• All staff to have the opportunity to be involved in cross-departmental working, both within the Students' Union and the University.
• Encourage ideas generation within the team. Use whiteboards, time in team meetings and Away Days to encourage creativity. Consider Innovation Fund if appropriate.
• Systematic approach to getting student feedback: feedback option on website, feedback from service users, asking students to review Student Advice Centre publications, engage with non-users of service also. Incorporate feedback from new Students' Union feedback scheme when available.