Conor Murphy | Senior Editor
Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) Council tonight approved the text of a strategic plan that aims to set an “effective” and “forward-thinking” direction for the union between now and 2018.
The plan aims to to set out 20 measurable goals. “The goal is that we will have yes or no answers as to whether we have achieved a certain goal”, said TCDSU President, Domhnall McGlacken-Byrne tonight. It was noted that a strategic plan was one of the main election promises of McGlacken-Byrne.
This plan has four sections separated under the titles of “Represent”, “Serve”, “Community” and “Effective and Forward-thinking”.
Under the titles of “Represent”, the plan has broad goals and says the union will “focus on representing and campaigning for Trinity students on Trinity issues”, but with the possible mandate of campaigning on broader issues where they serve the interests of TCDSU members.
Each section of the plan contains a “how we will measure success” section, determining how the union will conclude that goals have been met. Under “Represent”, this includes two measurable results based on a student survey of 576 people. The goal will be successful if students think that “representation effectiveness” increases from 48 per cent to 75 per cent and think that “effectiveness at dealing with College issues” increases from 31 per cent to 50 per cent. It also says that the TCDSU would publish “reports on USI involvement”, without stating the regularity of these reports.
Half of the “measures of success” are the surveyed views of students, although there are no requirements as to the size of such surveys in the plan.
The section titled “Serve”, is mainly about running TCDSU’s services. This includes normal officer services and supporting an editorially independent University Times. There are also very aggressive hopes for increasing The University Times’s online circulation to 150,000 views per month, with all goals being completely online focused, not mentioning the print edition.
The community section again mentions goals concerned with increasing the feeling of community. The measurable goals here are to “reduce current perception of cliquishness from 9%” and to “increase effectiveness at Communications and community activities from 58.9% to 75%”. It also sets out the goal to “ensure the creation of a world-class student centre for Trinity College Dublin by 2018”.
Under the section “TCDSU will be an effective and forward-thinking organisation”, the goals cover hopes to plan strategy effectively and for the union to be “open and accountable”. To this end, the section says that its main measure of implementation is to have reports for “finance; strategic plan; officer activities”. It also mentions that there will be bi-annual reports.
The plan was primarily developed by McGlacken-Byrne, in consultation with Hugh Sullivan, a former TCDSU Education Officer who advises companies and public bodies on strategic direction.
