Case Study: HathiTrust Strategic Vision

Client: HathiTrust

Project: Strategic Visioning

The world has changed dramatically in the 15 years since HathiTrust’s creation and they sought a new Strategic Vision—and a process—that recognized this shifting landscape. Throughout 2023, Athenaeum21 led HathiTrust and its Strategic Visioning Task Force through an iterative process to bring a new Strategic Vision to life that fully embodies their strengths, accomplishments, and aspirations. The Strategic Vision was founded on a year-long, in-depth exploration that helped HathiTrust staff and governing bodies better understand the organization, its members’ needs, and the changing ecosystem in which it operates.

The phased work was designed to uncover and build upon HathiTrust’s successes, understand its unique and important contributions to the academic community and the world, and to shape its future directions in deep and meaningful ways. “How Should HathiTrust Impact the World?” was a guiding question throughout the process and the mixed-method activities were designed to help stakeholders understand HathiTrust’s: 

  • Role and mission in the context of the current research and education landscape

  • Opportunities to transform research and education

  • Actual and perceived value to various stakeholders, including prospective members

  • Opportunities for membership growth and sustainability, through the strategic assessment of opportunity costs versus revenue potential

  • Strategic paths for the coming 3-5 years

Discovery and Listening: Data Gathering 

We began the Discovery and Listening phase of this work with 60 one-hour interviews with HathiTrust staff, Governance Bodies, and selected members and non-members. These interviews provided initial perspectives on HathiTrust’s role, mission, and impact as well as perceptions of the value of HathiTrust programs and services to members (and prospective members) in various communities. Member library affiliates, staff, and others were asked to think creatively about unfulfilled areas of need and opportunity. The interviews also helped shape a subsequent online survey.

Visioning: Future-Casting

Based on what we learned in the Discovery and Listening phase, we identified and modeled future opportunities to shift our focus towards thinking expansively about HathiTrust’s future. At the heart of our visioning activities were a series of 19 workshops and a day-long, intensive retreat. These presented a deeply-informed opportunity to understand the organization’s current state, and then shift the focus towards thinking expansively about HathiTrust’s future. This was also the opportunity to examine issues of equity and access and to begin to envision means of addressing HathiTrust’s responsibility to different communities and stakeholders. Visioning workshops were followed by prioritization and alignment workshops with members, staff, and governing bodies to help the organization identify what is most important and why, and to also understand the realistic dependencies and timing for those priorities. This process helped to separate the near-term feasible from the longer-term aspirational. We were able to set the organization up for success in their next chapter by also helping them to articulate what they would not be doing in the near to medium-term future, and why— eliminating the potential for future wasted energy and effort re-visiting old ground.

Sharing: Communicating the Plan

The information gathering, synthesizing, and creative conceptualization culminated in a complete Strategic Vision, which reflected the inputs from diverse stakeholders, and was presented to the Board of Governors for approval and final confirmation in January 2024.  

The Strategic Vision is publicly available from the HathiTrust website, as well as a brief introduction by Mike Furlough, Executive Director of HathiTrust.

Services Provided:

  • Member Needs Research & Analysis

  • Strategic Discovery, Visioning, and Prioritization Workshops

  • Day-long, In-person Visioning Retreat

  • Strategic Planning

  • Roadmap Development

  • Organizational Needs Analysis

  • Strategic Vision drafts and final draft

  • Strengths Audit

  • Peer Research

  • Organizational Analysis Report

Methods Used:

  • Interviews 

  • Online Survey 

  • Workshops

  • Desk Research

  • Focus Groups 

case studies, libraries, strategic plan, higher educationA21 UK