CIRPA : Canadian Institutional Research and Planning Association

Welcome to the Canadian Institutional Research and Planning Association (CIRPA) website, where you can find information about the association, annual conferences, IR job opportunities and more.

We have recently redesigned the website, so please take a look around and let us know what you think. 

Much thanks,
The CIRPA Board of Directors

President’s Message – October 2011

We are now in the final stages of preparations for our 20th Annual Conference in Fredericton (our first in New Brunswick!).  Conference Co-chairs Garry Hansen and Elizabeth Lane, program chair Yuqin Gong, and all the folks on the conference committees have been hard at work preparing for your arrival.  It promises to be another outstanding “national” get-together in one of the nicest cities in the country.

Once again, 2011 has been a very busy year for everyone involved with the Association.  The most exciting news this year is the implementation of our new website.  This very ambitious project took about 18 months from inception to implementation. 

We flipped the switch on Friday August 19, to coincide with the opening of the conference registration site.  We all had our fingers crossed that there would be no glitches, and there were none - and we’re extremely proud of the final product; it’s a huge step forward in our world-wide interface. 

There’s certainly more work to do in editing and adding functionality and content, and we now have our site on a platform (Drupal) that permits us to edit and update without calling for programming resources.  Over the next year, members of the Executive will be trained in the use of the site and we will be organizing responsibilities to manage the contents.

Once again I would like to extend a huge thank you to Anna Burke who oversaw the entire project, in addition to her day job!  Kudos as well to Nocturnal Design of Halifax, contractors for the technical work; they have been very responsive and helpful through this process.

Enough about the business “stuff” - this is, after all, the conference issue of the newsletter.  As I look through the list of workshops and presentations this year, there is once again a broad range of topics, ranging from forward-looking workshops (“IR office in the next decade”, “Leveraging social media for IR and planning”) to more toolbox items such as “Using Logistic Regression”.   In terms of presentations, there is a variety of offerings, from “building successful dashboards”, “increasing survey response rates” (a real challenge in today’s environment!), “BI tools for strategic enrolment management” and much more.  

CIRPA 2011 will also feature, for the first time, four structured “Common Interest Group” discussions at the end of each day on the following themes: Program Review, Strategic Planning, Retention/Persistence, and Survey Methodology & Management.  I hope you will take advantage of this opportunity to share your expertise and hear what other colleagues are doing in these areas.  Clearly, there is something for everybody at CIRPA 2011.

We are also very pleased to be partnering for the first time with Statistics Canada to offer their workshop Turning Statistics into Stories.  We hope to continue this relationship in the future as part of our goal to increase the number and variety of professional development offerings to our members.  Establishment of these partnerships brings even more value to your CIRPA membership.  At the 2012 conference, we expect to again have the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) return for offerings from their Planning Institute.  And if there is something else you would be interested in having at CIRPA, please let us know about it and we will see what we can do!

In conclusion, I will emphasize the importance of sharing our work with each other. If you have never presented at the conference, submitted a newsletter article or posed a question to the listserv, I urge you to do so - we all benefit from sharing our knowledge.  This is the true value of belonging to CIRPA and, of course, attending the annual conferences.

See you in Fredericton!

Cameron Tilson, Concordia University
President, CIRPA-ACPRI