Everyone needs gift cards!

It’s advocacy time!

And it’s Cyber Monday! Tomorrow is Giving Tuesday!

Add these two days together, and it’s like days just made for CMLE! (Do some Amazon shopping!)

 

If you have been around here at all, you already know that we love our members; and that we want to do more cool stuff for them. Sadly, we are being held back by money.

SIGH!

Yes, that pesky stuff that is so nice to have – and so tough to get.

We are a multitype library system. We have more than 300 members across 12 counties in Central Minnesota, and that includes all types of libraries and information organizations: public libraries, K-12 school media centers, academic libraries, and all types of special libraries: archives, hospitals, law. We love them all.

Our mission statement is pretty simple: Partnering with libraries for visioning, advocating, and educating.

We would like to interpret that as broadly as possible, and we’d love to do so much more than we can now to provide help and support to our members – so they can spend more time concentrating on working with their communities.

We are a small staff with fewer than five of us all together – and I’m even counting Official Office Dog Lady Grey to make us sound as big and fancy as “not even five” staffers! (She’s pretty darn sweet to have around; so worth counting at least a couple of times to puff up our numbers.) So we have big plans and ideas – but not many people to pull them together.

To add to that bummer of a situation, we are a state-funded agency;  and our budget has not increased in ten years. TEN. YEARS.

Yeah, that’s nuts.

The costs of everything we do have continued to rise – apparently totally ignoring the fact that our resources have not risen. (Reality is such a drag sometimes.)

This is not a sustainable situation.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but: We need money.

So we are working on a variety of different strategies to start working on some different income streams. We don’t anticipate making oodles of cash or anything (ha!), but it would be great to bring in more money for scholarships or to hire another staffer to help us work.

We will start rolling out more of these ideas in 2019, so stay tuned!

But we have one going now that will be easy for almost anyone to do, gives us money, and doesn’t cost you a cent.

Shop at Amazon.com! Start right here.

If you are already an Amazon shopper, it would really, really help us if you started your shopping trip at our site.

• Just click on any of our links (any books we discuss, or other ads), and go to Amazon.
• Shop
• Buy whatever you like
• Check out as you always would
• Done!

Your only “work” here is to start on our website. Once you do that, then Amazon will give us a small percentage of your purchase price.

It’s that easy!

We don’t get any information about you, your credit card, or any of that.

Amazon makes a lot (a LOOOOT) of money every year. We help to advertise for them. This is how we get paid for doing that.

Again: This really helps us. It’s not going to bring us thousands of dollars (or, is it???) (no, probably not); but it’s going to be a stream of money we want to depend on for the future.

We want to be able to bring in money to help our members.

This is a painless way you can help.

 

Guys: we need your help.

Shop til you drop! It’s for a good cause.

Everyone needs gift cards!