Category Archives: Advocacy

Postcard Party Dec. 18th

Library advocacy can seem intimidating, but it is so important, and can actually be fun when you participate with other library people!

Join us on Tuesday, December 18th from 3 – 5pm at the Local Blend in St. Joe. We will be writing out postcards full of library information, stories, and facts to send to stakeholders. We supply the postcards and postage!

We hold Library Advocacy Postcard Parties to spread the word to school boards, city councils, principals, legislators, and other stakeholders about why libraries are so valuable!

Join us for a cup of coffee or some other warm treat to chat about your library and do some advocacy work. Hoping to see you there!

Advocacy Alchemy: Ranganathan talks marketing!

If you have been to library school, you have heard of S. R. Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Librarianship. It’s a thing that everyone likes to discuss, to help provide a common foundation of ideas and professional attitudes as they build culture for everyone to share no matter where you go.

And probably, you never heard about it again once you made it past that Foundations class, so you forgot the specifics. Or maybe you missed this piece of professional knowledge.

No worries! It’s very simple: (this is from Wikipedia, but there are tons of websites that discuss these ideas)

  1. Books are for use.
  2. Every person his or her book.
  3. Every book its reader.
  4. Save the time of the reader.
  5. The library is a growing organism.

You can see that there is a lot here you can think about, and use to apply to your own library work. We encourage that! We can discuss this later, in another article; and will be happy to come chat with you about library theories and philosophies in your libraries!

Judith A. Seis wrote a really useful book called The Visible Librarian. She discusses strategies for adapting these five laws to creating the basics of a marketing plan! (Check p. 35 – 43 for all the details; I’ll summarize them below.)

Your library needs to have some kind of marketing plan. If you are just hanging around, looking at your books, and hoping nice people will drop by to ask interesting questions, well…..it may be a long wait.  Instead, make even very rudimentary plans for how to get people to connect to the stuff in your library.

In a school, you know you need to keep connecting with teachers to tell them about the cool stuff you have; probably this is the same issue in most special libraries  – you have to identify the people who could benefit from your resources, and go tell them (repeatedly) about it.

A marketing plan lets you figure out how to do this in an efficient way.

So here are Seis’ adapted rules for marketing plans, with my explanatory information:

  • Library Resources Are For Use: no more having pointless services just because “we’ve always done this” or holding onto boring dusty books no one ever checks out. There are so many exciting new things to try and to bring in – find the thing that will connect with your community members!
  • Every Customer Their Library Resources: Have the things you community needs – but add in some things that will delight them! Every time you add some graphic novels, more books in Somali, a new fish tank – whatever it is, tell people about it! Put it on the website we discussed last week, send it in a newsletter, put up a flyer, post it to social media. Info -> Patron = Job Well Done.
  • Every Library Resource Its Customer: Pick something to emphasize that you do well. Are you campus leaders in technology? Are you subject specialists? Are you a one-person library, and ready to provide personalized service?? Find a thing and own it. Then tell the world: Hey! This is my thing!
  • Save the Time of the Customer: How can you make people understand, or believe, that you are better and faster than any competition? Provide a variety of ways for them to contact you. We discussed this in last week’s look at your website, but you need to add in an email address, a phone number, and any other way you can think of that someone might want to contact you. Also: know what the common questions people are asking. If it is something that you can fix or adjust – do that to stop the questioning process. If it is something you can link to, post, or otherwise share – do that. Save people time and effort whenever possible!
  • The Library is a Growing Organism: I saw this all the time, and it’s always true: Libraries are amazing. Your library is amazing! I cannot tell you how happy and proud I constantly am to be in this profession. One of the things that I like is that we are constantly growing and changing, responding to the needs of the communities we serve. Your community may be elementary school kids and their teachers, it may be doctors and nurses, it may be people coming by for local history. Whoever makes up your community, they want different things in different ways today than they did ten years ago – and will want other different things ten years from now! There is no sitting around on our hands, just coasting and assuming things are fine. Things will not be fine if we don’t work for them. We grow and change, and that is always exciting!!

Okay, so now you have a few basic ideas you can use to advocate for you awesome resources, services, and programs. Stay tuned to this column each week, to keep getting more ideas you can use to show the world how very excellent you really are!!

 

Advocacy Alchemy: The World is Online – You Should be Too!

We like you!

We like to talk with you!

Probably, your patrons and community members like to talk with you too!

They probably also want to see your information and all the cool stuff you have to share with them.

We’re living in the future now people, and the world has moved online. Your material is online, and it needs to be easily accessible.

You need a website. At the very least, you need a page on your parent organization (school, hospital, whoever) website.

And fortunately, it’s really easy to make a website today!

I say this from experience. Neither of us at CMLE knew diddly about web design and setup. We continue to not be experts. But hey – we’ve got a site, and we’ve torn it all down and rebuilt it. When things go wrong, sometimes we even know how to fix it!

*fistbump*

We are happy to help you set up a website, whether it’s one page or more detail. You can set it up for yourself, or work with your IT people, or hire a web designer to put together a nice site.

However you get there: you need a presence on the web.

Here are a few things you should be thinking about as you get started:

  • Get a domain name. You an find all kinds of services to help you with this – something like Host Gator, GoDaddy, or Network Solutions. Check to see if the name you want is available, and if so – grab it! If not, well, it’s time to poke around at the name to get something else you like.
  • Get a host. You need a place for your site to live. If you are doing a page on your parent website (school, whoever) then this is easy. If not, you can probably use the same service (examples just above here) that helped with your name. We use Bluehost. (Just throwing out a name that has worked for us.)
  • Now you want to put stuff on  your site! This used to be very hard, and if you have any HTML skills from the olden days of the web (the 90s, early ’00s) you remember how hard it was to make nice things happen. No worries: it’s so much easier now! WordPress and Squarespace are the biggies you hear about all the time. If you don’t know what you are doing – that is, if you are like me – just go with one of them. We use WordPress and it’s been easy (well…easy-ish…everything is harder than you think is should be!). Just use that.

Whew! There we go – we have a website!

What should you put on it? It’s going to depend on what you want to share with your community. We will talk about content, design, and usability in a later post.

The one thing that every library needs – and I am so enraged when it’s not there, as is true way too often – is a way to contact the library online.

Ponder this for just a fraction of a second. I’m online right now. You’re online reading this. If you come to my website – you’re online doing that.

Stay with me now; here’s where we go deep.

If you are online, on my website, and you want to ask a question or share a thought or suggest a book or point out that the site has been taken over by hackers/ransomware (yes: this happens!), what’s your very first move???

YOU WILL WANT TO SEND ME AN EMAIL.

I have email. You have email.

But if I decide that I now want to force you to get up, get into the car, and drive over to my library (please get dressed first) – that’s incredibly rude.

Slightly down the rudeness scale, but very definitely still on it, would be my alternatively requiring you to find a phone and call me with these questions and thoughts.

THIS. IS. TERRIBLE. SERVICE.

If I did this, it means I am giving no thought at all to the convenience of my community members. I don’t want to make contacting me easy; I want to make it as unpleasant and hard as possible.

When it’s time to ask for an increase to my budget, are you going to remember that I was horrible and rude to you? I’m betting you will. And you are going to tell me that you are giving your money to someone with a basic sense of service to the community.

AVOID ALL OF THIS. HAVE AN EMAIL ADDRESS ON YOUR WEBSITE.

I absolutely do NOT want to hear the various excuses I’ve heard over the years about this, from all sorts of libraries. “I don’t want to give out my email. I don’t want my name on the website. We turn over staff too frequently to put their names up.”

I DO NOT CARE ABOUT THESE STUPID EXCUSES. This is still terrible service.

And there is such an easy answer!

Well: the best answer is to have the names and email addresses of every single manger in your library on a page called “Staff” so they can be reached. My heartfelt applause goes out to the many libraries that do this. And if you include a quick photo, so I have an idea who I’m talking with online – I overflow with pleased gratitude for this!!!!

But. If you have some weird ideas about why that’s So Terrible to connect with your community, then I have thoughts about your lack of customer service.

But still. The very easy workaround is: just get a generic email address. Set up something like Admin @ Mywebsite.com, or AskAQuestion @ Mywebsite.com. Assign someone to check it each day, and forward emails to people as needed.

There.

Good service AND you have successfully (but bizarrely) hidden yourself from the people who make up the entire reason your job exists. BUT: still connecting, so it counts.

 

Okay, our takeaways today are simple:

  • You need a website, or at least a webpage
  • Put up content
  • Put up an email, and hey – all kinds of ways to contact you. Have a Google map (WordPress does this for you!), put up your phone number, set up a chat box. AND, have an email address, preferable with a name. We are a customer service profession, so be available to provide great service!

Bask in the wonderfulness that is you and you library! I join you in the basking, and celebrate the wonderfulness with you.

Mark Your Calendars: Postcard Party on Tues, Dec 18th

We love to see our members coming together to do library advocacy!

We know December is such a long ways off, nearly a whole week away 🙂 but it’s good to plan ahead, so we wanted to give you an early heads-up about our next Library Advocacy Postcard Party!

Mark your calendars for Tuesday, December 18th because we will be having another Postcard Party from 3pm – 5pm at the Local Blend in St. Joe! 

If you’ve come to past Postcard Parties, you know they are fun and casual events, just a gathering of library supporters getting together to write to stakeholders about the necessity of supporting libraries!

We hold Library Advocacy Postcard Parties to spread the word to school boards, city councils, principals, legislators, and other stakeholders about why libraries are so valuable!

We provide you with the postcards, you fill them out, and then we get them mailed for you.

Join us, write out postcards with some of your library success stories, and let’s advocate for libraries!

Advocacy Alchemy: Shop Amazon!

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!