Category Archives: Training

Advocacy, Training

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.

Training

Episode 413 Risk Taking

Check out our full shownotes page here!

Welcome back to Linking Our Libraries! This week we are going to talk about an exciting leadership competency: Risk Taking!

Your first thought when listening to this topic might be surprise. Hasn’t everything we’ve talked about this season implied that leaders need to be reliable, steady, and predictable?

Yes. All of that is true. These are important qualities for leaders.

But you can’t just take the safe course all the time. Sometimes you need to take a chance, try something new, to boldly go where no librarian has gone before!

Good risk taking skills will help to propel you and your organization forward. So let’s talk about risk taking, and strategies for minimizing risk and maximizing your chances for success!

 

What do we mean by risk taking? Different people may think of this in different ways, but we mean not taking the easy way; taking a chance of failure; bold or courageous action.

Check out this episode!

Training

Episode 412 Accountability

Welcome back to Linking Our Libraries! This week we are going to talk about the leadership competency that sounds like Adulting: Accountability.

Check out our full shownotes page here.

Who is joining us this week? Rhonda Huisman, doctoral candidate and Dean of the University Library at St Cloud State University!

We hear people talking about “adulting” online and in person. When you think about it, this means being accountable. And that’s kind of terrifying. Being accountable means taking responsibility for results – positive and negative. It’s great to take responsibility for the good things that happen in your library – everyone can join in celebrating together! It is much less fun to be accountable when your program is a disaster, people are complaining about your books, the computers explode, and the ceiling falls in with water damage.

Leadership means standing up, being accountable, and then helping everyone else to get back on track. Things will not always go as planned. It’s okay. Leaders will accept responsibility, and start working on strategies to move forward.

You can easily think of any number of leaders you have seen at work or in the news, who refuse to acknowledge they make mistakes or are involved in any workplace problems. These people are not real leaders; and everyone can see it. No one wants to work with someone who constantly tries to shift blame and hog credit.

Check out this episode!

Training

Episode 411: Resource Management

Check out our full shownotes page here!

Welcome back to Linking Our Libraries! This week we are going to talk about managing resources. If your people don’t have the things they need to get their jobs done, your leadership skills could use some sharpening!

It seems pretty obvious when you think about: you and your organization need money and stuff to accomplish your mission. But it can be really easy to assume this is someone else’s job, or to assume that things just appear in front of you – maybe by magic!

 

The reality is simpler, and maybe less romantic: as a leader it is your job to get things done, and that means you need to be sure everyone has what they need. You need to find the money and the facilities and any supplies to make everything happen.

Check out this episode!

Training

Training Tips: The Six Ps of Publicity

You need to talk about your library, and all your cool stuff. And you need to do it All The Time! You never know when you are going to make a connection, or say something at just the right time for people to hear it.

Like anything, publicity has a system you can follow. In this case, it’s often called the six Ps of Publicity. We are going to walk through them briefly here, and you can find more info online or in books or articles about marketing.

  • The right Product: This includes all the stuff your library has to offer to your community members. You want it to be things they want to use, or things they need.
  • The right Price: Many of your items will not be charged for directly, but you may have some things that are for sale directly, or that you charge for (meeting room rentals, special access to researchers, etc.), and you want to be thinking about how to charge for that.
  • The right Place: You want to be connected to the community, so you need to be where they are. If you are in an elementary school, you are probably right in the same building; if you are in a university library,  an increasing number of your students are probably off campus and maybe not in your state or even your country. Develop online and mail resources to be in place!
  • Promote the right way: Too many libraries use marketing material that looks like a kid made it – and not in a good way. You want to know how to use good colors (not salmon, for example), how to use good graphics, and how to assemble material that does not look like an amateur did it. This can really diminish your image when done poorly.
  • To the right People: You want to know your community. This does not mean people who live near you; instead, a community is all the people who you are serving. So you want to be able to connect with individuals in that group, and with groups within the larger group. Different people will want different things; you need to know what they are.
  • At the right Point in time: Think about promoting programs and services: not too long in advance, or people will forget, and not too close to the time because people won’t be able to change plans.

Keep promoting yourself!!!

Remember: CMLE is here to help members who want to work on this kind of stuff, and are not sure where to start or want to bounce around some ideas. We are here for you!