Episode 809: Strategic Planning/Needs Assessment

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Welcome back to Season Eight of Linking Our Libraries! We are so happy to have you with us today!

We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange. Our members are libraries of all sorts: public, schools, academics, special libraries, archives, and history centers. Join us in working thorough skills library staffers can use to be more successful in their work! 

We are getting near the end of this season, and next week is going to be exciting. So this week, we are going to look toward the future! We are going to walk through some strategies you can use to do some needs assessment and strategic planning for your library. It doesn’t matter how big or small your library is, you can always work on some plans for the future.

The Basics:

First of all, you may be asking yourself why you would even want to do this. You may be in a small library, like a lot of our members. You may have only a teeny budget. You may be the only person in your library. 

None of these are problems, and none of them should stand in the way of making plans for the future!

If you have been in libraries for more than even a few weeks, you know that things are always changing, there are always new things to learn, and new things you can be doing to better serve your community.

Don’t worry about making it perfect – it won’t be. Don’t worry about guessing wrong about what is possible in the future – you will get some things wrong.

Unless you have much better precognitive skills that we do, you cannot know for sure what is going to happen, and how you can be ready for it. But a strategic plan for the future will be the best chance for making a good plan and being ready to handle any situation that comes your way.

There are a few different parts to this process that we will talk about today: needs assessment, mission/vision statement, tactical plans, and strategic planning. Let’s look at each piece individually.

Needs Assessment

The Massachusetts Library System defines this as:

“Description of the needs of the community the library serves; includes a gathering of information based on an analysis of the population, results of surveys, and a description of the library’s existing services in relation to the community’s needs. Libraries might want to look to their parent institutions strategic plans to see what needs they have identified for the community, school, institution, etc.”

This is where you reach out to your community members, and ask them what they want and what they need in your library. This can be fun – they may talk about how much they love a program you did, or some new materials you bought to share. And it can be a little painful – nobody likes the new website design, nobody knew about your computer sign up process.

Offer some ideas for things that you like, some new things you might try, and see what kinds of responses you get. You can also let them suggest ideas for things you might try. While it’s not always possible to do everything people want to try in your library, finding some new ideas can be great for you – and definitely helpful to your community members!

When you are doing a needs assessment, use a variety of formats. Send out an online survey. Do some interviews, in person or on Zoom. Be deliberate in reaching out to people who may not be in your library. Your community is everyone you could be serving, not just the people who do come into the library. This is a great time to help connect some newbies back to your resources!

Ideally, you want everyone to feel like they have a stake in the library, and that there is something there for them. Not everything has to be for everyone, but everyone should have something for themselves.

Mission/Vision Statements

The first part of a written plan is often a mission or vision statement. Some organizations get very firm on wanting two separate statements, and that’s fine. Generally, you probably only need one statement, and that can be the one that helps you to focus your library on your specific path.

Let’s look at the specifics of each, if you do want to use one or the other, or both.

The Massachusetts Library System defines these terms.

“Mission Statement: a concise declaration of the purpose of an organization, specifying the fundamental reason for its existence and identifying its major service roles and the major user groups at which they are directed.”

“Vision Statement: an uplifting and inspiring declaration of the values and hopes of an organization and optimally what you want to accomplish as an organization.”

The important thing is to focus on having a quick and easy way to describe what you do. This is a statement you can put on a website, you could tell to stakeholders, and you can use when you are making decisions about grants and other potential future plans.

Tactical Plans

A tactical plan is a short-range project. This is how you will accomplish each individual piece of a larger, strategic, plan. You don’t need to accomplish big things here – tactical plans are for projects that will last a week or two, or maybe a month, or maybe one semester. It is short term, there is a definite goal at the end, and then you can measure whether it happened and how it went.

You can pile up a bunch of tactical plans all at once, to make larger, more complex plans. You can distribute tactical plans out to other people – so maybe one staff member gets a tactical plan, another one gets the next tactical plan, and you take a third. You can build them together and have three things happening at once, or stack them so you have three months of different things happening – each with an individual tactical plan.

Think short term. Think easy to define. Think easy to evaluate. These are your lego pieces for your strategic plan.

Strategic Planning

And here we are at the piece the whole process has been leading to: the strategic plan. When you pile up those lego pieces of tactical plans, you get the strategic plan. We have been saying this phrase a lot, and you have certainly heard it before today. But you may not have a clear idea of what it actually means. 

A strategic plan is a long-range plan. It will take place over multiple years. This used to mean something like eight or ten years, but now realistic planning is not great for that period of time. Think about making a plan for the next two or three years, maybe four if you feel pretty sure things are not going to change a lot for your library.

And of course, that sounds very daunting! How can you possibly know what you are going to be doing this time two years from now??? What if a global pandemic hits, or something?

It’s okay. You will not need to know everything about the future. A strategic plan is not a failure because not everything happened the way you wanted. Other things will happen, including the occasional pandemic. Sometimes good things interrupt too! Our strategic plan was interrupted by the pandemic. But it was also interrupted because we were fortunate enough to land a grant to buy VR kits that we can share with our members. That was great, but threw off some of our other plans – and that’s fine.

The point is for you to have a plan. If all goes well, then great. You know just what you will be doing, you can promote things to your community, and you can be gathering resources. And if – when! – things do not quite work out that way, that is okay too. Having a plan gives you flexibility. You can pivot off to something else if you need to, and you have this in place to return to when that is done.

And how do you make those big plans? You can use your needs assessment, and focus on looking at the SOAR strategy. As with so many things, you can follow the strategy other people have used in libraries, and other non-profits, to help get the best results. We will walk through this now.

  • Strengths –What are our greatest strengths? What are your greatest assets? What is working really well? What is valued the most –the work done, the population, the environment? What good things do your stakeholders say about the library?
  • Opportunities for the Library –What are our best opportunities? What’s happening that can benefit you? What’s happening that helps you benefit others? How can you repurpose or strengthen your strengths? How can you repurpose your weaknesses? How can you repurpose your threats?
  • Aspirations –What is our preferred future? Considering our strengths and opportunities, where do you want to go? “What do you want to be when you grow up?” What are your hopes for the library, for your department?
  • Results –What are the measurable results that’ll tell us we’ve achieved that preferred future? How do we know success? What will be different for the stakeholders? What will be different for the staff? Who is going to take responsibility?

We hope you feel ready to do some planning of your own now! Remember: it does not need to be perfect. But it will help you to make some good plans for your future. It’s always important to keep working to connect all of your stuff with your community members, and good plans will let you do that!

Resources for you to consult:

Books Read

And now we have one of our favorite parts of each episode: sharing books! Each of us will share a book we are reading. Links to each book will be on our show notes page, with a link to Amazon.com. If you buy a nice book – or anything else – Amazon will give us a small percent of their profits. Thanks in advance!!

Conclusion

Thanks to you for joining us this week! It’s always better when you are here with us!

Here are a few quick takeaways from today’s discussion. These are the four pieces of your planning process for today:

  • Needs assessment
  • Mission/vision statement
  • Tactical planning
  • Strategic planning
    • Strengths 
    • Opportunities 
    • Aspirations
    • Results 

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Check back in with us next week for another library skill!