 Hi, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event. We're a webinar, a webcast, an online show. The terminology for this thing is up for debate. But whatever you want to call us, we are here live online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. If you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's great. That's not a problem. We do record our shows every week and they are posted onto our website. So you can go back and watch them later at your convenience. And at the end of today's show, I'll show you our website and where you can find all of our recordings. When we do do the recordings, we include both the recording. We post to our YouTube channel. If anyone has any presentations, any representatives have slides or handouts or documents, we include that. And if there are any links or anything mentioned throughout the show, I add them to our delicious account. And then those are available to you as well. So afterwards, you'll have access to everything you may need. Both our live show and our recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do, if you see anything of interest to any of your friends or colleagues that has been on the show before or anything coming up, let them know, share, tell people about what we're doing here and have them come and watch the show with us. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live, interviews, presentations, book reviews, demos, sometimes we call mini training sessions. Basically, our only criteria is that it's library related. So anything to do with libraries, we are happy to have it on the show. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff do presentations sometimes on Nebraska-centric type things and programs we're doing here. But we also do bring in guest speakers, and that's what we have this morning. On the line with us today, as you can see here from every library, is John Kratska. I didn't even ask about how to pronounce that. I'm sorry. John, do you hear any Krista? Is that Kratska? Or is that Nebraska? Oh, gosh, yeah. All right. Anyway, John has been with every library. He's their executive director there. Every library is a great organization that is helping libraries across the country promote things, fight against certain legislative issues, get bills going, help the votes come through, all sorts of different things. He helped us out here in Nebraska. He's going to talk about that later as well. But he's got a presentation here about the librarian as candidate. Whether you like it or not, you might be. Good way to put it, yeah. Yeah, you are. So I'll just hand over to you, John, to introduce yourself more and talk about what you're doing. Sure. Thanks for the invitation. It's nice to be here. The chance to be able to talk to folks in Nebraska and around the country about our work, the chance to be able to share a little bit of the insight that we have. Most of the work that we're doing right now is focused on helping libraries when they have to go out for a vote. And in Nebraska, you guys don't necessarily go out for a vote all the time. Not super often, but when you do, it's extremely important. It's kind of a high stakes moment. Around the country from California to New York to Florida, there's different mechanisms for setting budgets for libraries. And we're focused on that when it goes out to the ballot, when you've got to run a bond to build a new building or to remodel, to run a referendum of some sort, to establish an operating levy. It's a millage. It's a parcel tax. It's a warrant article. There's a lot of different names for it around the country, but it's all about taxes. And it's the taxes that run the place. It's the learnings that we have here about how to talk about taxes on those election days that are also generalizable for other sorts of funding needs that you might have. If you've got to go to a city council, if you've got to go to a county commission, if you've got to go to Lincoln or Springfield, like where I live here in Illinois, if you've got to go and talk about taxes, you still need the folks with you, whether they're voting on it directly as in the public voters, or if they can be with you as constituents of your city council, your town council, your county commission. To bring those folks forward, we know some stuff about how to do that. And it's nice to be able to share that with you guys today. The key element that we always approach our discussions, our budget negotiations, our taking up to the voters for an election day, is that I don't want to see you as the folks who work at the library, the librarians, whether you have a degree or not. I don't want you turning from the person that the kid runs up to in the grocery store and says, oh my God, Ms. Karen, I love you. You're so awesome. Into the tax man, quite frankly. I want to avoid that for you, because the work that you do every day in the library needs to be funded. If you don't have enough salary, I'd like to see it increased. If you don't have enough colleagues, I'd like to see the ability for you to get other people hired on. If you're short on collections, if your program is a little bit short, because of budget, I'll mix that with you. And I certainly don't want to see you turn into the tax man in the process. Okay. Every library is set up as sort of an interesting organization, not sort of interesting, it's a rather interesting organization, because we're set up differently than everybody else is in the library advocacy ecosystem. 364 days of the year, the existing infrastructure of advocacy works very well. The existing infrastructure of advocacy even works well on election day from time to time, but it's capped. Every 501c3 organization, which is ALA where I used to work, ILA, where I was a trustee member for a number of years from my local library here in suburban Chicago, NLA, which does great work and they've been a good partner of ours, the Friends, the Foundations. They're all 501c3 organizations, which means that they're charities, which means that they can do public outreach, they can do public education, they can talk about advocacy, and at the same time, there's a one day of the year, which is a weird day of the year, which is election day, which is why we're set up differently than a c3. We're set up as a 51c4. It means that if you listen to Fox News or NPR, you hear about super PACs, how the super PACs can raise and expend unlimited funds to advance their special interest. Well, yeah, that's us, except we don't have unlimited funds and you are our special interest. Like I said before, we work on local ballot measures primarily. We work on negotiations with town councils and city governments. We also work to support legislation that allows libraries to function as a district by the transit of property. We also work to defeat legislation that impacts negatively the library's ability to function as a district. That's why we got involved in Nebraska with LB969. That's why we're very happy to push hard with the public about getting LB969 to die in committee. Why Nebraska Library Association was such a good ally in that and reaching out to the partners, sorry to the members. We're here for the whole cloth kind of approach. Okay, let me take you through some of the data about what activates voters, so that we can talk also about what activates constituents of your city council, your county commissions, what activates people who are donors, who want to cut you a check for 5 bucks or 50 bucks or God bless and put you in their will. When I talk about voters here, I'm talking about anybody who's willing to give, anybody who's willing to contribute their time, their talent, their good name, anybody who's willing potentially to punch a chat for us on election day. We know a lot about how residents believe, how parents feel, how folks who've got library cards behave, and yet when we're talking about taxes, no offense, this is 364-day statistics. This is about use of the library. This is about people liking the library, maybe even loving the library, but it's not necessarily about people voting for the library or talking about their own taxes for the library. What we know about that doesn't come from these data sets. It comes from OCLC and from Awareness to Funding. It comes from a number of polls and surveys that we've run over the last couple of years. We got started at the end of 2012 as an organization. Since the end of 2012, we've done 36 campaigns, we've had 27 wins. We've done poll after poll and survey after survey in communities large and small, rural, suburban, ex-burbs, red states, blue states. We've covered the waterfront, and we know these numbers to be pretty true still. About 37% of the American voting public, according to OCLC and the From Awareness to Funding study, 37% of the American voting public believe in the library. They will vote yes for the library regardless of what's on the ballot. They'll show up to city council with you if you ask them. They're probably the ones who are your key volunteers in your friends in your foundation environment. They're the ones who, when you send out your annual appeal for the friends group or the foundation, they'll actually respond with a check. They believe. They kind of don't care what's going on in particular, though they really want to know, but they're going to show up and support you regardless. 37% of the American voting public is way below 50% plus one, which we need to win in most states, or 60% in some other states, or 66.7% of the voters we need in places like California and in Oregon sometimes and Idaho sometimes. There's another 37% of the American voting public who will, they will vote yes provided that you can answer their questions, and they have legitimate questions about where the money's going and who is spending their money. The 37% who want to know where their money's going and who's spending their money, some of them just need to be told by another adult. Somebody knocks on their door and says, hey, I'm John, I'm with the library vote yes committee. Here's why I'm voting yes for the library. Here's why I'm going to city council. Here's why I'm a donor. And people say, oh yeah, that makes sense. This money's going to a good place. And the people who are spending it seem like they're spending it wisely. There's another chunk of those 37% though who are more suspicious than questioning, and they're legitimately suspicious about where tax money is going in their town, in their city, in Lincoln or in Springfield or in D.C., some of them are a little bit, think of the side eye to what's going on in the U.N. Those folks have got legitimate suspicions that you may or may not be responsible for creating. The responsibility of creating those suspicions might come from that city council and you're not part of that city government. It might come from something that happened 15, 20 years ago, and yet there's still a hangover in town about how tax money is spent. It might be because your board or your staff at some point or another had some problems. Yeah, we have to own that certainty. We have to assuage those suspicions. We have to answer those legitimate questions because the only way you get something done, the only way you get something done in this country is to have a majority behind you or a giant pile of money behind you. We don't have a giant pile of money like lobbying organizations do. If we get the P, the 37% who believe, who are activated in their belief about what the library is doing and what the librarians, all the folks who work there are doing, and then to assure the suspicious or questioning voter that we've got a plan that makes sense for the community. 37 plus 37, that could be 74%. It certainly is at least 7 out of 10, maybe 8 out of 10 people in town who are interested in what you're going to do with their tax money. They're hopeful. They've got legitimate questions. They're willing to listen to your answers. Okay, there's another 26% though who are not necessarily. They might be users of the library actually. These 26% who probably or definitely will vote no. They might be power users of the library, and yet they're not going to vote for you because they have a belief. It's about taxes. It might be any taxes of bad tax. It might be some ideology around how government should be shrunk. And folks, they might be in there every day using the library and still don't want to see their taxes go to it. Some of them are going to vote no because they can't afford it. I respect that. The rest of it's an ideological approach that I don't agree with personally. I wouldn't have started a political action committee for libraries if I didn't think that progressive taxes that fund the common good were the right way to go in this country. I want to focus on the 37% who believe though for the rest of this conversation, the 37% who want to ask and answer some questions or have their suspicions allayed for the rest of the conversation though. Because the 26% who are not going to vote for you, we're not going to change their hearts or their heads or their guts. And that's alright. There's fewer of them if we do the good work of bringing out the 74%. Alright, who are these 74%ers? Well, the nice thing about the data, and again, this is OCLC from Awareness to Funding. If you're a policy wonk like I am, it's a must read even though it's from 2007-2008. A voter's willingness to support increased library funding is not driven by or limited by library use. We've known this now for like 10 years, and yet we still do most of our marketing to library users. We still do it over the reference desk at the CERC desk in our newsletter on our Facebook page. To put some advertising dollars to reach non-users behind our Facebook page is really the ultimate goal in a certain respect. To put up the billboard that lets people drive, put up the big sign that lets people drive by. The folks who are non-users who are believers in the library, the folks who have not been there since he or she was 15 years old, they really actually want to hear what you're doing, not to become a user necessarily. Some of them don't read, and they feel like I got nothing to do with the library. That's cool. They love the fact that you are there personally. There's people in their stead who are taking care of those kids, who are taking care of those seniors, who are helping folks who are looking for jobs right their first resume. They love the idea that there's a library in the community that's doing 21st century library work and there's 21st century librarians provided that we actually tell them. This country is littered with buildings named after families that are too wealthy to ever go into the library themselves, and yet they want it there, ready to roll for those other people. Yeah, we can touch the folks who are users, who are in that 37% who believe, across the reference desk and through our newsletter, but to start refocusing our marketing attention on the fact that their willingness to support increased library funding. Again, this is not just for the ballot box. This is city council. This is in Lincoln. This is in Springfield. This is in DC. This is folks who are willing to cut you a check for five bucks or 50 bucks to put you in their will. It's not driven by their library use, and we've got to wake up to that fact. Also, those folks who are believers, and some of those folks who want to ask and answer their questions, the library is not perceived as simply a provider of the practical. The committed supporters hold a belief that the library is a transformational force. Why am I reading most of the words off the slide? It's because of a word like transformational force being in a data point on a survey. The force that the library is a force for good. Libraries Transform, which is the new ALA library marketing campaign, is doing great work highlighting that, and I love them for it. I want that to succeed wildly, and I want you to be able to activate the belief that people have not just an institution, but because you work there, you are actually the transformational change agents yourself. It's not just the institution. It's also the folks who work there. The factors that determine a resident's own willingness to increase their own taxes to support the library are their perceptions and attitudes about the place you work and the all y'all who work there. The perceptions and attitudes about the library and the librarian are co-equal in what, as factors, that determine somebody's willingness to see their taxes go up, either through City Council or at the ballot box. This is massive. We've got a great vocabulary about I love libraries, libraries transform, libraries change lives, libraries build communities, at your library, geek the library, library, library, library. It's all good. We got that down cold, folks. I'd love to see us bring up the other noun that matters to our taxpayers, which is the librarians. When I say librarian here, I'm not talking about just folks with an MLS. I don't have an MLS myself. I've never worked in a library. I've been on the board of trustees from my local library. I have a lot of respect for the MLS, and yet the kid who runs up to you in the grocery store and says, I love you, Ms. Karen doesn't know what your degree status is, and neither does her parent, who's also going to talk to you about what's going on at the library. I want to see more librarians out there in the world. It's hard sometimes to say, I do this. I know that. Sometimes if we just said we do this, sometimes if we just said let me tell you about my colleagues here at the library, we'd be better off because the perceptions and attitudes about the library can be really well informed by a newspaper article or somebody driving by and seeing that the parking lot is full or by us telling them the truth about where our funding is and what we need to have, but the we of it, the librarians, the people who work there, need to speak about it in an authentic voice as the owners of, owners might be the wrong word. No, owners is the right word. Owners are the responsibility of serving the public. All right. So who are these humans who are really cool and like us and are the 37% who believe? Who are these humans who are really cool and are willing to have a dialogue, ask and answer some questions, have their suspicions elade, their legitimate suspicions elade? Well, let's talk about them. How do we find them? Because you need to talk to them about the taxes in your town. You need to talk to them about the funding needs that you have in for the library. There's no other way around it. It might be a ballot measure, it might be city council, might be going to state capital, might be going to federal, might be going to a big grantor, might be putting the thermometer up on the front lawn for your capital campaigns. You can finally build that new wing. Who are those humans? Okay, to say they are involved in their communities is not a statement. Their communities might not be the library. It might not be civics kind of stuff. They don't show up at town hall meetings. If their community is Friday night lights parents who are in the high school sports, that's their community and they have an understanding about the whole child. It's the same kind of understanding that the arts parents and the band parents and the PTA parents have. Those couple of different sub-communities within education need to all be addressed because we do work with the whole child. Their community could be, you know, the Rotary Club, their community could be the Lions, the Kiwanis, the Moose, the Elks. Their community could be the civic and social organizations. It could be the soup kitchen. It certainly could be the church, synagogue, or mosque. It could be the knitters, you know, the knitters who make baby booties, you know, or the blankets. I don't knit, so I don't even know, you know, how that all works. But I do know that if they're doing it privately and then donating it to the hospital for the premature babies, that's really sweet. It's kind of an act. It's a corporal work of mercy. But if they do it in community and they probably do it at the library, they are eager to hear from you about your funding. I promise you. It might be an awkward conversation at the beginning because you haven't done it before, but they're eager to hear about your funding because they care. They care about a community that's bigger than themselves. They recognize the library's importance to their community and do a child's education. Again, it's not a duh statement. We don't necessarily do a good job of connecting the dots for folks about what story time is, just on its most basic form. Story time from the outside, if you're a non-user, it looks sweet. It looks nice. It looks like the kids are having fun. What they don't know now, those non-users, is that it's pre-K literacy. It's getting children ready to read. It's learning to read before reading to learn. It's all those things that we know inside this industry and we've not succeeded in telling the story effectively and connecting the dots for the non-users who believe. They are eager to hear about how summer reading or summer learning is not just like the nobility of putting a book into some brute child's hand. They want to hear about how it holds kids at grade level. It's after school time and the databases that you've got, whether you've got the K.L. or EBSCO or Reference USA or any other ones, that that is not simply, you know, works in the curriculum. Let's really talk honestly about how we extend the curriculum. People get excited about that, that there's leverage going on, that their schools are underfunded and under-resourced and their library is underfunded and under-resourced and yet at the same time we're able to have this blossoming flower of education in our community because, and if we could get a little bit extra funding out of it in order to extend that school day better, extend that curriculum better, they're eager to hear about it. Okay, we said before about how they're not always heavy users of the library, that is very true. They believe the library is a noble place. Congratulations, you all work in a noble place. Let's talk about it from that perspective. They see that it's vital. They are willing to increase their taxes if they're talked to about where's the money going and who is spending the money and they recognize your value, the value of the passionate librarian in the community. There's no differences, folks, between Republicans and Democrats, men and women, age, ethnicity, educational attainment and household income. None of the factors that bifurcate or divide this country politically are at play in the conversation about taxes and libraries. The only issue that comes up is if it's an any tax is a bad tax perspective, an ideology that says any tax is a bad tax. I would suggest that there's ways to work within that environment, that you can actually ask folks who are part of that any tax is a bad tax movement to not oppose the library at best, perhaps, but to look around the community broadly, to know firmly that it doesn't matter if you're in a red state, a blue state, a poor town, a rich town. If you're in a town that's got a lot of new immigrants or it's been there for a million years, that there's a willingness on the part of these people, a belief on the part of some of them, to talk about your funding and we have to be bold enough to go out and ask. Okay, we run a political action committee for libraries, we know a few things. The political action committee side of it from the political sciences, the two biggest issues, if you're running for mayor, if you're running for president, if you're running for town council, if you're running for dog catcher, it doesn't matter, the two biggest things that any campaign does, well you worry about the weather, you know, if it's the first Tuesday of November and we've got a blizzard, the alpets are off, unless you've got enough money and enough volunteers to have people bust people to the polls or drive them to the polls, you know, and campaigns do that all the time, big campaigns, small campaigns. The two biggest things for any campaign, well have they been given a reason to vote? Where's my money going? Who's spending my money? Have they been mobilized? Has somebody actually asked them to vote? But the two biggest things, one is does the voter have a personal habit, tradition, or culture of voting? Are they a voter? Big presidential elections, you see this every presidential election, there's people who come out to vote and there are people who are voters. When they come out to vote, they'll vote for the top of the ticket, they'll vote for a couple other things and they'll fall off because they came out to vote for a candidate, they're not a habitual voter. The habitual voter is like me, quite honestly, I get the sticker, I bring my kids, I let them punch a chat, we go for ice cream afterwards because I have a value. And if I don't know what's on the ballot, then I'm going to vote based on my hunch or my suspicions. I need to hear from, as a frequent voter, I need to hear from any campaign that's out in the field, otherwise I'm going to vote based on how I feel in that millisecond that I'm considering the ballot measure that I've just read for the first time. No, when we work on campaigns, we make sure that the get-out-to-vote group that we work on as every library goes to all the frequent voters and tells them what's up, to activate the 37% who believe, to assure the 37% who are suspicious or questioning, and then to just check in with the 26% because we don't want to do much more with them other than know who they are so we can avoid them in the future. The biggest other thing that we have available to us is some personal contact with the candidate or the issue. Has anybody actually talked to them about what they believe as a politician? Somebody come to their door, knock on their door, and said, hi, I'm John. I'm running for mayor. This is what I believe about our small town. Hi, I'm John. I'm with the Obama campaign. I want to tell you about what my guy believes. That's why I'm voting for him for president. Those little moments of personal interaction and contact are massive. They're drivers for voter behavior even though the presidential campaign is spending a billion dollars. Advertising, contact through social media, the knock on the door still drives voter behavior more than anything else. We have that available to us. We have that available to us whether we're running a ballot measure and we can send out the vote yes committee and say, let me tell you about my librarians. We have that all throughout the year available to us. When it comes to prepping our neighbors to be good constituents with our city councils, with our state legislators, we have that personal contact. Our thesis with every library basically is that nothing impacts voter behavior more than the perception of the institution and the people who work there. We've talked about that before. There's an awareness of some sort that something's going on that requires funding. Fundamentally, what it comes down to is that you are the candidate in whatever funding race it is that you're working on. The librarians are the candidate because nothing impacts voter behavior more than their perception of you and the place that you work. Your candidacy can be done in a way that is dramatically similar to somebody who's running for mayor or somebody who's running for president even. Dramatically similar to that because folks want to hear what their candidates believe. Folks want to be convinced by their candidate that they're worth backing. Folks want to be convinced that the vision that those candidates have for their town, for their country matters. And yeah, some people don't like the candidate. That's cool. That's why we have races in elections. Your library is not something to hide behind in any kind of funding discussion, whether it's going to city council, going to state capitol, going to DC, or going out to the voters directly. Your record is not something to hide behind when it comes to asking folks for money that shifts the landscape as a donor. I use the word incumbent here for a very particular reason because whenever you're talking about taxes, whenever you're talking about candidates, there's always an incumbent. You run as the incumbent and you say to folks, reelect me, I will take care of you some more. You run against the incumbent, you say, get rid of that shyster, I will take care of you. To run as the incumbent for the library is to probably and boldly say, new money extends our success. To run against yourself is something that you sometimes have to do very honestly, which is new money fixes problems. New money fixes problems is a conversation that the believers want to have if it's the truth. New money fixes problems is a conversation that your suspicious voters want to have because they want to hear about it. To run as the incumbent institution is cool, but who's spending my money? Who is spending my money? If we can step out from behind the institution and embrace our candidacy, that's one of our big goals here with every library. Hey Krista, I want to take a pause here. I want to see if there's any questions that come in or people sitting there in stunned silence about our thesis. Good question. Yes, does anybody have any questions? Use your go-to webinar interface, type in your question if you want to, or if you have a microphone, just type in and say, I have a mic, please unmute me, and we can ask your question that way. Nobody typed in anything while you were talking. I'm hoping that, I'm assuming that means they're just very wrapped, you know, attention. Oh, that's so cool. I'd be remiss if I didn't want to. I'm just, I don't know that I had any questions. The librarian is candidate, your idea of that, as I mentioned earlier to you, is something that I think is very important. Yes, that many librarians do have issue, trouble with talking about themselves and what they are doing and what we're doing in our libraries and any library staff, really, rather than, as you said, just about what the library does. And I think it's good that we can start thinking about that. And as I said, having your elevator speech and whatever you need to do to quickly get someone's attention about whatever the issue is that you're working on for your library, whatever voted is, whatever bond issue, whatever it is that's coming up. We do have a question just came through, actually. Yeah. Someone's to know if you provide good scripts for all librarians who are approached to have ready for citizens, like cue cards, for example, like something of here's what you can say about this particular issue. Sure. Well, I've got some, I've got some, some messaging that we're gonna, I'll go through to high level. We don't really like to provide a toolkit. We're not a toolkit kind of, kind of organization. What we can do and we love to do is be able to work with small groups and, you know, conference-sized, you know, presentations on developing the local legitimate script, you know, based on some of the guidance that we have for top-level messaging. I want everything to be localized. There's this idea that, what is it, it won't tell stories families, right, where they're like peculiar and they're unpeculiar ways. Everybody is, no, everybody's community thinks it's unique. It is kind of unique, but it's more peculiar than anything else. But I want to get everything localized for you. So yeah, I can take you through that right now. Let's go there. Yeah, I mean, there's certain, yeah, there's going to be something, and like I said, when you work with each group, like when you're here with Lincoln, you make things specific to that look at location, yeah. That's going to pay attention of the people you're trying to convince, obviously. Yeah, there's two tribes of those people. One tribe is, okay, I said before about how user status doesn't matter and we need to reach out beyond user status to the non-users, but when you begin any kind of conversation, if this is like your elevator speech, Krista, the idea that if you know it's a user, you start your elevator speech with as you know, even if they don't know, because as you know brings people into the conversation. It lets you push information to them and it lets them kind of become activated as a member of an insider group. That's not a bad thing. They're users of the library. They've been inside literally. Like as you know, at three o'clock in the afternoon, this place fills up with the high school right around the corner. The Wi-Fi goes down. Everybody who's over the age of 30 flees. As you know, we are the only place in town that does X, Y, and Z. As you know, without the funding that comes from this request to city council or this ballot measure, we can't. We'd like to. Going into that kind of a mode, to the non-user, I would highly recommend starting your talking points or your elevator speech with as you can imagine, because they're capable of imagining it. If they're a believer, this will activate their belief. If they are a questioner, it brings them into making the answer their own. As you can imagine, with the high school right around the corner, at three o'clock in the afternoon, this place fills up. The Wi-Fi goes down. Everybody who's over the age of 30 flees. As you can imagine, we're the only place in town that does X or Y or Z for those kids. As you can imagine, without the resources that come from this ballot measure, this funding request to city council, this thermometer that we've got on the front lawn, we can't. As you can imagine is a beautiful thing because you're going to hear back from non-users. Yeah, I can't imagine that. That's really amazing. I had no idea. You're also going to hear back, Nat, I can't imagine it. I don't care, and that lets you get away from those people and move on to other folks. Yeah, and sometimes you might need to. You may think you can convince everyone that the library is a great place, the non-users, but you do have to realize you might not, and that's okay. Yeah. Move on to someone who else is more receptive. One of the things that we tend to do in our marketing, though, and I'm always bothered by it, is that the only bar that we set, we set a very high bar for people to become library lovers, they've got to be a user. We always say to them, if you'd only come in and see it, you would understand. I don't have to go on the dingy with Greenpeace to try and save the whales myself in order to understand what those people at Greenpeace are doing. And to be supportive of them, yeah. I don't have to experience an Iranian or North Korean prison to fund the ACLU. I don't have to have my cold, dead hand be opened up in the gun pride out of it in order for me to check to the NRA. I can learn about it without having to experience it myself. We always tell people, you should come in and see it. Now, let's just be more narrative about it. Okay, so there's some high-level messaging that works around the country that I want to share with you. It's really basic. It's elevator speech. It's cocktail party. It's the person who you're talking to who cares. They care because they're involved in their communities. They see that the library does something good in the lives of children and for education. They see the library somewhat as leavening. And they're still yet they're a little suspicious maybe because taxes in town get spent really weird. All right, so some high-level messaging here. The library is educational partner. We need to start saying things about story time or its pre-K literacy. We've got to say it out loud. Some are reading, holds kids at grade level. We have to say it out loud. The educational day is extended. The curriculum is extended through our resources. We have to say it out loud. There's a difference between partners, by the way, and sponsors. We've got a lot of organizations that sponsor us but are not necessarily partners in our educational space. That's perfectly fine. Some of them are going to be legitimate partners though where they're contributing equally either through time or treasure or talent. Some of them are only going to be sponsors because they're going to catch you at check and yet they want to see you at work doing this transformational stuff or an education. There's a whole deck of information that we don't necessarily share well which is that the library is an economic development engine in the community. And that phrase, an economic development engine is something that I would encourage you to do. You could also use the phrase, the library is a retail anchor. By being a retail anchor, our hours matter to the rest of the retail community. We have the best gate count. Besides maybe the grocery store, people leave their homes, they go shopping, they come to the library to reward their children. People leave their homes, they come to the library, they go shopping. If we're not open on Tuesday nights and we're not open on Thursday nights and we're not open on Sundays, how does that negatively impact the rest of the retail community that people go shopping to? How can we as a neutral provider of information and recommendations potentially be a partner with the economic development corporation or the chamber on like all the restaurants in town get to do a taste of my hometown, you know, at the library? The chance to be able to show off and recommend is something that we should do more locally and not just for authors. The other aspect of us being an economic development engine is that our technology and access to technology, our databases, which we need to start talking about as business analytics and market intelligence, which is what they truly are. Help folks who have an idea, build the idea into a business and take it to market. That our technology allows people who've got a second job or second business that they're running, the eBay store, the Etsy shop to do that with a stable broadband connection. It allows us not just for the workforce literacy aspects of making sure that the workforce knows how to do their jobs. I'm sorry that the workforce is basically literate, but then the data sets that we have in the trainings we've got, the mango languages type stuff that lets people do job skills creation and building. Economic development engine is huge because we don't talk about what we do for bricks and mortar or web 2.0 businesses well enough. Okay, the social leveler conversation is something that the American public loves like crazy about libraries. Every single story that's put up on boing-boing or on Buzzfeed or on Huffington Post or any of those places that shows off that the library accepts people without fear or favor, that it lets people who've got an idea research it, who've got a play, like we shouldn't, we should be exhausted by telling that story and we still haven't told it enough. Where are my taxes going that lets everybody actually participate? Where is my neighborhood growing through smart taxes? This social leveler thing is still one of the single biggest drivers for people to understand that the librarians and the library matter in the 21st century. Don't be shy about the other two as well. The place of discovery story, the place of personal refuge, the librarians were the only people in my life who understood me. After school I went to the library and read all the Nancy Drews and all the Hardy boys because I was a latchkey kid, that the library was a place when I was young, I could learn about myself, I could do art, I could now do STEM, like if we can talk about STEM education and STEM access in the same way that, sorry, a little bit of a cold here today. So that being said, these stories are top level stories for people who, at a cocktail party, are very interested in it and it's got to be short, it's got to be tight, it's got to be about a paragraph at the most and you can do a good amount of advocacy in that paragraph. There's a few other things that are activating around the American public that we're doing when we're out in these campaigns. Like I said before, we've done 36 elections to date, we've got another 15 to do the rest of this calendar year. We've had 27 good wins, we've helped secure about $100 million for libraries, we've done negotiations with small town city councils, with big city, big county commissions. When we talk about the library we should be talking about an incubator in the community. We should be talking about how the library incubates not just ideas, not just the educational stuff, but businesses, how STEM and the arts programming incubate the next generation of craftsmen and artisans, how our community identities are incubated through this being the one place of neutral contact, of active neutral contact. If the community's on the way up, how do you grow it? On the way down, how do you save it? How do you weather a recession together? Then there's the idea of the library being leveraged. The leverage about being a retail anchor, I talked about before, we don't talk enough about how our grants, our leverage, our tax money that lets us match a grant, our tax money that lets us staff a grant, our ability to be, the library in a certain respect is, I don't know if this sounds weird or not, but for grants and capacity building, we are shaped like a cash register for money to come in from the outside. It might be money coming in from Lincoln, or from DC, or from some national organization, but to talk about that leverage that we can do by being shovel ready, but then for the day in the morning. If you've got questions you should start typing them out, but for the day in the morning. John, we do have one question going back to when you were talking about how to talk about it. Someone did want to start off the question, wanted to know, is there a good response to, I don't need a library because Amazon, the internet and streaming and everything, and she answered that because you were talking about that, but related to that, how do you, and this is in this librarian's words, how do you hold your temper and avoid pointing out the fact that the person is completely out of touch and out of date, and in her humble opinion, extremely selfish? I love you. I agree completely that that is, yeah, I have that same issue with people who don't know or friends of mine who get snarky about libraries, and I kind of just look at them as dumbfounded, like are you really, and I kind of lose it, but I'm trying to get a better way of responding. So my colleague Peter Bromberg, he's on our library board. Peter's at South, or at Salt Lake County, he's assistant director over there, he's a Princeton public in New Jersey, assistant director over there at one point. Peter is a hell of a trainer, and one of the things he does with his trainings that I really admire is some stuff from improv. You know, just your classic second city upright citizens brigade kind of improv stuff, which is that you never say no in a scene. You never say but in a scene. You always say yes, and you always say and in a scene when you're doing improv, because otherwise it shuts it down. By saying yes to it, it doesn't mean you agree, it means that you can diffuse the other person in the scene, and by saying and you can either add to a good idea that the person had at the beginning of the scene, or you can redirect it. And yet it's participatory. Yeah, we don't need libraries, everything's on the internet. We have Google. Yes, we do have Google, and what's behind the paywall right now is massive, and you didn't take any of the cleaners by it if you don't have your library card. Oh yeah, we got a Netflix account. Yes, you do, and isn't that lovely? And there's a whole bunch of people in town who don't. To be able to use that improvisational cue, yeah, I understand that seeing red the moment that you get when somebody's talking like a complete ignoramus, and yes, and it's on you, because quite frankly, you are the only expert on librarianship that that person is ever going to meet, and it is your great burden, and I appreciate it. I appreciate it very much that you're going to take that extra step with that person. All right, let me hit the damn light here. We've been staring at this slide. We know this to be true now. We've got to talk about ourselves. All those things about the libraries, leverage the libraries, incubate the libraries as an economic development engine, the libraries, educational partners, all cool, and yet the voters want to know not just where their money's going, but who's spending their money. This is really key. In my own personal experience of being a librarian, I know this to be true, is valid, and it's something that you can strongly talk about. You are an expert in 21st century library work. You can strongly talk about it, and people are actually interested. All right, a couple quick tips. A couple just quick tips, the take-homes here. The biggest thing for you, I think, is probably the ramping up your social media and humanizing your social media. If it's not just about the institution, it's about the people who work there, my big tip to you, even if you can't afford $5 a day in social media advertising, is to change your postings on social media from something like 10 o'clock, Storytime Friday in the bunker room. To Ms. Karen invites you and your kids to Storytime. Storytime is more than just fun. It's first language literacy and pre-K readiness. Ms. Karen loves your kids, and she wants to see you guys out there at 10 o'clock on Friday in the bunker room. Changing that little bit, where you put the humans into it who are doing the work, the librarians, the staff who are doing the work, it's a real big driver. And then you can use that social media posting to connect the dots for people about education, about economic development, about refugee discovery and leverage. The other big thing, I'm sorry, I just bounced out of here, is that if we are the candidate and we don't have anything that we're running for right now, I would highly recommend using some of the things you have to do when it comes to your strategic planning and your surveys for the state library, the state library commission, in a way that the candidate would do it. A candidate who's a good candidate goes out and knocks on doors and says, hi, I'm John. I'm with the library. We're out today going door to door in this neighborhood to do our strategic planning survey. Yeah, we've got a survey monkey. We were really happy that 50 people responded to it. We need to find 50 more people who aren't library users, and we're coming door to door today because it matters so much that we get your opinion and your perceptions and your attitudes about what we're up to. And if you're looking at me right now and you're thinking to yourself, I don't have a place I can do that door to door, that's fine. Go to the hardware store, the grocery store, the feed store, the pediatricians office. I can go somewhere and do it with a clipboard. And you end your conversation with them saying, thank you very much. Here's my business card. I'm your librarian. It's nice to meet you. The other big thing that you could do that everybody could do as the candidate right away, September is coming. September is library card sign up month. If we are thrilled that we get 15 people or 50 people or 500 people signing up during an average week who are coming into the library willfully coming into the library, that's an extraordinary barrier. What if we went out and knocked on the door and said, hi, I'm John. I'm your librarian. I'm with the friends of the library. I'm a volunteer this week. We're going door to door in the neighborhood because we want to see if you need a library card. This most basic form of enfranchisement to all the wonderful things that go on there. No, you don't. That's cool. How about anybody in your family? No? Okay, that's cool too. How about anybody on your block? Because I'm your librarian. Here's my business card. It's nice to meet you. It's a massive way to meet people, to break down barriers, to jump over the reference desk or the CERC desk. I guarantee that if you were to do library card sign ups door to door, that you'd have kids yelling at their parents, mom, dad, the librarians are here. There would be a lot of fun to do as well. I got some tips on our website about how to do that. Last thing, here's our website for our petitions, for our sign ups, for our events. We're hosting two events at annual conference in Orlando. If you click on events here at action.everlibrary.org and scroll down, you'll see them. One on Friday night is a benefit for us, a fundraiser. The other one is for a new foundation that's been set up by the Herd family. Cynthia Graham Herd was one of the folks who was unfortunately murdered a year ago in South Carolina at the church. She was a librarian in Charleston and her family set up a new literacy and civic engagement foundation. We're doing a benefit with the Black Caucus of ALA on Saturday night at annual to raise funds for that new foundation. We also have our petition platform, and I'd love it if you'd sign up for our newsletter. We do a lot of stuff that is focused on the public, that teaches through demonstration. I'd have you involved and looking over our shoulders, something that I welcome very much. Okay, Krista, I hope this was a good little run through here. I hope that there's some Q&A. I'm happy to hang out and chat some more. Here's my cat that could help you need us. Absolutely, yeah. Yes, thank you, John. That was actually very, that was awesome. Yeah, very, engrossing, yes. Everything you said is just, I'm just sitting here. I wish, sometimes I wish we did have our cameras set up for this because we don't always every week. A lot of nodding and uh-huh, uh-huh. Yes, of course, of course, coming from me. Yeah. We do have a couple of comments, questions that did come through also. And actually, one person did say, props to you very much. So, the only thing better than the information presented on the slides is the complete webinar. It should be your acquired viewing for every advocate, supporter, staff member, and library school student. Hey, do me a favor, email that to me at john.crosscut, everylibrary.org. I'll put you up on the website. That's beautiful. Absolutely. And she did have a question, too, about, she's asking about, you know, what to do to talk to the people who say, you know, that there are other things that are, why do we need libraries? But another issue she says, I repeal the encounter, because the community I tend to interface with is the argument of library as equalizer and open to all, yet still not as accessible to individuals with disabilities as they might want it to be. I'm not sure that this seems to me as something that the libraries need to work on. Yeah, when it comes to ADA and what not, yeah. Yeah, if you've got an ADA change, it needs to be made to your physical plant, your space, and that's going to cost money. Let's talk about that honestly. Let's talk about that aspirationally. There you go. If they say, but you're not accessible, say, well, help us be. Help us be, yeah. And how do we get there? The, and then if it's an issue of budget that prevents you from doing blind in the, in the handicap better, let's talk about that honestly, you know? And it doesn't have to necessarily just be writing a grant. It could be about changing the allocation from city council in order to get that done. Absolutely. Another comment, I guess I'd say here about strategic planning. So what else here from the library Christian says, it's strategic planning. We ask them to ask people not about the library, but about their views of the community. For example, what are the major issues you're concerned about in this town? See what they're interested in, what they're worried about, concerned about thinking about, and then, you know, connecting that to what the library does. I'm with you on that. The, if that's the Harwood model, if that's the World Café model, if that's the, what's the other one? I can't turn a blank on it. Yeah, that's exactly right. Mike, my feeling on what to do with your strategic plan though, afterwards, I'm kind of agnostic about the approach that you take in building your strategic plan, as long as it's legitimate and open, transparent, consultative. I would love to see, okay, if the librarian is the candidate, then how does a candidate, you know, begin to surface among the public? We've just gone through this with presidential candidates. You know, the first thing that the presidential candidate does in order to be seen as a legitimate candidate, one of the traditional things that they do is they write the book, you know? Like, it takes a village, make America great again, dreams from my father, you know. Dreams from my father did more to bring President Obama, then State Senator Obama, onto a national scene than anything else did. If we named our strategic plans, dreams of my hometown public library, or dreams of my hometown, what would that do to actually talk honestly about our hope and our vision as a library for doing librarianship in our town? Dreams from my hometown library would be a hell of a title. I'm kind of agnostic about how you get there, you know? Pull up their heartstrings, absolutely. Yeah, and talk about your goal, you know? Yeah, they're talking about the ADA, this is saying my brain is responding to that, which she's asking about it. She often sees reluctance on the part of library administration to put money towards services for, and quote, their term, so few in the terms of ADA. We don't have that many people, so yeah, but the ones that you do, it's going to make an impression on, and yeah, that's the library administration. Well, maybe that's actually, as a candidate, you go and get someone in the community to really come at your administration about it. I would bet you a nickel that the compassion in the community is massive, even though it's only for a few people. And to find that out is part of your planning process, you know? Yeah, right, and just to give you a point, we need to change our attitude about them, yep, absolutely. Right. All right, any other last minute questions or just exactly at 11 01 central time, which is when we, I started things up for 10 01. Anybody have any last minute questions you want to throw at John while he's still here for you? Of course, you've got his contact information there. Definitely connect with them on Facebook and on their websites. I am, I'll tell you that, so I'm keeping up on what they do, of course. We have had just some comments for you, John, saying that agree that this was, agree about the previous comment about the praise for this session. She's a little upset. Where was this when the city council was slashing our budget to 40 by 40% last fall? She wished we, she had known about you guys to help out in their town. Well, we can come back around, drop an email, we can come back around and start rebuilding. Yeah, it's not over. You know, you can always, yeah, get things back. And she also said this has been a top five CE hours in all the years I've been doing this. Wow. Awesome. Yeah. I will send you these comments. Like I said before, we're interested, we're eager. Most of the work that we do is pro bono as well by the way. That's the beginning. We do this for free. We're donor supported. Our donors, coming in at this page, $5 a month, $10 a month. We've got some nice corporate donors like your Gales and your Upskos and your Dempkos and your Mangos. Rosen Publishing. We do all of this to the best of our ability for free, for the libraries. If we've got to travel, we do ask for travel reimbursement because we want our consulting dollars to go further. A lot of what we do is just all virtual, you know, we never actually even set foot in town. But to have the librarian, to have the person on this webinar, the person who's listening to it later, have it kind of activated in your heart or in your guts about where to go with this, we'll take a confidential contact from you as well. I mean, I don't want to get anybody in trouble. So we can work with you though. Yes. Reach out to them and see what you can explain what's happening in your town and see what could be done. I don't know, that's how we did it here in Nebraska. There was, you guys didn't actually come here. It was all done through online resources, through emails to our advocacy people here at NLA. And it worked, yeah. All right. It doesn't look like any more urgent questions are coming through right now. That's okay. If you do have them, contact John later and he'll be able to talk to you. So thank you very much, John, for coming on the show for us. I'm glad we finally got you on here. I've been, as I said, watching what you've been doing for a few years as you've been doing this. And I was glad to finally get you out there. Get you on our show to share everything. It's been a real fun. Yeah. All right. I'm going to pull back control now to my screen here. There we go. All right. So that will wrap it up for this week's show. It has been recorded and will be posted here on our website. This is our main page right here underneath our upcoming shows is where all of our archives go. So later this afternoon, most likely it'll be done at the mercy of the processing through YouTube and getting all that up, but it'll be posted here. This is last week's show. We had a recording on YouTube presentation. I don't know, John, if you have your slides somewhere you want us to link to or how, if you share those or not, we can do that. And any links that we have, I've been collecting into our delicious account, which has been being temperamental this morning. So I'm not sure if I can... They just changed their system a bit. So take it a while. But they'll be up there whenever we get our recording up. So when it is ready, I'll let all you guys know, send you all emails about that. I hope you join us next week when our topic is why use Google Books. Devadre goes who's here at the Nebraska Library Commission is going to talk about the resources that are actually really good in there. The free resources in the Google Books program that you can use for research and projects and things. So sign up for that and any of our future shows. Also, we are on Facebook. So if you are a big Facebook user, please do pop over there to Facebook and like our Encompass Live page. I post notices about shows. Here's my reminder for this morning. People could pop in on the fly if they wanted to. Reminders of upcoming shows. And when our recordings are available, or I'll post it on here. So if you are big on Facebook, please do give us a like over there to keep up on what we're doing. Other than that, that wraps it up for today. Thank you very much for attending Encompass Live. And we'll see you next week on the show. Bye-bye.