 All right, so first up this year we have a repeat performance or repeat performer, excuse me, different talk. Natalie Bazan, the director of the Hopkins District and Door Township Libraries in Tennessee, was on last year talking about non-book collections. And this year we have her back to speak on reaching out, fighting back against a bad public image. Natalie, go ahead and take it away. Oh, God, trust me, right now I wish I was in Tennessee. I'm up in Snowy, Michigan. Oh, I'm sorry. You're fine. You're fine. Okay, let's see if I can get this to show. There we go. All right. So I am very excited about ARS-L2. This is going to be my first year I actually get to attend. But on to why I have this presentation to begin with, right? So Hopkins District Libraries covers about 100 square miles and it's about 4,700 people. Door Township Library, which I just started out last year. So I've been there just over a year now, covers about 74, 7,500 people and it's one township, so 36 square miles. However, when I started at the Hopkins District Library, they had had a director for 34 years, 32 years, sorry. And she believed that children shouldn't be in the library. Or if they were, they should definitely be silent. So that was kind of terrible. And we happen to be right around the corner from the local elementary, middle and high school. So this was really, really bad. Door Township Library, which I just took over, had a director who is there 23 years and she believed her motto, which I found all over the office, was it's a good day in the library when no one is there. So you can see why we had some issues. It was not a good time to start with. Our first line of defense we found was our library staff and trustees. They're the ones who are meeting the public every day. They are out there. If you're working back in your office, they're the ones who are seeing people constantly. And by the way, as we go through here, I'm going to have questions for you. I like to talk. I'm really, really into talking. I enjoy it very much. However, I want to make you guys talk too, because no one wants to just hear me for an hour. So if you have questions, please type them in. And I'm hoping that the moderators will just interrupt me and I will work on answering your questions or we'll throw it out to the rest of the community here. So I started up in the Hopkins Library and we had some very, very excited staff members. They were thrilled to do new things. They were thrilled to get the kids back in there and they were really, really happy and the staff, the community loved them. So there's no way in the world I was going to change them. In fact, the first thing I heard my entire first week is, please don't fire anybody. It's like, okay, I won't fire Linda and Jerry. I promise. I started up in door and we had one staff member who definitely adhered to the Itzhakar Day in the library when no one is there. Everything must be absolutely perfect at all times. If a book is out of place, somebody should be written up for it, things like that. When we replaced that staff member, we saw people coming into the library who hadn't come in in 10, 15 years. Everyone was very excited. They were thrilled with our new staff members who took over for them. But a big thing that I found out, especially with the Door Township Library, is they hadn't been involved in any of the changes coming into the library. So we wanted to, I wanted to make sure that they were involved. They're the ones who have lived in this community, worked with this community. In Door, I have one person who has worked at the library for 17 years, another for 11. In Hopkins, I have 11 and seven years. So we have people who have, they have lived there their entire lives. They have worked with these people. They're most of their adult lives and they know what people like. So it's kind of silly for me to just throw things out there when they can tell me, they can give me an honest opinion. Is this going to work? Is this not going to work? We have talked about different programs. We make sure that we have staff meetings where it's not just me talking at them. It's a collaborative thing. And we do the same thing with the board. So every board meeting is pretty long. I will admit we have it down to about an hour at one at Hopkins Library, but in Door, it's still about two hours. But we all get a chance to chat. What do we think would work better? What kind of fundraising activities do we think might work in this community? What can we do to get people excited about the library, about literacy, about our groups, about anything, really anything, and about the community itself? So it's been quite a trial, but that's all right. It has worked out very well. We've seen a huge number of increases in staff and people coming in, in checkouts, and we don't necessarily measure everything in the number of items checked out. We're more interested in the stories. So we've had people who have gotten jobs that we helped out doing new resumes that didn't know how to use a computer and now they're emailing their friends and their family and all sorts of fun things. And our library board meetings are something that we try to encourage people. So how many of you out there, and yes, this is where you get to respond, invite people or encourage your community groups to attend your library board or your library board meetings or your trustee meetings, whichever one you call them. We started encouraging people and groups to come in and my library board president decided she was really saddened by it. We have a teenager who works there and she was really saddened by the fact that this person had no idea what a lot of these terms were. They didn't know anything about Robert's rules of order. They didn't know why we would second something. They didn't know, you know, what are these minutes? Why do you call them minutes? Different things like that, pretty much anything like that. So she went through and created a handout that we can give to our high schools, encourage, I guess, our anyone in government or civics classes to attend a local governmental meeting. And frequently they offer them a bonus. They get some type of credit towards their class, something like that, to attend these meetings. Well, we decided that if they're going to attend, they should probably understand what's going on. And our local governmental meetings tend to go really, really fast and they don't stop for anybody. So we changed our meetings. So if they have questions, they get a handout when they come in that we can sign off on and they can give to their teacher. And if they have questions, we stop and we'll go through and explain. Why are we doing this? If they have ideas, they can feel free to chime in. It has led to a teen group that has formed and helped us out with different decision-making for the teens, which is very, very nice. It's been a little while since I've been a teenager, so it's really helpful to get their opinion on things. But one of the things that we had to make sure to do is be really descriptive when we are typing these things out. If we don't do that, they don't know what these words mean. We need to give them a vocabulary. I mean, the first time you encounter some of these words, they could have a dozen different meetings. It's really hard to keep up with some of these things. So how many people out there responded that they invite people in? If you do, you can either send a chat or there's a little raise hand icon that was in the beginning slides on your GoToWebinar interface. Just click on that and we can count. We do have one comment actually, Natalie. Someone said that their library invites the public. There's always a place on the agenda for public slash community participation. That's fantastic. We have some community groups that will come in. We actually have the Allegan County Library, or Allegan County Community Foundation just came in and talked to my board members and any community members who are there. It is really exciting when they come and they want to participate. Generally, I will fully admit, generally our meetings are really dull and boring and there's not that many people there, but we try and we keep reaching out to the schools to make sure that they understand that this is a possibility. Their kids can come and we will definitely make sure that they get a chance to actually participate in government and help us make decisions. Okay, programming. I've talked about programming in the past. Programming is something that I am very, very passionate about in libraries, mostly because neither of my libraries had any programming besides summer reading at all, not for any age. So, expanding programming or adding programming is a real way that you can embrace what your community loves. So, if you want to type in a comment, what is your community like? I have one community that I work with who absolutely loves smoking meat, right? They, hey, there are very interesting people sometimes and it is fantastic. There are a large number of hunters. So, we have a lot of people who are interested in preserving meat and doing things like that. So, we are working on finding somebody who will come in and teach a class on how to smoke your meat or how to preserve it. We have done beer and winemaking classes. Our area has a large number of people who are interested in DIY. We've had fly time, we had a champion fly tire. I was not aware these things exist, but I can now tie a fly. I'm not very good at it, but I can do it. It has been really interesting to see the number of people who will now walk up to you and say, hey, what do you think about doing one of those melted crayon picture days? Or what do you think about having a beekeeper come in? I know somebody. So, not only are they now giving us ideas which is bringing more people in, people who maybe they don't read, maybe they don't want to read. Well, that's fine, but we want to know that they, we want them to know that this is a place of learning. They can come here and they can learn about what they love and they don't have to necessarily do it through books. Maybe we have to do it through programs to embrace those people. And slowly but surely we can let them know, hey, did you know that we have some nonfiction books over there on beer and winemaking that maybe you wanna check out? Hey, did you know that I have a fly time kit so you don't have to buy the tools and you can check that out along with the book and then away you go. And it gets them interested and excited. We have a Ducks Unlimited group nearby that we work with and every year they do a bluegill fishing thing for little kids and we'll make sure that we're there. And we do a little game and they can do all kinds of stuff and we bring like a fly time kit and some flies and things about hunter safety. We talked to the Michigan DNR and we have a hunter safety class at least once a year and every year it is packed, 40 kids, which is great because Hopkins is, this is held in Hopkins, it's a village of 600 people. So I am packed every single year. We have one coming up next month actually and it's already full. Okay, so what types of things did people respond with? Oh, let me see. We're getting genealogy, hunting, essential oils, cookbook book clubs, bee keeping, a sockhop at the library, painting classes. We're just all over. Fantastic. I can say that we have done the bee keeping and it is a little bit nerve wracking. Our gentleman brought in a enclosed hive with glass sides so you could see the bees and you could hear the bees. But it was really exciting and we had a lot of people who came for that. We've done the painting classes. We actually, one of my libraries is not a dry library. Now we don't have alcohol during the day. Obviously we have beer and wine making classes. We have alcohol, but we don't do it while the library's open. We do it afterwards and you have to be 21 to attend, but we have done the wine and canvas events. That brings in a lot of people. Now the local bar got mad at us so we have kind of come back on that a little bit because they are also doing that. So it's another thing that you have to be careful with. Is your 4-H group, maybe you have a 4-H group in your area, do they do a soap making class? Are you competing with them for people? It's one of those things where you have to get accustomed to talking to your local groups and find out, what are they doing? We also do special programs, which yes, these other ones sound like special programs, but these are something entirely different. So I want you to think about what types of special programs you could do and feel free to write in. We have done, our goal with doing something like this was it's not always about the library, but it's about the library. We want people to be drawn to the area. Hopkins, like I said, is a village of about 600 people. Door is larger, door is more spread out. Well, the rest of my Hopkins district is very spread out, but door is spread across the township and it is a bedroom community. So that is a hard sell. You're trying to pull these people back from the larger areas that they work in, that they spend a lot of time in and having them focus on the community they live in. So our goal was to bring attention to the area. We have a summer secret project where like I said, our goal is to bring attention to that particular community and this will be the first year for door, but Hopkins has done this several times and actually the picture up there is one of the ones we've done. We did a yarn bombing. So there is a huge antique market just south of us and there's a main road that goes down to it. We put up this big sign that says yarn bombing this way and we had a huge number of people turn off that road, come down a couple of miles to see the village of Hopkins which was all decked out in crazy yarn creations, right? We had yarn faces on trees. We had yarn covered cars. We had all kinds of stuff. Yes, the yarn covered car cover was stolen, but that's all right. Anybody who really wants a yarn cover, a yarn car cover can feel free to steal it anytime. This picture was, we did a gorilla gardening event. One of my board members cut out those wonderful gorillas and we had people put them up in their yards around town and we asked some of the flower wholesalers in our area and retailers for that matter if they had stuff lying around to donate to us and told them that we were going to give it away and we were trying to improve the area. Ideally we wanted perennials because that would give us the greatest impact for the longest amount of time and we did. We had over $10,000 in perennials donated to us and we gave them all away to the community. We gave them to the churches who gave them to different people. We had people showing up. We had a group that went around town and planted in front of the township hall around the library right under our sign there. We have a bridge in town so we did each corner of the bridge all over. It was amazing and very, very bright that year. Now, I'm not gonna tell you what this year's summer secret project is, but it's gonna be exciting. Winter secret projects, we generally stay with the same idea. We wanna make sure that people are thinking about others during the holiday season and we start just after Thanksgiving and we go all the way through Christmas Eve. We have done the, you've been jingled, you've been socked. If you don't know what those are, just Google them. You'll see some really super cute images and little posters that you can print off. You don't actually have to make your own stuff for this, it's wonderful. Again, our cost is really, really low on these things. So we went through and came up with a random list of people that we thought really needed cheering up and maybe we had one gentleman who had fallen off a roof while he was helping his neighbor fix shingles that had come down on a storm and because of the way his insurance worked, it wasn't covered. He was very, he had lost his job. He was very slowly recovering. So we did, you've been socked this past year and we made sure he got a sock. He called in tears. He was so happy and so excited that people were thinking about him. He was gonna pass it on right away, just that moment. He told us who he was gonna send it to. It was really wonderful. So we asked these people, anybody who receives the stocking to report back to the library. So that gives us these stories that I can share with you. It gives us data, so I know how many people it's reaching. No, not everybody's gonna respond back, but we have people 30, 40, 50 miles away who are receiving our stockings and it's hilarious. It's great. They're calling us up saying I have no idea where you are but I just got your stocking. We had all of the stockings made by a local lady and our business association covered the cost. So we put a little sign on there saying, hey, our business association paid for this. It was very wonderful, wonderful of them and it brought more attention again to our community. Now what kind of special programs do you think you guys could do? I'll give you a quick rundown of things that we have done to bring people in but they're not quite the same. We have a forensic lab about 45 minutes away or so. We ask them, hey, you ever think about coming in to do a little how-to? Yes, we could be teaching serial killers. I really don't know. However, we could be getting people interested in the field and I prefer to focus on that latter one. We had them come in and they set up an entire murder in our teen room. A little tiny room that had a dead body in there and shell casings. Our library cat had a fantastic field day with those shell casings. It was great. We just did a chocolate tasting fundraiser. Seriously, who doesn't like chocolate? I mean, there was no downside there. We have a large community group who likes to do DIY projects. So we have done DIY things. I've talked to other libraries who have ghost tours or historical buildings and they will do tours to benefit the library. So what things did you guys come up with? We have, let me see, art exhibits that feature local artists, plant swap, repeating the sidewalks with positive quotes. I don't know where you see what else we got here. Canning, woodworking, game night. Let me get back to the previous questions. We're kind of, that's what we've gotten so far. That's fantastic. We're pretty interested in the shell casing toys for cats here. Well, you have no idea. Our library cat just started. She's a part timer. She's at both of my libraries. She comes with me and then she comes home. She's actually prowling around me right now. And she just had a field day. We had to count the shell casings once we were done and make sure that they got back because they had to log them back in when they got back to the forensics lab. It was really bad, but it was fun. It was a lot of fun. Okay, so here's another one of those question things for you. We have, we are starting Community Garden in our area and both libraries actually. If you had a Community Garden, what kind of groups of people do you think you could appeal to with that garden? So think about it. Feel free to put a message in there. We are starting a Community Garden because we want to have gardening classes. We want to have food classes. We want things that we can give away to people. And we have the land. We have, it's not a big area. The Hopkins Library is actually going to be in these big pots I got last year from Home Depot Clarence down at 6 Vexapiece. I mean, you can stretch your arms huge and yes, I know you can't see me, but I'm doing it, of course. And that's about how big they are. They're huge. And we have them around the library and we're just gonna put different herbs and things in there. And we're gonna do herb mix classes and how to make your own herbal teas and different things like that. It doesn't have to be something like you see in this picture. The Bridgeman Public Library did a fantastic job. I don't know if there's anybody here from them right now, but I stole your picture. It looks amazing. They did the raised beds. They have all the community members out there. We are doing raised beds and we're doing a very small, the little landscaping you have around the library. We took out one section of that and we are putting in the raised beds and a couple trellises so we can grow things. But we're looking at doing things with heirloom seeds because that is very popular in our area and we want people to understand what's the difference? What's the difference between heirloom seeds and high-bred seeds? But we're in luck. We have a master gardener on staff at one of my libraries. She is extremely excited about doing these classes. That's at the Door Township Library and she has been planning out, she has a whole list. I don't think she can fit all of this into a year, but she tells me she's gonna do it so I can't wait to see it. And my parents had a greenhouse business for 20 years. So we have a little bit there, but you can find master gardeners and they have to put in volunteer time to get their master gardener certification. So it's not as if you can't do this on your own even without those people on staff. You can. And you really don't need that much space. I will be posting pictures eventually on our Hopkins Facebook page of the pots that we're gonna use. And they're just big pots out in front of the library. Gives us a little bit of color, gives us a little bit of height in our landscaping. And most importantly, you don't wanna plant mint in your landscaping. So it will contain that. So we don't have to worry about it spreading so much and we're gonna make sure to cut it before it flowers. We also, it gave us another opportunity to talk about our seed library. And again, this is not something that has to cost you much. I wrote two different seed sellers, seed catalogs and said, hey, can we get, do you have any heirloom seeds lying around? We wanna start up the seed library and loan them out to people. Now you have to be careful these days because there are a lot of bands coming up. You can read all kinds of articles on it. Unfortunately, people are cracking down on seed libraries, a lot of seeds, not necessarily heirloom seeds that you get from people, but seeds that you get from manufacturers. They might be copyrighted. So then you have lots of copyright issues there. But the other thing that you have to think about when you're doing one of these is just, does your library own the land? And door, we don't. The township owns the land, they own the building, they maintain it. However, we've talked to the township about it and they are fine with us taking out that section of landscaping was really ratty anyway. So they're fine with us taking that section out and turning it into a little garden as long as we watch it. And that's our job, that's fine. And Hopkins, we do own the land. So we don't have to worry about it so much. We just talk to our board and say, hey, what do you think about doing this? And of course, they were very excited. It was wonderful. And do you have any green space around your library? Maybe it could be, maybe you don't own the land and your township or city or whoever isn't interested in doing something like that. Well, you can talk to a church or we have a thrift store right down the street or we have the VFW Hall is right next, or no, Legion, the American Legion is right next door. You could work with them. You could work with anybody who happens to be around your building. Even homeowners might be interested in lending you a small area to do this. So what kind of groups did you guys come up with? And then I'll tell you what I came up with. Laura? We see I have low income and senior citizens. When one person commented that they do storytime at the community garden. Talk to the microphone. You need to talk towards the microphone. They have storytime at the community garden. Nice. They nominated a good neighbor award. And so they have, yeah, they had a nominated a good neighbor award and they honored people at a reception. One group has a cabin fever reliever in February. It's a fully cook off dessert auction and basket raffle and cake walk. Sounds like. We figured we are appealing to our community to bring in the people who are interested in gardening. We have a large number of people who are interested in organic everything, which is great. And they are the people who are willing to come in and help us out planning this. So they come in. We have people who are turning to more natural herbal remedies. So we have, I actually, we have a herbalist who's coming in next month to do a talk on that and setting up your garden so that you can take advantage of some of these herbal remedies along with using some of those things for culinary thing, culinary cooking. We have the thrift store that I mentioned just down the store, just down the street also feeds the homeless or the people who don't necessarily have access to a garden in our community. So we can donate to them and we've talked to them about that. And we're looking at hopefully some time in the future we have a small community room and we would like to put a little kitchen in there so we can do cooking demos. And that way, we have the team group who comes in, they don't necessarily, I've talked to them, they don't know how to cook. So we want them to know how to cook and how to cook healthy before they go off to college and then be surrounded with all sorts of lovely food which is not necessarily maybe the most healthy for you. So that's who we're working on appealing to. Clubs, so how do we use clubs to break our bad image? We have found that it's a matter of appealing to the largest number of people possible. You need these people to realize that you're not the same place that you used to be. One of our board members wanted to actually change the name of the library so that we disassociated with the past 23 years into our, but we don't wanna go that far. We want people to realize that the library has changed. So we started up clubs and some of these are in Hopkins, some of these are in Door and some of these are ones that we're looking at starting sometime soon. I already mentioned that we have people who are really excited about smoking meat and hunting, arts and crafts. We have to remember that clubs are not a one size fits all thing. Yes, everybody has a reading club or some type of reading thing, but on the other hand, not everybody is going to be interested in a barbecue club at their library, right? Not everybody is necessarily gonna be interested in the embroiderers guild of America meeting at your library, which they have and it has helped them bring in new members. I'm really excited about that. But you have to be sensitive to what your community is interested in and you have to advertise a little bit for it. So think about what is popular in your community? What do people like to do and just make a list? Maybe start a little survey. Maybe it's just a little paper, half slip of paper thing they can check off. Hey, I like to garden. I like to read. I like to do anything. We've done the wine and canvas. In one, we do appetizers and canvas in the other library. Very popular. They always fill up. We're looking at possibly starting a travel club. So come and talk about places you've been. Hey, we've got a projector. We've got a slide. Now we don't. Yeah, we do. We do have an old real to real movie projector. I do not have a slide projector yet, but I'll probably end up getting one at this point. Give people an opportunity to share the places they've been and the things that they were really excited about. And it's another way of preserving our history. So we have a lot of people who are going now. We have a lot of people who, I talked to a gentleman who was in Germany during World War II and saw his photos. I have been to those same places and I have photos of those same places. They are very, very different from the past three or four years versus back in the 1940s. It is really interesting for people to see that and to realize how much things have changed. Okay. So working together. I've talked about this in 2012 when I presented for Big Talk for Small Libraries. You can look it up on their website. It's called a community working together. So I'm going to go over this pretty fast. You need to work together. You can't do this alone. A bad image can be created overnight. It's not going to take one day, one week, one year to repair. It's going to take a lifetime of building it, building it back up. And you can do that more effectively if you're working with other organizations because they're spreading the word for you. It's less work that you actually have to do. Yes, initially you have to partner with these organizations. You have to get something going with them. You have to share their information. So they'll share your information on Facebook, build trust with them. But after you get that established, it's much less work for you to maintain. You can work with, and don't just stay with the media or governmental organizations. Work with the churches. You know, a lot of them have a weekly bulletin, or make announcements before service. You can email them and say, hey, would you be willing to talk about the fact that the library is going to do a Pisanke decorating class before Easter? Pisanke are traditional Ukrainian Easter eggs. And we want to invite everybody to come in and participate. You can work with the schools and tell them if they're within walking distance, hey, we would love to do a flowers in February. That's what we just completed. And encourage the students to come in and learn about flowers, learn about planting, get ready for spring. And we told them this year to decorate up bags to put their flowers in, to give to somebody, to think about somebody out beside themselves. And then we gave them information on our summer reading program. So it's a good way that you can bring people in from all over and maybe a good way to bring in people who don't come to the library very often. Maybe they don't live in your area. They're just on the outside boundaries of your area. You can work with historical groups. You can work with any organization. I mean, we have talked to Ducks Unlimited. We have worked with the NRA. We have, trying to be as diverse as possible is going to expand the people that see you. Working just with literacy councils is fantastic and they're built in. They already believe exactly what you're saying. They understand the need for literacy. They understand why you have to have people coming in and learning these things and practicing these things. But you're preaching to the choir. I'm not saying you shouldn't work with them. You should, you most certainly should, but you're preaching to the choir. You need to look outside and bring in some of these organizations that maybe are now automatically something that a library would look at. Okay, so make a list. We have a gentleman from the robotics club in school who comes in and helps us teach our computer classes. It could be a little bit of anything like that. Make a list of what you can potentially do for them and what they can potentially do for you. And that'll give you a working plan for the future and you can check them off. Yes, I went to see the Hopkins Robotics Club. Yes, I went to see the Door Business Association and they are gonna work with us. Yes, I went to see the casino and they are interested in putting up posters for some big event that we're gonna do. It could be anything. Okay, community outreach. This is kind of a no-brainer, right? We all need community outreach and I can't think of very many better ways to break a bad image than going out into the community and doing things. Schools make total sense. You work with a school librarian. You pull in those kids as much as you can. You go to see them. Sometimes the school can't come to you so you go to the school. Yes, I know this is really hard with a small staff. I have two part-time ladies in Hopkins and me and I'm also part-time down there and I'm part-time in Door. And I have six people up in Door but they're all part-time except one. So we are definitely pressed for staff but that's where you try to pull in volunteers. And maybe it's previous library employees who already know all about the library. Maybe it's people in the area who absolutely love and adore everything that you've been doing and you say, hey, how would you like to go to the school and talk to them about why the library is a good thing and bring incentives. I brought a bag of suckers and went to see all kinds of middle school classes. You have no idea what those kids will do for a sucker. They will tell you everything they know about the library and then you can correct what they don't know or what they knew but it's not like that anymore. We don't shush people. Well, unless they're really bad. We have DVDs. We let people convert VHS to DVD, preserve your history. We have postcard exchange programs going on. All sorts of things that bring these kids in and make them excited. Talk to the churches again. See if you can go to the Vacation Bible School and teach a little class or work with their libraries. Maybe you had a bunch of books donated that would fit better at the church than they do for you or you've already got them and they don't. Work with the local governments and host a candidate forum. You've got three people who are vying for the township supervisor position. Have them talk. Ask the media to give you questions to ask them and have them talk in front of people, in front of their constituents, their future possible constituents. Okay, so think about what unique organizations your library can partner with. I see I only have 20 minutes, so I'm going a little bit faster. Welcome packets are something that we just started and we're just rolling out now. It took a while for me to put these together. I will not lie about that. This does take some time. If you have people who are moving into your area, Door is definitely an expanding community. Hopkins is not expanding that much yet, but Door is located right on the expressway. They're building a large outlet center just north of us. We have a casino that moved in. That's between Door and Hopkins, but on the other side of the expressway, it is bringing a lot of people to our area. Well, we want to be the first smiling face they see in Hopkins or Door. And to do that, we decided that we were gonna have a welcome packet. How many of your communities you can do is a little raised hand icon thing. How many of your communities already have welcome packets for the new residents? We decided to take this and put it together. It's an eight and a half by 11 sheet, print it landscape, fold it together, and staple and you're done. It is only seven to eight pages long, but it's front and back. So each sheet of paper is actually four pages in our booklet, which cuts us down to seven or eight pages total. Printing off seven to eight pages, yes, we do print them in color, but that's not a terrible cost. You're looking at maybe, let's just say it's 10 cents a page. You've got well front and back, so maybe $14.50, $1.60 total per booklet. I talked to our equalization, our townships to see if we could get the addresses of people who have just moved in. They're not entirely sure they can give us that, but what they can do is encourage us to leave them with the local grocery store. Our post office said that we can leave them right there so when people come in to sign up for a new post office box or to change their address, they can give them one. Our bank took a bunch of these and is willing to hand them out to people who come in and sign up for a new account or talk about just having moved in and they wanna convert or change their home account to be this bank. It has helped us immensely. So what types of things would you put in here? Why would you do this? Because you are the first thing that they're gonna read about. Instead of them just driving by, even if you're on Main Street, instead of them just driving by and not even seeing you, not thinking about you for a minute. Every time they look at this packet, they're gonna see, hey, the Door Township Library is welcoming us and look, they won this big state award. Isn't that amazing? And then they're gonna open it up and they're going to get township information. They're gonna find out about our parks. They're gonna find out about our businesses. They're gonna find out about annual events that happen in the community that everybody knows, but they don't because they just moved in. They're gonna find out about churches, where to go for daycare, where to go, what schools are available, parochial and public, what types of facilities are available for home schoolers. Anything that we could think of, where to find a good campgrounds or a golf course or a bowling alley or grocery store, where to get internet, where to get your trash service. Literally anything we could think of. And then a huge section about the library. Along with that in the annual events, we put things about the library, where to access the internet. If you don't get it at home or you can't get it at home, you can come to the library. This is a real possibility for you guys to get out there and market yourselves. Market what we have and make people aware that, hey, the library has everything. It's the library. So people have been very excited to have moved in and received these. So how many of you guys said that? You have these packets already. Laura, let me see. One person tells us our local newspaper, publishes a county guide each year with all the information. And then the library purchases the inside back page add and has information inside as well, which includes all the library service and contact info. They, each new person who gets a library card gets a packet with library services and contacts. Couple of people are saying that the Chamber of Commerce does this in their town. Has a new. That's wonderful. Unfortunately, we don't have a chamber yet. So. One place says they have a books for babies program where they give free books to newborns at the local hospital. And that has a pamphlet about their 1,000 books before kindergarten program. That is great. So okay, we do have a question here about, when you get your volunteers, do you require background checks? We do not require background checks. Part of the reason is, it would be very off-putting for some of our people. And part of the reason is, if they're working with kids, the example that I threw out of them working in a school is not actually something we have done with volunteers yet. But if they are going to the school, they're going with one of us. So they're always gonna be with a staff member. We don't actually have volunteers who are leading classes with children by themselves. We do have volunteers who teach adult classes. Most of our volunteers work on library shelving, and they're going through the stacks and making sure everything is all set. They're running a book sale and taking care of books that come in. They're helping us to cover books, things like that. We are looking at expanding that and there is the possibility we'll start doing background checks. I really hope it's not something that we're going to end up being required to do at some point. That would be kind of off-putting for some of our volunteers. On the plus side, we know most of these people, they have lived in the community for, you know, umpteen years, I don't wanna guess, I'll just go with it. So that gives us a pretty good idea of who would rather work with adults who is really good with kids and we have a lot of former teachers that help and volunteer. So that's why we don't do it. Okay, so advertising. Advertising is the number one way to reach out to people if you don't have an advertising budget, even if you can only put 20, 30, 40 bucks in there to start with, try to do a monthly budget. So if you've got 20 bucks a month, I actually want to quick show you Facebook. Yes, I know I was supposed to close Facebook, but I actually want to show you something here. Can everybody see that? Yep, we're all good. Is my Facebook on? Okay. This is an ad that we ran. So Hopkins, I mentioned the flowers in February that brought in over 200 kindergarten and first grade students. And we had some flowers left over, so we're bringing them up to door. The elementary schools in door are a little bit farther away. They certainly can't walk when it's negative, I don't know what it was this morning, like negative 10 out. So we would rather have them come in afterwards. And we decided to post this on our Facebook and we also boosted that post. So there's that little button that says boost this post. That's Facebook advertising. We paid 20 bucks, that's what we're gonna do for this month. That's what we're gonna spend our money on. And we have reached, you can see there, 1700 people. That's pretty good. We only have maybe 800 followers, which is fantastic for us, but it's still small. And we've had comments and shares. This is where you want to focus your attention. You want to make sure that you get more likes, comments and shares because that makes your post viewable by those people's friends and it will hit more people. So for 20 bucks, we've hit 1700 people. Just think about that. For 20 bucks, what can you do? And this is actually for $8 because we haven't even used our whole 20 yet. For $8, we've hit 1700 people. What else can you do for $8 that would hit 1700 people? All right. So you can have a very small budget and still be able to do things like that. My advertising budget in Hopkins, I think for the year, is $400 and indoor it's larger because I have a larger budget, but it doesn't have to be that big. You just have to think, okay, so what is your community use? Do they all read the local paper? We have a local free newspaper that comes out to everybody. Do they all read that? Do you have a small local movie theater? Can you get an ad there? Do you, does everybody have internet access? We actually have a broadband survey that's going around right now in our county because a large swath of our county doesn't have access to high speed internet. It's either too hilly or too wooded or too rural that they just haven't bothered to run it. So think about it. What things can you do that would hit the most people and make a list? Okay, so a local newspaper will probably affect X number of people, maybe half of our people read the local newspaper because when an article comes out about the library, they come in and they tell you about it. So you know that they're reading it. And maybe, I don't know, a quarter of the people or so go to the movies. Maybe everybody has social media because everybody loves connecting with everybody else on Facebook. Facebook advertising is super easy. It's really not as hard as people think it is and you can always go through and fine tune as you go. Facebook will let you change your ad as it goes. So if you don't have any of those things and you definitely don't have the money to put into advertising, which I totally understand. I have tiny budget in Hopkins, I get it. You can do what the, is it Rowlett, Texas Library did? I love this sign. I just got it on the ALA ThinkTanks Facebook page couple days ago and had to add it in here. So now that you're done acting like you're going to the gym all year, sit on the couch and read our ebook. They don't even have to come in. They're advertising ebooks. It's funny. It captures people's attention. And when I saw it, it had been up a couple hours. It had 332 likes and 21 shares. It had been seen by an enormous number of people and granted those were library people and not necessarily people from Texas, but how many people do you think that area in that area saw that? Social media. I think I'm going to skip playing this little video for you so I can give you a little time for questions at the end, but make sure you have a plan. Make sure you have a goal. If you've got the time for it, get a couple of people together and drop a weekly plan. Maybe on Monday, you want to post something about your program coming up on Wednesday. Maybe on Tuesday, you want to post a cute cat picture. It could be anything. And start monitoring that. See which things people are commenting on, are sharing, are liking, because that's your return on investment. Those things are being shared, are being seen by the greatest number of people. If you're doing Twitter and Facebook, great, but don't always post exactly the same thing on both of them. You want to make sure that you've got different things that are hitting those particular communities. So maybe on Facebook, you're targeting people who are what, 80 to 20? And maybe on Twitter, you want techie people who are maybe 30 to 10? I don't know. I'm just making up those amounts, but make sure that you are working towards those people and you can find information on what your demographics are for each one. So using your resources. There are free resources out there that you don't have to worry about subscribing to. You don't need a budget for. I have a fantastic, I mentioned the team that works for us indoor. She, I hope to God she becomes an art major. She is amazing. She makes our posters for us. She draws our locals for us. But in Hopkins, I don't have that. Instead, I have the local high school, which like I said is within walking distance. It's very close. So when we did a logo search, we talked to them and said, hey, art class, you wanna win something and get yourself out there and leave a lasting impression on Hopkins? Send us your logo ideas. We have a little bit of wall space. You don't need much for an art show. You really just need the tops of a bookcase or some wall space or anything like that will do. And that makes people excited. It brings in not only the friends and family of the people that you're showing, but it brings in community members who like art, things like that. Jumping around a little bit, I was going to show you the ALA think tank. I'll switch over to the marketing library. So if you're on LinkedIn, you can go to joining groups and you can join the marketing for public libraries group. It's wonderful articles, ideas. They will go through and take polls. They'll talk about different things that are coming up. And yes, a lot of these are not geared towards small libraries. But on the other hand, a lot of these are things that you can take and you can make your own. I mean, increasing program attendance, that's just a kind of a no-brainer, right? We all wanna do that. Okay, so there's another idea for you. Now I'm gonna jump over to the not-so-free. At the American Library Association Conference in Chicago in 13, I think. And then this past year, this past mid-winner conference, I sat in on a gentleman named Ben Bizzle's presentation. And he wrote a book called Starting a Revolution, Stop Acting Like a Library. You can go to his website. He has all kinds of free resources. It is a really good thing to look at and give you another idea of what you can do. Facebook and Twitter advertising, yes, you have to pay for it, but it brings in so many people. Photoshop, if you wanna make your own posters and you wanna play around with Photoshop, granted, there are a million things you can do on Photoshop. And it's gonna take you a while to learn them. But you can go to techsoup.org and it's $22 right now. It is not terribly expensive. These are not things that you're gonna have to pay a huge amount for, but they're going to give you lasting impressions. They're going to expand who is looking at your things. They're going to bring more people in. So now is the thing that, yes, you never will win over everyone. There's always going to be that person who remembers so and so screaming at them at the library or hitting their hand with the ruler or shushing them and they're going to be convinced that's the only way it is. It won't change, doesn't matter who's there. It's never going to change. But you can't give up. You just can't listen to those people. You just have to focus on all of the people who do love it and do support you and do want to do everything that you're doing. All right, so if you have any questions, feel free to call me, email me, either place. I also have some extra resources for you. I will be sending this presentation to the Nebraska State Library and they're gonna post it up there for you so you can check it out anytime, okay? Any questions? All right, thank you Natalie. That was wonderful. A couple of questions have come in but looking at the time, we do need to switch right over to our next presenter. So we will pass along questions to Natalie as we go through things next week and there is our contact information there.