 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. We're a webcast. We're an online show. Call us whatever you want. We're online and we're here live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. That's a guarantee. The show is free and open to watch as are our recordings. The show is recorded every week and they're also posted on our website afterwards. And we do a mixture of things here, presentations, many training sessions, book reviews, interviews, demos, basically anything library related. We are happy to have on the show. We do bring guest speakers in sometimes and sometimes we do have just Nebraska Library Commission staff on. And this morning we have Library Commission presentation. Strategic planning in a nutshell is our topic for today. And next to me is Richard Miller, Library Development Director here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Hello, Richard. Good morning. Good morning. And he's been actually, strategic planning has been a big deal, well big deal everywhere I would say anytime, but recently in the last couple of years in Nebraska, major changes have had been happening for our public library accreditation standards and many changes coming to fact. Strategic planning being one of those new things. And for the last month or two, Richard's been traveling all around the state doing this strategic planning workshops. That's great. And so we decided it'd be great to have him come on here and give us a snapshot of that. The actual workshops are three hours. Three hours. So we're not doing that. We're doing a readers digest version this morning. That's why it's in a nutshell. So this is not a three hour workshop, but this is condensed to what we've been doing. So Richard's going to take us through what we have about public library accreditation on our site. Now I know, we know from our registration list and who's here that there are many of you that are not Nebraska people, which is great. Some of the things you'll hear will be specific to our libraries in Nebraska and Nebraska accreditation. But strategic planning in general, it's standard for anybody, right? It's universal. So all that those resources will be useful to anyone. But just be aware when we're talking about things, requirements and whatnot that is specific to Nebraska. Check in with your states to see if you have something similar. Other than that, I will hand it over to you, Richard, to take it away. Well, Christa said, we have some people from out of state as well. When we looked at the registration, we have people from at least 10 other states. So welcome. Right, you're here. And as Christa said, this is aimed specifically at Nebraska, but we will talk about strategic planning and the steps involved in it. However, the way we're doing strategic planning is it's kind of a simplified version. This is not a full fledged strategic plan that you might do using something like planning for results, for example. What we're going to be doing is we're talking about doing strategic planning based on needs that you identify in your community and then responding to those community needs, not library needs. Notice I said the difference there, community needs. Now, Christa was nice enough to send out a link to this agenda. We're not going to have this agenda up here, but I do want to run through the agenda with you to let you know what we'll be talking about. And I do want to add one thing to the agenda toward the end if we have time. First of all, wish me happy birthday. That's my birthday today. Oh, that's right. Happy birthday. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. So I'm glad to share that birthday with all 34 of you or ever many are on here. So glad you're here. This is what we're going to be talking about today. We're going to be talking about how the strategic planning works in relation to, as Christa said, our accreditation guidelines. If you're interested in more information on our accreditation guidelines, you can find that on the website, which we'll be looking at. I think they're good. We had a task force put them together about three and a half, four years ago. They're really an excellent improvement over the old accreditation guidelines, which weren't bad, but these are much better. And you might be interested in looking at those. So after we talk about that connection between those two things, we'll talk about community needs. And for those of you who have sat in on any of our three hour sessions on strategic planning, which either I've done or I've done in conjunction with a system director in one of our four systems, we hit people over the head with that they have to underline the word community needs because so many plans that that I read and that other people read from libraries talk about library needs. That's not the emphasis of strategic planning. The third bullet there says the word strategic comes from strategy. They're both three syllable words, but you'd swear that strategic makes the word more complicated for some reason. But what we're going to talk about is how the concept of a strategy built into strategic planning really helps you, we hope, in your position within the community when funders are handing out money or you're making the case for improving the library. Is there rat poison in your future? For those of you who've sat through any of the strategic planning I've been doing, I'm going to tell a story about rat poison in libraries, which I do tell and it's probably getting old since people have heard it for at least three years, but I hope, oh, well, good. Well, I think it will, I hope, open up your mind to thinking differently about what the library might do in the community. And then the next line has to do with the library as an investment in the community. And I make the case whenever I'm with village boards or city managers or city councils or library boards, when they ask questions like, well, why should we put this money into our library? It just costs us, we don't earn anything from the community. Well, first of all, I would say that if you're a good real estate agent, for example, that if you have people come to town and you want to try to entice them to buy a home, what you do is you show them the schools and you show them the recreation services and you show them perhaps their the churches that respond to their particular need or or other things. And I would bet that almost every good real estate agent makes sure that they take them by a library, especially if it's a good library in the community. So in essence, a library is an investment in that community. It's part of the quality of life. It's part of the educational process, and so forth. And I think smart real estate folks know that and show people their libraries. We're going to talk about seven required elements of a strategic plan. What we have told people in our planning processes are that they don't have to necessarily follow the planning or the strategic planning process that we're going to give them if they already have a strategic plan that is of recent vintage meaning in the last three years. And it has the seven elements that we'll be talking about then they're probably in good shape. However, a lot of our communities and we have a lot of quite small libraries don't really have a strategic plan. So that's why we go through the steps. We'll give you a strategic plan process in 12 steps. And the thing I'm going to add after that if we have time is we're going to look at it at a sample strategic plan from Morwell Public Library, which is in the extreme western part of the state. It's eight miles from the Wyoming border. It's got 921 people. It's a small community. We have smaller, of course, and it's a short strategic plan, but it meets, I would say, nearly all of the elements that we want to see in a plan. And then we'll give you a chance to ask questions. Of course, as Krista pointed out, you can ask questions as we go through here. I'm not typing your questions anyone. I am willing to interrupt as needed. Okay, well, we're not going to keep this this up here because you should have received that ahead of time. I asked you to print it out ahead of time so that you'd have it on the side. When we do our three hour strategic planning, we have a copy of the strategic excuse me of the agenda in the front of the notebook, but we also have a free copy that's not hole punched and put in the notebook that they can just set aside and follow along. So I hope you can follow along. If you get lost, type a question or we can always go back to this if we need to. All right. I want to talk about a few things first before we go to the strategic plan in 12 steps because there are some points that are made during the longer workshops that I wish to go over with you. We talked about the first two on the agenda which had to do with strategic planning and its relation to library accreditation guidelines that we talked about community needs versus library needs or other needs. The word strategy and strategic. I mentioned earlier that I thought that the word strategic somehow is harder for us to understand that the word strategy. If we think of our plan as a strategy as something we can use in the community to make the library's position stronger. It's not really intuitive I would say, but if the library can do a better job of meeting the needs of the community in a sense it needs its own needs better and that maybe should be straightforward, but I can almost guarantee that most of the plans that I have read from libraries before we started talking about strategic planning were really things such as we have x number of kids who come to the summer reading program we want to increase that by x percent or we don't have enough people using our library we're going to bring more people in by doing x, y, and z. Do you see how that's all internally oriented whereas if we say something like all right we have a lot of latchkey kids in our community here are the facts in our community 85 percent of the families have both parents working and so from 330 until five or 530 when the parents get home these kids are without supervision they don't have a lot to do in our community maybe that's something that the public library can address that's that changes the orientation from the external from the internal to the external so that you're actually responding to community needs and that will endear you to the community leaders so let me talk to you about rat poison some years ago when I was living and working in Missouri I heard a story about the st louis public library st louis public library is a large metropolitan library they have multiple branches I don't remember how many probably around 12 or 18 whatever it is and the city of st louis for those of you who have been there you know it's a river town right along the river it's an old city it looks like an eastern city for the most part um there's a lot of old structures in the town although it's done a lot of rebuilding lately and some years ago they were having a rat infestation problem in the city so the city decided that the thing they wanted to do was to distribute rat poison to the citizens at large and let them put it out to help with the rat problem now i'm not going to get into a whole debate about how dangerous that might be or whether it's a good idea or not or the environmental aspects of the whole thing the point that i want to make about the whole thing is that when they decided that the best approach they could use to is to distribute rat poison to the community at large they looked around about how they were going to do that well all the city offices that might do that are open naturally from eight or nine o'clock to five o'clock most people in the community are working till five o'clock so what do they do how do they distribute that rat poison now i don't know how this came about but it turned out that the multiple branches of the st louis public library became the distribution points for rat poison now that's hardly a traditional library service or something that they would do but what's it doing it's addressing a community need so i hope that you take this story to perhaps expand your view about what the library might be doing in the community it might not be traditional library service or it might be something in conjunction with other entities or other agencies that deal with the same community need or community issue so remember rat poison if you remember nothing else from the presentation and maybe it'll help you expand the view of how you do strategic planning i already talked about investment in the community so let's go to the website first of all okay if you look on the commission's website this is the page that you'll be brought to if you put in the word planning in the search box or anything else that this is what the website looks like can i expand this a bit let's expand it for those of you have not been to the Nebraska library commission website whether you're in the state or not i i suggest it's a really good resource the way this works is that it has flyout menus if you hover on the left hand side here you'll notice the menus fly out from there to the right well the one that we're going to be dealing with is accreditation and certification so the way you get to this page that we were looking at here as you go down to library accreditation and you can look at about library accreditation and then you can go down the page and go to strategic planning and public library accreditation which is the page we're going to be spending a lot of time on here so let's look at that at the very first part of that strategic planning and public library accreditation before we get into the rest of the page which has example plans which has other information forms in word documents that you can use for the process we're going to go to the top here because i mentioned earlier that if you already have a strategic plan that is no more than three years old and it has all these seven elements in it then you're probably in pretty good shape as long as it's a pretty as it's a pretty good document now we work with our four regional library systems in the state and each of the directors in those four systems is willing and able to evaluate or to give you a critique of any strategic plan that you have that you plan on sending into the commission for approval the connection again with public library accreditation is that as part of the accreditation process which takes place every three years for public libraries they must have submitted a strategic plan to me at the commission which is then approved often i will look at those strategic plans and send back recommendations for changes or say you got to make these changes or this is missing some elements in the strategic plan if your strategic plan wants you to look at it and you're try to look at it critically if it has these elements in it then you're probably in pretty good shape so send it on in we'll take a look at it and evaluate it now one of the things that we're going to be doing starting this year is that for those of you who are not from the state the accreditation process happens this way we send out emails on the first of july to every public library that is up for accreditation or re-accreditation in that year because we take a certain number of libraries every year it's split into three different years when we send that to them they have until october 1st to send in and complete their public library accreditation application form which if you're interested in seeing a sample that's down here we're not going to go into that today but they're also they also have to send in and have approved before october 1st their strategic plan now this year there were about 55 libraries that were up for accreditation or re-accreditation it took a lot to get that done within the time period we had some slosh over beyond that too because there's you know it might take some time to redo a strategic plan or there are some mistakes in the public library accreditation application so i was worried because next year there are almost 90 public libraries that are up for re-accreditation and i didn't know how i was going to get it done and Scott Childers who is the system director for the southeast library system came up with a brilliant idea why i didn't think of it i don't know that the strategic plans you don't have to wait until july 1st to send in your strategic plan to get it approved you can do it anytime so anytime up until july 1st up until october 1st actually those public libraries that are up for re-accreditation or those libraries that are currently unaccredited and wish to become accredited can send in their strategic plans either to their regional system director for a critique or directly to me if they wish to for a critique and i'll send back information if there's some deficiencies in it so that's the idea Scott came up with and i thank him for that that's going to take a lot i think off my plate at least come july 1st through october 1st here are the elements that need to be in your strategic plan at least these there has to be a library mission statement if you're interested in mission statements we're not going to be talking about that today but we have some samples in the documents below that you'll see which you can look at we have the sample mission statement from the new york public library which is about one sentence long i suggest to you that if your mission statement is too much longer than that it's probably too long i know we get mission statements in that are several paragraphs long that's not a mission statement you should be able to memorize and your mission statement so you can use it in your elevator speeches if somebody asks you what do you do and what's the library's purpose and all that it has to contain a community profile and we'll be talking about that today the community profile basically is hey what are the demographics of your community and in addition to demographics what are the things that make that community tick and you'd be surprised if you have not done or looked at American fact finder for example which is the U.S. Census Bureau's user-friendly interface to census data if you haven't looked at the census data recently for your community you should do that i mean we've got the 2010 census that's pretty darn recent and you might be you might have some surprises in there then number three here it says you need to do an assessment of the community needs and that again we're hitting people over the head with community needs if you have anything written down underlying community needs so that you see that all the time and number four you need to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the library and the opportunities and threats outside the library now over the last several years i think this was our CE coordinator Laura Johnson's idea and i really like it is that uh separate those two this is what's called the SWOT analysis strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats but don't yes you have everybody's heard of the SWOT analysis but don't do that straight through without separating it into internal external you're going to analyze the strengths and weaknesses inside the library then you're going to look outward toward the community and analyze the opportunities and threats outside the library itself this has the advantage of doing a couple different things one is that if you do strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats and you do it all together the strengths tend to get confused with the opportunities and the weaknesses tend to get confused with the weaknesses so what i said weaknesses and threats yes that's what i meant to say okay so it's better to do it this way and it does help you look internally and then look externally when you're looking at the community itself then you analyze those things that you found and you'll see we have a form in here that you might be able to use you analyze what this all means in the steps two three and four that you've gone through here and where the library can contribute to community the community itself and i'll come back to that number five in just a minute then you develop specific goals and measurable objectives and we're going to talk to you briefly about smart goals and what those mean and how you write actually uh measurable objectives or smart objectives is what we really should have called it and then finally you come up with a plan for how you're going to evaluate whether you have met the goals and objectives that you put together for your strategic plan it's cyclical it's never ending you don't have to necessarily start at the beginning with step one and so forth and so on but it is a handy way of doing that so those are the required elements of a strategic plan if you think you already have one that's it if you're in Nebraska please from other states don't send those to me contact your state library agency i'm sure they'd be happy to help you but uh we can't really evaluate strategic plans from outside the state all right let's talk about the strategic planning process in 12 steps and which was this one thank you chris is so helpful thank you uh we were kind of kidding around calling this is your own personal 12 step program but that has some jokes that you may not want to make but we did come up with 12 steps that you might use for the strategic plan itself and let me show you that goes down one more okay all right so uh we're going to be switching back and forth from this list of 12 steps to some of the documents on our website and chris is going to tell me that's this one over here correct okay we're going to be looking at this uh this also appears on the website so you can look at it and there's a connection here between these 12 steps and the worksheets and the how-to guides that appear on the chart on that same page when we've been doing our strategic planning our three hour strategic planning we have been doing a shortened form of it and you've got an even more short form of this whole thing today because we're doing it in one hour but we have uh not made people use all of the forms on this thing but you might want to look at all the forms just to see if it would be helpful to you today we're cutting that even shorter so the first step would be to establish a planning team and set the meeting and work schedule and we're going to be looking at worksheet number one uh plan to plan and at the how-to guide called the planning team so let's do that let's go to those on this chart down here the chart has worksheets on the left and how-to guides on the right so for the first one on establishing the planning team and setting up a work schedule or a meeting schedule first of all we have a nice handy plan in here which you can open and it looks like this all of these documents that we have on our on our uh website our word documents so you can use them fill them in change them however you want to you might not want to say Nebraska public libraries if you're from out of state but here is a work plan a plan to plan form that you can use you're going to put dates along the left-hand side which correspond with a planning step and you're going to list the team members that are actually going to be involved in that planning step and the next three columns they get kind of a kick out of because you have a start date and then two columns to the right of finish date but then reality sets in your target finish date and then your actual finish date so i think that's what happens often with planning and then a review date when you do as part of the evaluation now one of the things that you need to do and we'll see when we're talking about smart goals or smart objectives is that you need to identify either by title or by name of the person who is actually going to be doing and being involved in these planning steps if you list steps that are going to be taken for your planning process and nobody is assigned that responsibility guess if it's going to get done it is not and probably what will happen is the library director will do it all if your library director does this whole plan and perhaps the library board is involved in the whole plan and nobody else you probably aren't going to have a very good strategic plan you need some input from stakeholders in the community you need to involve some other people it's often very good to get some educators involved because they've been doing planning and their sleep for years and they're often very good about following sort of steps step by step procedure so this is the plan to plan form which i think would be very handy for you to use now let's go to the how-to guide which says for the planning team here is a suggestion about who you might involve with the planning team we suggest anywhere from five to 12 people in many of our smaller communities if they get five people together that's going to be maybe what they can get together we do warn people and i don't know how strongly open meetings law or public meetings laws are in other states but when you're doing this sort of thing a public library in Nebraska should involve no more than two board members if it has five board members or if it has seven board members no more than three library board members because otherwise they have to declare it a public meeting and these really are work sessions to do a planning so maybe made up the planning team might be made up of library staff board members community stakeholders in some communities there's a feeling that perhaps if you have multiple staff in the library that perhaps the library director might not be involved in this that's your choice in many of our public libraries that is the only staff maybe in addition to one part-time person if if that a stakeholder is a person in the community that has an investment or share or an interest in something and will be a good member of your planning group don't get somebody in your planning group who doesn't care about the library or who doesn't care about the community that's a waste of time it should be diverse if you have everybody on your planning group being the same age or gender or or race and you have different races represented in your community you're not being diverse enough you need to get other people involved these people need to act as a team they have to be they have to use the consensus process to do this this is not a debate this is not a voting process this is a consensus sort of thing and there's just a little definition of consensus there that says it does not mean that everyone agrees that the solution is the best of all possible solutions but it does mean that everybody comes to a consensus that yes they can live with that so that's the how-to guide on that particular step all right let's go back to the and i want to go back to this i want to go back to this one this one okay step two complete the community profile using American fact finder or other sources i mentioned American fact finder earlier if you have never played with this please do it's got it is loaded with information and it's really easy all you do is put in the name of your community like Shadron City or whatever kind whatever is the name of your community and you can find some great information there not just things on population but commuter times for people who work the percentage of families of the number of families who have both parents in the workplace just any number of things it's really a wealth of information now here's something that will be a great relief to a lot of people if your community has already done a community survey that is something like a quality of life survey use that that is wonderful information in it if it's been done within the last three years that's really good up-to-date information as a matter of fact we often tell our libraries that you probably want to stay away from a survey writing survey questions administering a survey and then accepting the responses to the survey and interpreting those are a real skill a real art but some of our communities have done that we have especially been interested in smaller communities that are able to stuff a survey into the local electric or gas bills where they have their own electric or gas company in town we had one small community that did that it had an 80 percent response rate that's almost unheard of for a survey but you know they were able to get it into everybody's home and it arrived with something that everybody looks at so you know if you want to do a survey that's not a bad way of doing if you have that opportunity number three gather information from the community we're going to talk about various ways of doing that i already talked about surveys you might use focus groups interviews observation and worksheet three which we'll go to now does talk about that's let's go down to worksheet three yep sorry a little slow it's my birthday i'm a year older it's not you it's the computer no it's an operator okay so this again is a work document here are some suggestions about ways that you might do this you might use this form to organize those how is your going to do this if you're going to have focus groups on our web page we have about a six page explanation of our focus group should be done pretty complicated but it is something you might wish to look at a focus group tends to be a group of people that you want to ask questions about in a particular area they may represent a particular group that you'd like to talk to young parents older citizens new people coming into the community business people local government officials you name it it's kind of a focus group you're tending to focus on a particular group because you want to ask them questions that you think might be useful for your planning purposes a key informant interview now we're not going to be going through the key informant interview today other than i want to tell you that a key informant interview tends to be a one-on-one interview that is you choose a person who you feel would be a key informant somebody who's in the know in your community and we have an example of the responses to a key informant interview process that was done in what we are calling the bookville public library we changed the name of the library to protect the innocent or the guilty but they are actual responses i also changed the names of the people involved so that you wouldn't recognize who they are but a key informant can sometimes really be offer interesting points of view that you may not agree with but that's not the point of a key informant interview you're getting their point of view in the bookville public library interviews what they were doing is they brought people together they brought people in to talk about economic development in the community and what their point of view was they brought in people from economic development they brought in people from job service they brought in other people to find out what their view was on on job development and economic development in that community i think i recommend that you read that it was very interesting and somewhat disturbing what they heard survey this says in here and i probably should take this out that if you're going to do a survey attach a copy of the survey questions with compilation of answers i don't need to see that i'll take that off that form and walking around observation i kid it with people that if i ever retire i don't know where that'll be but if i do i'd love a job as kind of a secret shopper type person who goes into public libraries to see what kind of treatment i get and service i get i think that would be a wonderful way of you know somebody from out of town or somebody who's new to the community coming in and see what kind of service they get that would be very interesting for the planning group to hear about i think so that's an idea of something that you might wish to look at all right i'm going to keep this community needs up here because we're going to go to that on the next one which says record community needs on a frequency list and this same form here community needs goes on to a page two that i want to show you so that's why i didn't take it off here now i don't know about your community but in the training that i've been doing i've been saying the following and i've had agreement at every one of the training sessions that that we've done what you're supposed to do on this sheet is that when you are attempting to find out what the community needs are you have to push them to tell you what it is in the community that bugs them or what's positive about the community or what do they think they tell somebody else uh if they try to entice them to come to the community and almost a hundred percent if you ask them the community needs they'll say something to you like i wish we had more books on and you have to say no no no no i i don't want you to comment on potential library needs what are the community needs what are things in the community that really stick in your car they're real positive that you're not telling them tell us about us our library that's exactly what'll happen and for those that's right and for those of you who know what happens is that if you ask people about the library they almost always say i need more books or i need this or whatever so you have to push them and say no no no community needs and almost every community and people either laugh or shake their heads when i say this these are usually the top ones i don't like people who let their dogs run loose people aren't keeping their property up people don't scoop the snow off their sidewalk that's a gripe i have in my neighborhood um yes people are not keeping up their property um you know those are the kinds of things that come up and what you will find going back to something i said earlier if your community has done a recent quality of life survey those are the things that probably came to the top there now the the difference with this page which is a frequency page is that you need to take all those things that you've heard and you need to put them in frequency order what have you heard the most in the community in terms of gripes or praise or anything else um what have you heard the second most what have you heard the third most one of the ones that often comes up that i failed to mention which i i'll bet i'll see head shaking out there if i could see your heads is that you know what there's nothing for kids to do in our community after school or even more frequently kids get kids go off to college and they don't come back here because there's nothing for them to do there are no jobs i hear that all the time and i bet you would hear that sort of thing too so that's what you do in terms of the frequency list the reason for doing this is not just for the sake of doing an exercise the reason is for the following what we're asking you to do when you're doing strategic planning is to find out what are the biggest needs in the community looking at this frequency chart and deciding which of those needs the public library is in a unique position to address either by itself or in conjunction with other entities or individuals in the community and that's where we get back to rat poison i would bet that none of you have a rat infestation problem although i don't know that but it's open your minds this might be some stuff that you might plan to do that you haven't done before or that is not traditional for a library to do remember also when i mentioned earlier that this is not necessarily a comprehensive strategic plan it might be but it probably will not touch on all the services that you offer in the library in fact it likely will not but what it will touch on is those things that the library decides to do either in terms of programs services collection cooperative ventures collaboration with others whatever it is those things the library decides to do become part of this strategic plan that is responding directly to needs that have been identified as of high interest and importance in the community you are responding to community needs you're not going before your funders and saying we need more money for blah blah blah you're starting out your pitch saying we have identified or you have identified in your quality of life survey or wherever or we have found in in demographic information from the census that these needs are of high importance in our community and in the process of identifying those and wanting to respond to those these are the needs that we have for our budget to do that either above and beyond the base budget that we have or we're going to reallocate within our budget or whatever the story is but you're letting the needs in the community drive your decision making and that makes the plan strategic there's a strategy involved it's not just there's where it comes from it's not just going back to the same old same old okay i feel like i'm doing a sermon at here i always feel like that when i get to that point but i anybody have any questions or thoughts or comments type them into your question section or go to web at our interface and we can uh expound on them all right let's get away so far as a few happy birthdays for you and then someone saying thanks for the information that they've got the excellent resources i think the birthday thing was a cheap shot i probably shouldn't have put it out there but that's all right okay all right let's go back to the 12 steps again we are we did steps three and four we just went over those then here we get to the swad analysis in five and six the first one step six five has to do with determining the strengths and weaknesses of the library itself so we're going to look at worksheet number four worksheet number four is entitled take stock this gives you a working document if you wish to use it again you don't have to but it has some suggested topics that you might want to look at when you're looking at the library strengths and weaknesses you might look at human resources that is your staffing how about your facilities are the ADA accessible what kind of shape is your mechanical systems in do you have breakdown of the HVAC every summer do you have an HVAC do you have a do you have a air conditioning how about technology what kind of shape are you in in that in that regard about funding whatever the funding is from what are the strengths and weaknesses your collection you can break it down by sections if you really feel you want to get that detail or you can have overall strengths and weaknesses of the collection the services the programs and outreach operations governance anything else that you think of these are just suggestions these are word documents you can change any of those delete any of those list honestly the library strengths and weaknesses ask people on the outside if you're a little bit wary of doing that see what they say that's the hard part that's the hard part yeah honest honestly don't just put down things that praise you really be honest about what your weaknesses are then once you do that you go on to step six which has to do with opportunities and threats outside the library and this is the same worksheet here of course and we've recommended some topics or areas that you might look at what about the economy what are the opportunities and threats now those people who do this ever a number of people say this and it's really true that if you identify a threat in the community let's suppose they do identify that that internet access in the community really stinks well immediately you could say oh hey there's a potential opportunity you'd also say under opportunities internet access stinks because you're thinking in the back of your mind well you know what we can help with that in our library or if we can't currently help then we need to put that into our strategic plan to be able to help and that could fall under under technology i guess that's what i said how about the economy the economy's going to hell in a hand basket the last grocery store left the tornado went through town and we lost xyz okay so that may be an opportunity it's certainly a threat how about the social climate do you have people who are supportive of what's going on or what city government wants to do or what anybody wants to do or is everybody saying i'm for myself i don't care about anybody else i don't care about my property i don't care to be taxed etc how about community relations what kind of relations do you have i've been to some small towns where i swear it's the Hatfield and McCoy shooting at each other just you know so those are opportunities or threats that might be there and what else might be so that's that form use it might be useful you don't have to use that form but it might be useful for you let's go back to this again all right we did five and six number seven determine which community needs the library chooses to respond to i don't think i need to hit that any harder i hit that in sermon at number one earlier but notice the word community needs is underlined if you get nothing else out of this besides rat poison that's community needs you need to get out of this so number eight write goals and measurable objectives for the library under each community need and we're going to show you worksheet five in just a minute here to show you and then the how-to guide for developing goals and objectives and i'll go to both of those so worksheet five develop goals and objectives here's where we talk about smart goals but as i said uh wrong one i'm sorry first this in your own mind this is this may be a form that you would use when you're saying okay community need number one two and three in the workshops i have the people on their paper circle the word community community community at the top because otherwise they're going to put down the library needs to improve its collection and blah blah so community needs so if it is for example that there needs to be more economic development in the community and we need to help local entrepreneurs learn how to be better business people that would be a community need what's well okay wrong that would be a goal community need would be something like uh business development in our community is lacking the goal could be help local entrepreneurs grow their businesses and then you could have measurable objectives under that in each case list the community need first before you get to the goals and objectives in that case i don't think it makes sense to write the goals and objectives before you list the community need up above you're going to see if we get a chance to look at uh moral public library strategic plan that there might be a little bit of a mix up between what is a need and what is a goal and what is an objective but they didn't do too bad a job on it and then we're going to go to the uh develop goals and objectives and here's where you find the smart goals which should be called smart objectives and i'm going to go over this briefly the uh your your objective should be specific measurable attainable realistic and timely and i want you to add one thing on there add a w at the end of it which is who's gonna do them and i mentioned that earlier under the planning process so who's gonna do take a look we're not we're running out of time here so i'm not going to spend too much time on that if we need if we need to run over a little bit that's no problem we'll go until uh we're done getting through everything so just to be aware people we may go past our official 11 a.m central time um ending time determine in step nine how the library will follow through on these goals and measurable objectives how really very carefully how we'll do it now we have on our website a summary sheet which you can use if you wish to use that for putting and structuring your strategic plan you don't have to use it but it appears at the very bottom here under strategic plan summary again it's a word document which you can use if you wish to um the start date of the planning process the end date the members of your planning team summary of important demographics socioeconomic geographic etc cultural characteristics summary the community needs and desires in priority order summary of the library profile and including the library strengths and weaknesses and the external opportunities and threats a list of goals and measurable objectives for the planning period in priority order and a summary of the projected evaluation if you look back at the seven elements that need to be in those seven elements are kind of built in here as well so back to the 12 steps evaluate how well the library did in meeting the goals using the measures set out in the objectives and that's worksheet number six evaluation i'm going to go to that come on worksheet number six evaluate the program and projects who's going to be on your evaluation team is it the same one that was on the planning team it might be good to get a few other people involved who are can be objective what are you going to evaluate and you have to go then to the objectives the goals and measurable objectives because if you do not uh have measurable objectives you're not going to know if you get there what is the purpose of this evaluation is it just to do it because the commission said you should do it or because it's a good thing to do with planning no how are you going to use this evaluation and what questions will the evaluation seek to answer now this little box at the bottom i want to talk about for just a minute and i want to add a question when we get to the very end here notice it says what do we wish to know what are the indicators of how we will know if we reach that if your objectives are written in measurable means then you will know whether you reach them or not when is the evaluation needed okay the question i want you to all add if you have a piece of paper in front of you there if you don't add it mentally is that the most important question in an evaluation all of these aside but taking into account all of these is what real difference did it make if you cannot answer the question that it made a real difference then it probably was an academic exercise and a waste of your time so what real difference did it make if if what you do didn't make any real difference then you probably ought to drop it like a hot potato and look at some other goal and some other measurable objectives for your strategic plan now i want to go to the moral public library strategic plan for just a few minutes i want to tell you what we have here i mentioned earlier that we have the results of a key informant interview from bookville public library you can look at that at your own time we do have sample community questions which i think will be very helpful so i'll go to that for just a minute if you're going to do a survey or you're going to do focus groups or you're going to talk to people or have community meetings these are questions which we were asked for the first year that we did this which we've developed and i think they would be handy for you no matter which community you're in to use some of those take a look at those when you have a chance let's go to the moral public let's go to the moral public library oh you closed the tab of the website that's the thing go to the tab this one this one let me just let me get there this way i gotta do this one i really am sorry that was definitely operator error all right we're back on the page let's go to the moral public library strategic plan it's only four pages long but it's really quite good the other plans that we have on there some run 20 or 30 pages they're quite good as well but i thought that we'd share this because i think it's a little bit less discouraging to look at one that's a little bit shorter and still has at least almost all the elements involved notice they have a mission statement notice they did a community profile which is actually quite detailed i can tell that they went to the census data because it's all in there now they did some on their own like a cultural summary they say they have one swimming pool two city parks public golf course public pond stock for fishing five churches various community groups and tells who those are then they move on to their SWOT analysis and they were very good about separating these out for the most part the internal strengths and internal weaknesses notice how they use the word internal and external that's probably a good reminder i don't mind that at all that's that's a good idea they talk about having a friendly staff the fact that they have ADA accessible computers they don't mention under weaknesses that i don't think the building is physically ADA accessible they don't mention that they probably should have they mentioned that they offer several children's programming in conjunction with other entities in the community they have a new logo they recently remodeled the library with all the windows being replaced and i have to check with them because if they recently remodeled the library perhaps they did make it ADA accessible physically under weaknesses they obviously looked at their accreditation application and at their peer libraries which they can find on that and they found out that they are below the average of their peer libraries in local income open hours expenditures on collection circulation and turnover rate it's not a bad idea to use the accreditation application and look at your peer libraries and see because it's already on the form itself where you lie in conjunction or in comparison with those libraries another internal weakness they expanded the parking but it's still not enough and then this last one um the age of the building if you look at it you can see on the picture the age of the building does make it difficult to expand or to include new areas okay how about external opportunities and external threats they uh the community lacks entertainment opportunities for all ages but especially for kids and young adults um there's a growing use of technology by older adults but they need help now this last one looks like it might be library oriented but really they could have just restated it and said there's only one free wi-fi access in town which happens to be the library so they um their community needs that they identified are there's not adequate programming and entertainment for school aged kids many families have two working adults so they have latchkey kids young adult population is latchkey also so the goals they want to institute a weekly school program to serve the needs of children establish a teen advisory board and a research family outreach their objectives they want to write and submit a grant proposal to us here at the commission for a youth grant for excellence i look back on that they got a thousand dollar grant from us in october 2014 so they met that objective they want to start an after school program they want to talk with high school counselors uh to see about establishing a teen advisory board another thing about the teen advisory board they want to contact other libraries uh like to determine if there's interest in doing uh movie nights game nights they're talking about the local school library etc they want to increase the children's summer reading attendance and young adult summer reading community need number two the lack of adequate housing and the rising cost of living so what are they going to do they want to be a source of information for those they want to establish um they want to increase their information on things like housing and reducing the cost of living and have programs on things like budgeting and loans and other topics and their objectives are they're going to research this and purchase some materials for the library they're going to advertise these new library resources they're going to contact other entities that probably are interested in these in this goal and they want to hold the least couple of programs in 2015 2016 community need number three here they're addressing the uh need that they found about the seniors being underserved they want to establish a kind of miniature bookmobile to do drop-offs at a local home for uh the elderly they want to open lines of communication to discover what the needs of those patrons are and specifically they want to have technology classes for those people because they identified a member of need about evaluation becoming more uh prevalent among aging people but they don't know how to use it their evaluation is kind of weak i will say that they do say that they're going to evaluate they do say when they're going to evaluate they could have been a little bit stronger but all in all not a bad strategic plan quite short but seems to hit just about all the marks that it needs to hit to be a strategic plan i think that's good to realize it doesn't have to be yeah like i think it can be intimidating yes it can be huge and long and what am i going to do and i can't even think about doing it it doesn't have to be yeah all right what questions do you have for us here let's see here anybody have any questions use your go-to webinar interface to type them in we just have a couple of comments from earlier when you were talking um about uh oh finding out what's needed in your community someone just said find a need feel in need instead of um pat in hand yes exactly exactly you said that better than i did yeah find a need feel in need and then you talk about goals versus um objectives goals are nouns or goals are verbs goals tend to be nouns objectives tend to be verbs yeah i like that i like that and action verbs not just you want to bring something passive yeah bring something okay anything at all i had up the i had up the agenda but our picture was gone so oh just hit one of those others at the bottom we had the agenda there now there we are okay all right any other questions so yeah any questions other comments um thoughts i know that was real quick i hope we gave you the essence of the whole thing please feel free to send emails to me if you have any additional questions if you didn't ask them during the session and uh we welcomed all those folks from out of state i hope this was helpful to you yeah i think it's good that um we have some comments just thank you and it's a nice refresher for some people who have been doing this yeah i think it's great all the resources that are on the web page yeah look at those they really are excellent uh yeah that i think you richard and you guys have put together with the system administrators i know a lot of great resources and things that you can use from here to create your strategic plan all these worksheets and things i know people have been using them yes and i think it's nice it breaks it down into just point by point step by step break it up into small bits i know strategic plan can just scare people and i've heard the comments myself when i've been out and about doing other kind of training and technology planning is something that we've done too as well that i've helped keep with and people are just like i don't want to think about that it's too much like no you don't have to just work at it a little bit at a time and you can get through it what i'd say is about planning is as much as people might think it's painful if you put the work in upfront it makes your work later on a lot easier i'm not saying that just as a a platitude or a truism but if if you have measurable objectives and you're working with your board to meet those measurable objectives you really can report to your board and can report to the city when you do your annual reports of the city that you have addressed some very real community needs that were identified by community members and you've addressed them and this is what you've done and blah blah you know make your case you're making your case as that one person said earlier you're making the case based on what the community has told you not just based on this internal stuff you say we want we want yeah there are other issues the other things you can do with this plan once you have it it's not just like in our case in nebraska i have to have one to get accredited to get those benefits but then you can think about other ways that it can be used definitely it's not just a um a one-use item one of the things i will say about the public library accreditation guidelines are that if you're outside the state of nebraska you can't get a live form of that accreditation application because it's only for nebraska public libraries however those nebraska public libraries can look at that whether it's live or whether it's a a sample we have if you scroll down here oh no yeah let me have that for just a minute i just want to show them where it is we do have if you go back to our flyout menu um there is a copy of the accreditation application form here you can preview the application and the reason i suggest it is because it's a good planning tool it's a good planning tool because it shows the kinds of questions that you probably should be asking yourself as a library and there are things like in section two where we're talking about the collection here that really are kind of interesting like you use this in training where you say okay your annual expenditure on materials in this particular case is either and your peer library figures would be in here in a live one but in this case they met all four but let's suppose your annual expenditure on materials is below that of your peers yet your annual circulation is higher than your peers well maybe that doesn't mean you need to spend more on your materials maybe it means you've done good selection so there's some really good stuff in here when it's real figures that we have from the annual statistical surveys that you send in that is really good for your planning purposes so take a look at that whether you're in nebraska or outside nebraska i think it would be useful for you yeah absolutely okay that's the end unless you have more questions thanks just a couple comments came in someone says i plan to use your webpage and some of the resources to update our strategic plan they are very straightforward and easy to work through and a thank you this was helpful i intend to check out your website their five-year plan is due this year all right good definitely good all right well thank you very much then i think that will we'll wrap that up then for this morning to see like anybody has any urgent questions at the moment that's great thank you that is our strategic planning in a nutshell all right thank you everyone for attending so that will wrap it up for this week's end cup of slide it is being recorded and will be available to you um at some later i'll let you all know when it's ready along with a link to this and um just link to the website here for resources uh so that will wrap it up for today's show um using our flyout menu as richard was i'm going to go to our end cup as live website um so thank you for attending this week i hope you join us for next week's show when our topic is fun with friends integrating programming for adults with special needs into your library we've got staff amy wenzel and wan debuts from some memorial library up in papillion nebraska are going to be here to talk about them some programs they've done at their library for adults with special needs so definitely sign up for that and any of our other future shows that we have here on the calendar also if you are a facebook user and compass live is on facebook so please do go ahead and pop over there and like our page and you will get notifications of when um reminders are going out uh when recordings are available right here at your might this morning people log in right now for the show on the fly so you'll get updates about the show um from here on our facebook page oh yeah the archives um for all of our recorded sessions are here thank you for their reminder on our income slide mentioned that right here underneath our upcoming and compass live sessions in the bottom goes to our archive sessions page where all of our shows are here all the recordings are posted to our youtube account but here's where you can get links to all of our previous shows it will have a link to the recording on youtube if there was a presentation of some sort powerpoint presby whatever linked to that any website links that are related to whatever the session was and we have all of our sessions are here going back to the very beginning of encampus live which is january 2009 yes and they're all there for your uh watching we're gonna rename it to krista show i think no i just host i don't yeah i'm just here to guide people along so um other than that wrapped it up for thank you very much and we will see you next time on this live