 Hello everyone, this is Michael Krista and Laura from the Nebraska Library Commission and welcome to Small Information Campaign, gets big numbers at the polls, this is part of the 2013 Big Talk from Small Libraries conference sponsored by the Nebraska Library Commission, the Association of Rural and Small Libraries and IMLS. This session is presented by Melissa Gardner, the director and Katrina Arnold, one of the trustees of the Broadview Public Library District in Broadview, Illinois. These are you there? Yes. All right, just go ahead and take it away. Okay, like you said, my name is Melissa Gardner and I'm the executive director at the Broadview Public Library and we have with us also Katrina, yes Katrina Arnold, library trustee for Broadview Public Library District. Okay, and we're just gonna sort of tell you the story of our library successful referendum campaign. I'm gonna start out with a little bit about who we are. If you attended the other sessions, you would think that we were a large library compared to them, but in our own area, we're the small fish in the big pond and we are a western, Broadview is a western suburb of Chicago, we're about five miles away, so we're very urban. We have 8,000 residents and we have over 10 libraries that are within a five mile radius of us, which means there's sort of a lot of competition. We're very close to each other, a lot of sharing and a lot of competition in that. We're a member of the SWAN consortium, it's a shared ILS and we share that with 80 other libraries. So we have a really good pool of resources to pull from whether we don't have it at our library, we'll get it somewhere else. You can see some of our other statistics on this slide, our collection size and our circulation, but I'm gonna focus on the building next. Our building is 16,000 square feet, which is still a fairly large building. We also, we've been showing the public our statistics for our usage and I just wanted to include this for you guys, but I'm sure all of you are aware most of our, most libraries, our uses has gone up over this bad economy, so showing you that. Now our building has some of the same issues we saw in other presentations. We have aging facilities, need of cosmetic changes. I'm sitting in my office now doing this presentation and I can see through the paint on my walls. So there's a lot of outdated things. We don't meet ADA requirements. We have a very small youth space and you can see from the photos, it's not pretty. Knowing all of this, there had to be something despite the fact that we all know that this building has been aging, it's been aging for a long time. There needed to be something that sparked a change in the building. And we have narrowed down a few things that we think were the impetus for this change. The first thing is a new administration. I'm a new director here. I've been here for two years. I came on in January of 2011. We also have three new trustees, which Katrina is one of them. They all started in May of 2011. And we found this project at the time to be somewhat financially viable. The former board of trustees saved money over a long period of time. And we had about 3.9 million in reserves when I started on at the library. The other thing that happened was there was a state grant for 1.5 million that we wanted to apply for to do a building project. So the money is there. At this point, we also got community input. When I started out the library, we did a survey. And that went out in April of 2011. And we got input from the community that we needed to make a change with our facility and overall with our library. Planning. It's not fun. One of the most important steps, although not glamorous, was planning. Katrina and I want to make it clear at the beginning of talking about planning that from the beginning of planning, we were not considering a referendum. In fact, I think we were all opposed to a referendum. Nobody on the board wanted to even say the R word. There was a bad word to say referendum. So at that point, we were just going to plan on the fact that we had 3.1 million in reserves. And we were hoping that applying for the state grant would give us another 1.5 million so that we can turn this space that we have now into something bigger. Because even though it's 16,000 square feet, we only have 12,000 square feet of usable space. And I don't know if you looked at the slide earlier, after all the increases in the programs and circulation and things like that, it's just not enough space in this building now to house all the programs that we are envisioning that came place from when we had our retreat back in January 2012, which Melissa is going to touch upon now as far as when we came up with our mission and things like that. Yeah. So as Katrina said, we had the survey and then there was a little bit of time between the survey and then the next step. And that was the mission, envision, and the strategic plan. The board got together and we had a retreat away from the library and it was just at a local hotel. And the board came up with a new mission and vision. So I'm just going to share with you the mission. You can see here and you can go back and read through everything and our vision. Now, previously, the library had somewhat of an unofficial vision that we would be a popular browsing library at 40% and reference 60%. So the new mission and vision was far away from what the library had been practicing before and was practicing when I came on board as director. We were very reference centered and so it was a different philosophy from our new mission and vision, which is more about going out into the community, seeing what the patrons want and empowering their lives before it was we're reference and popular browsing. And this is more encompassing the new mission and vision. We rolled this out. We put it on a lot of our publications. We put posters up in the library, in community centers. But the most important thing was this was a staff philosophy change. And so when we were creating the strategic plan with the staff, the mission and vision was at the heart. Every one of our strategic goals ties into the new mission and vision. And when we start a new project, we talk about the mission and vision and where they stand in that. So more than getting out the new mission and vision to the public was changing how we saw things as a staff. After we got past the mission and vision, we have the state grant. And what happened was, and this happened very close to the same time. The mission and vision was in January. We knew, I told this board about the state grant around the same time and they decided to move forward with it sometime in February or March, which gave us less than three months to put it together. And the state grant required a lot. For the state grant, we did town hall meetings. We had to put together a building program which said exactly what kind of space we needed. We did preliminary designs with the architect, a facility assessment. And that was very detailed. It told us the age of all of our heating and air conditioning, what systems were at the end of their lifetime, which was pretty much all of them for us. And a financial plan, we hired financial planners, elders, investment partners, and they helped us come up with 20 years of projection of our income, how much we could use from our reserves. Again, at this point, we still weren't thinking of referendum. So we were trying to see what we could do with all of our own money. After we had preliminary designs from Dewberry, our architect, and some of this financial plan, all of these pieces start to hold together. We were trusting a process. And so we just went through the process. And at the end, you'll see how we came to our decision. We also did an environmental assessment and an ADA evaluation. All of these things were required for the state grant. We did them in less than three months. But I would not recommend that. Do you want to add anything about that Katrina? No. OK. We did at the town hall meetings was when we first started to see some negative feedback on our campaign. And so when we get to the point about what we've been doing, that's when we first started to hit some roadblocks on people not really being excited about our project. What applying for the grant did for us? Well, we had a clear understanding at that point of our financials and our building needs and wants. We had a great image from Dewberry, our architects. You can see on the flyer there. And we turned our grant in in April. The grants were awarded in June, and we did not get one. In fact, they told us we were not even close to the top of the list. A lot of people applied for this grant. What we did, though, in the meantime, while we're waiting to find out about the grant, was we formed a group called the Citizen Input Committee. And we gave them all the information that the board got. They saw all of our financial reports. They saw all the detailed information. So they were getting that at the same time we were waiting for the grant when we announced that we did not get the grant. The board and the Citizen Input Committee found out at the same time. So it was a group of people, the board and this group, that came together and heard this news at the same time. And that was a big turning point for us, because we were at a point where we knew we weren't going to have enough money. And everyone felt like they wanted to continue the momentum and continue to move forward. And plus, along with that, from the Citizen Input Committee and from us having a town hall meeting and taking the surveys from the residents, a lot of people really wanted to see the things that they were voting on, that they were looking at contribution. So at that point, I think that's when we first started talking about a referendum, because we stated we have all this information, we gave all these people the drawings and seeing what they're going to be, can have. Now everybody has this vision in their head of what we could possibly be. And nobody wanted to put it down at that point. Everybody was on the consensus that, wow, we've gotten this far and we are falling short. We only short by a little bit of money to make this happen. So at that point, that's when we started talking about, maybe we need to ask the residents if they want to help pay to see this vision come to reality. And that's when we started talking about maybe going for the referendum. We were still a little afraid to say the R word. We kept saying, we're going to the bakery to get some dough. So we all were a little hesitant at that point. But what happened was the Citizens Input Committee and the board talked and discussed it. And really what was decided was we would go and ask the community and let them decide. And so this is why when we go through what our campaign was, you'll see it was almost entirely informational. We didn't want anyone to feel pressured. We wanted to make sure we got all the information out there for people and gave them a choice, an educated decision. So really everyone felt they would leave it up to the voters. I know the board felt strongly about that. OK, so what kind of publicity did we put out? We had a lot of things and some of them fun and some of them your standard publicity. All of our publicity was informational that the library put out. And it ran between April and November. The election was in November. And since all of our stuff, the library put out had to be informational, all of it was attorney approved. So the attorneys went through it and said, that sounds a little bit like you're encouraging them to vote yes, you need to change it and make it more neutral. So you'll see that we had a couple of instances where they changed things. But for the most part, most of our stuff was OK with them. And we repeat the same message over and over again, which made it easier. The Q&A fact sheet, this was our main piece of information for anyone. It's still on our website. So I included the link for you. This was given to the Citizens Input Committee and the board and the staff. Everyone in those groups had to read this and knew it. You slept with it under your pillow and you pretty much knew everything that was in this. But this has all the information. If anyone asked a question we didn't know the answer to, we would refer them to this document. Like I said, it's still on our website. And I'm sure people still go and look at it. It's 29 pages. It's a huge document. But really, most of the questions that were asked are in this document. And when we got a question more than once, we added it to the document. And then we put a little revision date at the bottom so people knew if it was updated. The next thing that we had been working on this again before we decided to go to referendum, but this was we created a new website that was launched in June. And our Facebook page, we always had a Facebook page, but we never really kept it up to date. So when we created the new website, we kind of tied our Facebook page in and posted on it daily. So that was key for our Facebook page to become more popular. And then the website, we had a Plinkett website before. And it was getting kind of outdated. And ours had a very bland look. I saw some nice ones during this presentation. But ours was white with a little bit of green and it wasn't very exciting. So the new website that we had, we were able to put these images up on it that you'll see repeated over and over again of this modern facility. And overall, we were just trying to show the community that we're becoming more modern and our facility is gonna become more modern along with it. This isn't just a building change. This is a philosophy change. And we also wanted to make sure that in all the publicity that we went out that we kept, let me everybody see the same image. It wasn't one day you see this image, another one you see, it was just hammering home. This is gonna be our new home. This is the home that you're asking for so that they can start getting more into feeling and get more excited about the changes that are about to be made. This mailing here that I'm showing you now, this was the only mailing that we did that was specific to the referendum. And this went out right before early voting started. We have, in Illinois, we have early voting and it's actually pretty popular here. You don't need a reason to do it. And a lot of people do early vote. So we have not only election day to think about, but early voting to think about. And this mailing went out pretty much the day before early voting, so everyone saw this. It's a pretty simple mailing. There's not a lot of information to it, but if you wanted more, you could always go to the website and get those facts. It was just a reminder of that image and what you were gonna get with that library. We were originally gonna have this be a door hanger and we were gonna go door to door. We were gonna do kind of a blitz. We had volunteers lined up and we were gonna go out one day and everyone was gonna see us on the streets hanging these up and we were gonna have our library t-shirts on and doing this. But at the last minute, we had to change it because the village didn't want us going out door to door. So we just switched it to a mailer. It worked out fine. We do have a library quarterly newsletter and we did put information about the building project from the beginning in that. The first one, you can see the library matters that's in black and white. This was the first time the building was mentioned at all and that was just to let people know that we were forming a facility planning committee. And that was when the board started looking at, well, what are we gonna do? That's when they knew they were gonna be applying for the grant and the facility committee was the group that really put together all the materials for the grant for the board. And so that was the first mention of it. And then you can see our newsletter changed along with our website and along with our Facebook page. We just got more graphic. We became more visual and so you can see the summer and fall. We switched to a color newsletter, which ended up not costing us very much more than our black and white one. And you can see then the whole first page of both of these were dedicated to the building, but it was more informational about Citizens Input Committee on that middle one. And then on the last one, it just is letting the community know we're going to referendum. Here's how much it's gonna cost you. I didn't even include the image of the building in that last one because they were getting, they were seeing that image everywhere and this was more of a letter from me explaining it to them. And also before we get to the fall one, you'll see later on in the next couple of slides that we have been going door to door. So they were prepared, they had seen things out there before and this was kind of just a summarization of what had taken place during the summer, our summer activities. Yeah. Okay, so we had a couple other publicity that we thought was fun. At the top, you can see the orange card that says treat yourself to a modern library building. And we passed these out for Halloween. We passed them out at the library, at the senior center and different areas where you would pass out candy. We also put together hundreds of these for the schools with pencils in them, Halloween pencils in them and each, we have three elementary schools in our town. Two of those, two of the school districts got these with pencils in them to pass out. So the majority of kids in Broadview came home with one of these or threw it on the street, on their way out the door of school but they all had the opportunity to bring one of those home. We also had all of the trustees attempted to write letters of opinion to the editor as well as I know some of the community members did and some of the citizens input committee members did. Two of those letters were published and we were able to get one article in the paper letting people know about the referendum and that went out again right around early voting time so that was good. The other fun thing that we did, we have an electronic billboard here in Broadview because we're right by a highway and we ran the billboard five days before the election and on election day and you can see that picture there. That cost us less than $600. So really it wasn't that expensive and I know that in some communities you can use these billboards for free. So I thought that was another fun way to get the word out in our community. We were offered phone banks but phone banks in our community had a negative connotation especially at the time because there were other groups using them for the election so we did not do phone banks although that's another idea that someone might want to use and we had volunteers for that as well. The thing that we've felt had the biggest impact on our campaign is our door-to-door and it's probably the thing we're most proud of when people ask what did it, I think the door-to-door sent us over the edge. The idea for door-to-door really came from Katrina I think we didn't get a lot of public attendance at our town hall meetings so we were trying to come up with a way to really talk to residents about what is going on without inconveniencing them. Because we had about two town hall meetings and we had every week we were having citizen input committee meetings and facility planning committee meetings and we just weren't getting the turnout that we were expecting. Sometime around July or August it's nice out. I think we need to start taking it to the citizens. A lot of people's lives are really busy these days and I would say one way that we can try to let them know what's going on because like we said, we wanted this to be informational. We wanted everybody to know what was going on. We didn't want anybody to say they were surprised by seeing a referendum on the ballot and that they didn't understand what was going on in the community so we got some people from the citizen input committee and a few board members and we started a door-to-door campaign. We decided that we wanted to make it something consistent where people knew the exact day, time, when we were gonna do this so we had to set it up for the months of August and September where every Thursday from three to six we would go out and cover different areas of the village and knock on the doors and try to speak to as many people as we can and as we went, we had to have opportunities to speak to quite a few people and once they weren't there, we would leave them sorry we missed you tags like the UPS does when they miss you so that they know they haven't and give them an opportunity to go online to take a look at what we wanted to speak to them about and it was funny because every Thursday when we did the walking, Melissa will report back that we had spikes on our webpage from people going out and actually taking a look at the website and looking at the information that they missed from us talking to them and taking a look at the question, the Q&A publication we had out there as well as the designs. So we attributed a lot of the things that happened with being able to get out there to see the people and a lot of people that came into the library would tell Melissa they appreciated that oh we got their information in our door and oh I went on the website so they kind of made us feel good and that just kept us going as far as moving forward on our door-to-door campaign. Yeah, it's a little scary going out and knocking at people's doors because you think they're going to be upset that you're bothering them or that they're just gonna shut the door in your face but to be honest the people who didn't wanna talk to you just didn't answer their door and you left the player there and you moved on and the thing I found, because at the same time I got myself personally involved into another political campaign and I did door-to-door with that, I found that the library one was so easy. I live and breathe the library. Like I said, we were sleeping with the Q&A under our pillow. We all had absorbed this information. We were all working on it weekly. We knew our project, we were passionate about it and that came across when we went door-to-door. It was really easy to talk to people about it and the other thing that we found, or I found as a library director, I got great feedback from people about how they felt the library was doing and what they used the library for or maybe they didn't even know about the library. I mean, some people didn't know we had computers or didn't know we had kids programs and going door-to-door we were able to spread that information and I think it helped us just overall as a library get some new people in the door and get some new library cards out. If I were to go back and do something differently in this whole process so far, when we did the surveys, I would have done a three-question survey and I would have done it door-to-door because I think it would have opened up the conversation with the public that we got later in the process and that would be really valuable. If I were someone starting this process off now, I would highly recommend doing that especially if you're a small library and a small community, you don't have far to walk. You don't have a million houses to go to, it's not overwhelming. We did our door-to-door with a small group of people. I would say there was probably five of us dedicated people who did door-to-door and we reached a lot of households. The best thing to do, you never wanna go out alone. We always went out as a group. We carried our library bags with us so people knew where we were from. We had name tags, some of us had name tags on, some of us did not. And we would always walk the same streets together. One person would hit one house, the next person would go to the next house and then if someone answered the door, we would try to always have someone come over so that there are two people talking with the person when they answered the door. And for those who didn't know quite what to say, we decided we'll make it really easy. Let's come up with a script. So that way, when you're introducing a script, just to introduce yourself, then people are not gonna take up a lot of time, just want to let you know about what's going on. I think it made it really easy for people to, when they had their script, to know what to say and what to do. And we also had little things that in response that somebody had a question, the things that we wanted to make sure that they focused on when we were talking to them. So I think that made it easier. So that way, it went out to all the board members. It was one of those things that was out there, I believe it was on the website. So when people, anybody who wanted to come along and help with the coverage of the canvassing of the neighborhood, they already knew what script they had. You had some, we also had some people who went out with their friends and were on days that we didn't do it on Thursday. Like they couldn't make a Thursday, so they went out on a Friday, but they had the script, they had the bags, they had all the things that they needed so they can go out there. You really couldn't make it at the schedule time on a Thursday. They would do it at a time that was convenient for them. Yeah, you can also see on this slide, you see our script, what it says, how we really, you know, we didn't try to spend a lot of time with anyone. We just let them know what was going on. We handed them the flyer that you saw before and if they had additional questions, we would either answer them right there if they were easy or if they weren't, we would point them to that Q and A document on the website. You can see our map of our community down at the bottom. You know, after we went out, we would highlight the area we went for the day. So the first day that we went out is that pink highlighted area. You can see we covered a good chunk of town just in one day. The people who went out on the door to door were trustees, citizens, input committee members, or myself. We didn't have other staff members go out, but they could have and I would recommend that they do. I think it was a really positive, good experience. And then, you know, anyone who's, we sent out people who are familiar with the project. Okay, this is our only piece of non-informational material that went out and this was not sponsored by the library. Citizens on their own did this. Katrina was a part of making this, but it was not library sponsored. And basically, this was a little postcard shaped thing and that was a four by six postcard that we handed out at the polling places. We wanted to keep it kind of straight, simple, quick to the point. You know what? We need for you to go to the end of the ballot and vote yes on the referendum. We put the language in there so that when they saw the question at the end of the ballot, they would see what it was and up under it, it still was reinforcing what we had been passing out in the summer times in our publication on the website that, you know, this amount, even though you see in the $4.1 million, it is equivalent to $5 per month over the next 20 years because, you know, one thing you didn't want people to do is kind of get a sticker shock and they see the $4 million and they're like, well, what happened to the $5? So we wanted to make sure we kind of kept it simple, make sure that, you know, there wasn't no funny stuff going on that all of a sudden you kept hearing about $5 for the last three to four months and all of a sudden now you're hearing about $4.1 million. So this was put together by the citizen input committee. We went out on the election day. We hit, I think it was like six different polling places. I mean, yeah, five different polling places that we had on the day, making sure that we passed it out and making sure people understood. Even on that day, we still had people asking us questions, but I think a lot of people were excited when they went to the polls and saw that we were out there because we got a lot of feedback. We got a lot of thumbs up and I voted yes, you know, at the polls. So, you know, it really made us feel happy. We didn't really know the results until we came back because it was a cold, rainy day and all we kept thinking about was trying to get back in but, you know, we stayed out there from like 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. that day, making sure that we got it out there. You know, it just made you feel good with some of the residents or something like that. I voted yes, you know, or when people say, I know what I need to do, you know, things like that. So, it was fun. Now, I unfortunately didn't get to be a part of that fun, which, you know, I was dying in my office just wanting to be out there, but I stayed away from that because the library needed to remain neutral. But you can see on this, you know, what percentage of coverage we thought we had at each of the polling places and that's kind of important for the next slide because we were trying to gauge what was the thing that gave us the most success. So, while all of those people were out at the polling places, I was here at the library getting ready for our referendum party and we invited anyone who helped out on any of the things that we did. So if you served on the Citizens Input Committee, if you came to the town hall meetings, if you were a trustee or a staff member, you were invited to our results party and that's when we learned that the first one came in and you can see my picture at the bottom of this slide. That's me telling everyone when one of the precincts came in and the first one came in and we had 81% yes vote and that was a great sign for us because we only had seven precincts and for the first one to come back with such high numbers, that was great. And then you can see in the bigger picture at some of the Citizens Input Committee members and actually we also invited our architect and our financial planners and the other people that were a big part of this project to this party as well. And so you can see how excited everyone was. If you look at the statistics next to it, I broke down each of the seven precincts and I put what sort of materials went out to those people. The two precincts that we covered, 100% of the precinct door to door received the highest percentage of votes and then you can kind of see that it falls in line almost with what percentage we did door to door. The last two precincts, six and seven, we didn't do any door to door at those precincts and they got the least votes. You can see the fourth precinct, that one had a huge, we had a huge number of palm cards passed out of that precinct and it didn't make as big of a difference as the door to door made. So we realized when we looked at these numbers at the end what success the door to door part really was and overall I mean obviously our lowest vote was still in the 70s percentile so we still had a really high percentage at the lowest of the precincts so it was a big success overall. The people obviously wanted this project to move forward. After we found out the vote we did the billboard, again the electronic billboard, we put up again thanking the public and we also put signs up at the library thanking the public and we have a big banner up that says future home of your modern library and we really made an effort to thank everyone. We had a day where we invited the public to come out as a thank you and we served some white refreshments. We also honored those citizens input committee members at that day just letting them know that we appreciated all the work that they did, walking around and all of those things. I wanna make sure I leave enough time for questions. So we, at our party we put together a little board that showed sort of the whole process and you can see all of our flyers and publicity and everything and it shows that just all the work that went into it in one place and now we're doing even more work now just getting the building built so. Does anyone have any questions? I think we're ready now for that. All right, that was phenomenal. We're sitting here listening to you and I'm so glad we finally get to hear the whole presentation and just how much work you have done. Laura, you just started to ask a question and or make a comment. So have you started building yet? We plan to break ground around July. So we haven't started building yet but we're getting very close. The project goes to bid this April so the bids will go out and we feel that there'll be construction and digging in July so. All right. And then what is the projected finish date? We expect it to take around a year from then so we think summer of 2014. Okay, we'll be back then. I want pictures. We want pictures, we wanna see how this goes and we really wanna hear, so we're gonna wanna grand tour when you get open. Yes, well once the progress begins, we'll be putting pictures up probably daily on Facebook so you'll like us on Facebook and you'll see how it's going. Okay, thank you. All right, I just wanna remind all the attendees that we'll have you to take any questions. There's a questions and answers area in our, just a questions area in the go to webinar interface. Just go ahead and type your questions in there and Krista is monitoring those on a laptop here so we'll happily pass those along to our presenters. I've got some questions and as other questions come in, we'll pass those along. First, the one thing I wanna say is I love the new newsletter design with the full color, very graphically oriented, especially on the cover. I think kudos for that, I might steal that idea somehow. Yeah, well we wanted to make everything a lot more colorful. You'll see we used orange a lot. It was just, at some point that got picked and we just kept repeating the same sort of visual in every one of our materials and really it was, here at the library was a philosophy of we're showing people something new and we showed it to them in many areas and these newsletters and the website and things were just one, we added new computers at the library and we were just, we're getting out more in the community. It was really when we had the new mission and vision we really took it and ran with it. Yeah, and the other comment I had with the door to door and just pound and chew leather basically is one thing I've always tried to remind people is doing a survey of your users is one thing but talking to people who aren't necessarily even coming into the library can almost be if not equally important, more important and from the looks of those numbers going out and talking to people was probably the single most successful thing you actually did. Definitely, yeah, I mean and it was really, it was really powerful for me. I felt like the survey and we got responses and we got an okay feedback but when I went out there and talked to people I really saw what they wanted and I think they just really gained this huge amount of trust in us. Before I was here, before I came on board as the director I mean, I think people had gotten this impression that the library hadn't changed at all and when they see you out there and when they, all of a sudden you felt this trust overnight that would take years to build and I think going out there and talking to them really opened their eyes to what the library was doing even if they weren't library users I think they saw the change. Definitely, I've lived in broad view now for 10 years and I have to admit I did not come to this library before I came, when I first had my children I came to the library and I just thought they didn't offer anything for the children. The children's section was lacking and I did, I used to go elsewhere to the library. I decided to run because I wanted to see a change and I heard about the new executive director that was on board, I came to a meeting I think when she first came on in January and she got me when she said, I have a wish list. I was like, ooh, and after the meeting I called and I said, I really want to get a copy of your wish list to see what you want to do. That she said before, it was one of those things where people didn't really know, people didn't really come into the library and I think it just kind of hit home when they saw me, when we introduced them we go on next door and they say, oh, this is the, when I talk to people I say, oh, we have the library executive director here, they're like, what? I'm like, yeah, come on, let's let you know I'm flagging her from across the street and they actually got a chance to talk to her and give comments to her about things that they didn't know was going on at the library and things that she was able to fill in me and so I thought it was really successful for her to be out there and being able to get that feedback from the community. Yeah, and I think if you were to do a survey and you were to do it door to door, I mean, I would highly recommend it and I plan on doing it in the future. I would get staff involved. I mean, I think your staff are really gonna have, it's gonna have a huge impact on them and then people are really gonna grow to respect them and it really builds a good rapport with the community. All right, and I think we have some questions from the audience. Yeah, there's a couple of questions about the campaign you did. You said the campaign ran from April through November. Once you decided to ask for the referendum, how much prep time did it take before you launched the campaign? We had no prep time. We had no prep time for anything. We had a really tight schedule because we applied for the grant in April. We waited to hear about that. We didn't make a decision on the referendum till June or July, probably July because we didn't hear about the grant until the end of June. So sometime in July, the board decided, okay, we're gonna go for a referendum. So we were out walking in August. So we didn't have tons of time to prep which was another reason why we just felt that the community town hall meetings weren't a good avenue for us. Going out there, really, all we needed was a simple script, a flyer and us. We were the ones who went out there and just talked to people. Having that conversation was what did it and we didn't have tons of time to prep. We've really been moving at a fast rate ever since January and doesn't look like we're slowing down anytime soon. And second question, someone has about on voting day. How close were you able to stand to the polls on voting day to hand out the postcards? In Illinois, I believe it's 100 feet from the polling place and then again, the library was not a part of that. We couldn't be a part of that. And I definitely couldn't, I'm exempt. My position is exempt. So anytime I put in looks like you're using taxpayer money to vote one way or another. So I didn't participate in anything that said to vote one way or another. I only participated in informational things. Anything that got printed was informational from the library. Anything that was done that wasn't was outside of the library completely. The thing that said on the palm card that was being handed out at election day, that was funded by the citizen input committee and the only people that went out there was since input committee volunteers and a few of the board members went out there. So we were the ones that were out there at the polling place. And like she said, we was like, I think it was 150 feet from the polling place. So we stood our distance and as people were walking up to the place, we would hand them the cards and do a quick little explanation if they needed it and just say, you know what? Because we just thought the palm card just said, I'll just go to the end of the ballot. We'll sit at the bottom of the ballot and vote yes. Yeah, and when we say end of the ballot, there were 400 some things on the ballot. So it was really the end of the ballot. So we really had to motivate people to go all the way through to the very end to get to the last thing, which was the library referendum. Well, it's probably better than being number 212. Right, not the middle, that's our point, right. Yeah, that's right. So to be clear, I remember that in the slides that slide that said that postcards put together by a community, people not by you guys, yeah. Yeah. Any more questions from the audience? All right, well, that is just about our time here. So Melissa and Katrina, thank you for doing this. Thank you for participating in big talk from small libraries this year. Thank you for providing this, taking this time to get your whole presentation out there for everybody. I just wanna remind everybody we have been recording this and we will post this online on the Big Talk from Small Libraries website probably tomorrow or Friday, yes, today's Wednesday. And I wanna thank once again everybody who has helped to organize and participate and attend in Big Talk from Small Libraries. All of our presenters, Laura and Krista, who have helped me out with this. Thanks for everyone who attended and all the wonderful comments that we have been getting so far. We will be sending out an evaluation URL tomorrow to everybody who registered and attended these sessions. So we do wanna hear back from everyone and what you thought of Big Talk from Small Libraries and just to let everybody know because we haven't getting the questions we have at this point, pretty much booked February 28, 2014 for the third annual Big Talk from Small Libraries conference. We've already started talking about how we're gonna do it next year. So I would say that it's been a success at least enough that we wanna do it again. So Laura, Krista, any last words you want to say? Oh, this has really been very inspiring and very educational for me so much. Yes. All right, well, thanks one last time to everybody, all of our presenters, all of our tenders. This is Michael Krista-Laureth of the Nebraska Library Commission. One last thanks to ARSL and IMLS for some co-presenting and help with this. And we'll call it a day. Thank you very much. Thank you.