 First up, our first session this morning at Big Talk from Small Libraries is Cathy Hogan. She is our international presenter, our international speaker for the day, of Ontario, Canada. And you know, I didn't even ask, is it Powassan? Powassan. Powassan. Oh, darn it. I should have asked. Powassan, District Union Public Library. And she is going to be talking about some great changes they made to their library up there. I'll just hand over to you, Cathy, and have you tell us all about what you did up there. Thank you, Krista. I'm very thankful for this opportunity to talk today. My name is Cathy Hogan, and my position at our very small library is communications and program coordinator. We serve a population of approximately 7,500 people. We have a small town, Powassan, and two adjoining municipalities that all are involved in our library. You probably have the same amount of farm animals, too, except they don't come to the library with a few exceptions. You'll find out. I apologize in advance for my Canadian accent, but I am very thankful that you put in some Canadian content today. My talk is how we transformed our little library from lovely, it really was a lovely library, to a community hub that's very lively. I don't have all the answers, but I do have a few ideas, and I'd like to give you some of those ideas today. Something must be working right, because in the past year, we have increased our participation number by 350% at our library. So to me, those statistics are humbling and impressive. So I have 10 hints on how to become a community hub. My first suggestion is to go slow. Even though it's counterintuitive and against my better nature, go slow with all your changes. You are changing people's habits and their expectations of your little library. Instead of coming in for a book and leaving, now you're asking them to learn a new language, take a cooking class, or play the ukulele. It takes time for people to make that adjustment. We have changed our library into a community destination of choice, and we're changing people's habits even beyond our little community. This has to be gradual, if nothing else, for the staff too. The front desk staff will be asked to do much more than in the past. There's more money going across the counter, there's more paperwork, and there's much more phone calls, and there's just more people in the library. And their jobs will be changing. Perhaps you'll even stretch the bounds of friendship with your boss. Your library support team will be challenged. This is called, in our case, the friends of the library. And the library board members, too, want to support you. But initially, all these changes will be viewed as rocking the boat, and viewed with a bit of skepticism. So go slow, and you'll win them over. Even your municipalities that support you, they will also need to be challenged. Perhaps their sleeping, their last thought before going to bed is, what is all this going to cost us? So those gradual changes will help adjust them as well. One thing that my boss did was she collected favorable comments, and we've been doing that ever since. We collect favorable comments made about our changing library, and we store them under a comments file in our Google Drive. And they have proved invaluable in the long run. When we go to do municipal presentations, and I hope that you're doing that presentation every year, these are front and foremost in those presentations. The nice thing about doing a municipal presentation is when the library comes to town, we don't ask for money. And if you want to stand out at your municipal meeting, don't ask for cash. That's my advice. Everybody else is asking for cash. When the library comes, we have an attitude of gratitude. And we take that time to highlight things that people are saying about our library, and also to let them know some of the things that are happening at our library that are new and innovative and exciting. So keep them informed all along the way. Number two suggestion is communication. Communication is key. Our overlying message in our library is we are an exciting dynamic place with tons of exciting dynamic events, and you should come too. That message needs to be loud and clear. We need to hear it as soon as they enter the parking lot, into the front desk, into the stacks, and overflowing into your community. The first thing my boss did when she took her position was to change our beige walls into this lovely warm red color. It was so warm and just changed everything. Our new image started then. Then she purchased a logo for our little library. The logo is important, and her advice to everyone is to go professional with your logo or go home. It is worth the money. We put this logo on everything that we can, on letterhead, on posters, on library swag. And we also put stickers with our logo on every envelope that we send out from our library. The third thing for communication is posters. We still use posters, even though in this modern world, everybody is hoping to go paperless, but not everyone is on the internet, especially in rural towns. So we need to do posters. We put posters in the library and around the town as well. Our posters are very consistent. As you can see, there's horizontal bars top and horizontal bars bottom and logo in the middle at the bottom. When this format was first suggested, I have to say that I thought it was entirely too constricting. But I've since come to love it. We use our format poster as a backdrop to everything. And people, whether subconsciously or not, recognize it as a library poster and are drawn to it because of it. Make all your posters in this format. Make it landscape. Because then when you put it on Facebook, it fits into the events portion of the Facebook page on the left. So it goes smoothly into Facebook. And plus it further makes your posters more consistent. Make your posters eye-catching. Use minimum amount of words and make it pop. We use a lot of different fonts. I know some libraries are consistent in their fonts. We like to go to DaFontdaFont.com and get a whole bunch of new fonts and have fun with it. Our posters are clear, professional, colorful, with the minimum amount of information and the maximum amount of impact. Spend time on your posters. Get two and three other people to view your posters and make comments. And although it's a bit humbling at first, in the long run, it's much better. Your poster will say everything about the quality of your library. So a quality poster is a quality library. We have an outdoor sign outside our library, which is worth every penny. Front and back is available to us. And we use that sign to give information about upcoming programs. The sign is changed several times during the week, maybe twice, sometimes three times, but at least once a week. So instead of people looking at a tired old message like Happy Valentine's Day, which stays there for three weeks, people look at our sign because there's new messages updated often. So we become a trustworthy, a more consistent source of new information. So look to that signage outside your library. So there's Kathy. We have a question, actually. Yep. Someone wants to know, what is library swag? Here's some examples of what you're talking about that you did with that. Okay. So for example, we have library mugs. And we also have library book bags. And both of them have our logo on it. Basically, any physical thing you can slap your logo on is really good to hand out to people. Exactly it. Get your brand out there and market it. That's totally it. And we've made, I mean, the logo honestly did cost us serious money, but we've made serious work of it. Cool. Thanks. Okay. So the next thing is posters. And we use several ways to promote our events at the library. And first and foremost are the posters. So we put them around town. We put them in the library. And we also put them on our community cable channel. Secondly, we use the outdoor sign to promote events. Thirdly, the Google calendar, which links to our email, is then put on our webpage. So the Google calendar is a good source of information. And if you look at the analytics, you can tell people are going back and forth from your webpage. Number four to promote events is public service announcements in the newspaper. And it's amazing how many people actually read those public service announcements and comment on it. Number five is our public radio station in Canada. It's called CBC. And we use, because it's Northern Ontario and news is sparse, we have the opportunity to do live announcements, promotional announcements about our events at the library. And this spreads out over a huge area and has attracted quite a few people that wouldn't have come to our library. Number six is our local cable channel that I mentioned from our community, from our town office. And number seven way that we promote our library is through our monthly handouts. So this is front and back of a half of 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper. So this is the front. And on the one side, we have our regularly scheduled events. So at the top of this page is our weekly events and the bottom is things that occur every month in our library. At the bottom, any closures that we have and our artist of the month, we have a downstairs art gallery, a tiny one. We promote our artist on that side. And then on the other side of that handout is the special events that are happening that month. Interestingly, at the beginning of this process, probably a year and a half ago, we had to struggle hard to have people take these handouts, slip them in the books, explain. You can imagine all the conversations. This is our monthly handout. It was quite an arduous task, to be honest, even so much as to going into the parking lot and running after people, you forgot your handout. So that was the beginning. Now, a year and a half later, we have people actively asking for this monthly handout, which is lovely and keeps you honest, keeps you on your toes, when is the March handout ready? When is the March handout? Okay, I'm working on it. It'll be soon. So it's very encouraging to see that people have come full circle. The next way we promote the library is through emails. We have a very solid email list and we actively connect with people through email and we actively collect these emails from people coming into the library. Whenever there's an event, I take that opportunity to say, are you on our email list? I promise to send you just one email a month. And people have responded to that very, very positively. If there's a new family that comes to town or a new face at the library, instantly I'm at their side saying, here's a monthly handout and would you like to be on our monthly email list? It's only one email a month. Everybody says yes. But critically, and if you follow marketers, this email list is a wonderful source of gold for you. You're sending an email into their email box, which they have asked for. It's not unsolicited junk mail by any stretch of the imagination. So it has much more weight. We use vertical response. Our wonderful marketing intern, Maxim, uses vertical response, which is a free service. And we can look at the analytics of who's opening it, how many people it goes to monitoring their email adding and subtracting, which is a really great service. So we use our email list a lot. And we guard it carefully and maintain it and actively seek to expand it. So my number three from the top ten list on how to transform your library is social media. And when you're using social media, yep. Yeah. Kathy, we do have a question before you pop on to your next one. About the logo that we saw over all of your different things that you did there, someone that wants to know, said their library is considering getting a logo. How did you go about doing that? We went to a local marketer and just gave him an open book, right? You could do whatever you wanted. And that's what happened. We got vertical, we got portrait and landscape logos, colored and black and white options. Nice. Okay. So you just found somebody locally who does this kind of graphic design marketing type stuff. Yes. And that worked really well. You know, often a library will say, oh, we're going to have a contest this month and we're going to have our new logo design. So, you know, you'll get a free book if you win the contest. Don't go there. Right? That's not a thing to do. That's good. You have to go to a professional. Yeah. Could you, would you be willing to share how much that costs to do that? You know what? I didn't ask, but I know it was in the hundreds. Right. You did this. Yeah. Right. Because then you can, once you have it, then you can use it on everything, like you said, the posters and the media and your social media and your swag and everything. Did it come with like a tagline or a motto or anything for the library? I know some libraries do that or was it just the graphics? No, we chose, no, just the graphics. We chose to do that. We used the motto on our Facebook and our social media, but not on the logo. We wanted the logo to be very, very clean and simple. Right. Right. Okay. All right. Number three way to transform your library is social media. And as I said, always be Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Okay. People come to me and say, I just love your Facebook. And they view it as a positive thing and an uplifting thing. And that's my goal with social media. I ignore any political comment, any undertones of anything. Anything that has to do with sarcasm is out the window. I'm Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm 24-7 and the happy, happy girl, oblivious to all of that. Post as often as you can or as often as is effective. In my case, I post 90 times a week at my little library between 75 and 90, but often in 90. And if you look at marketing books or Facebook experts, they will say, don't even go there. Don't even go half there. But yet in my town, it works. So my advice would be to post as often as is effective for your library. So look at the analytics and see if people are un-liking your post. Well, change it up. Do something else. Also, my advice for Facebook is to not make it all about you, right? Just about like the world isn't all about you. So too, your Facebook page isn't all about your library. So 40 to 60 is what I aim for. So 40% is about library programs, library programs, library programs. Great. Or library information or library volunteers. But 60% is about supporting the neighboring community, supporting a local event, interesting content, any of that. All goes into the Facebook mix and people tend to like it. Also my advice for Facebook is to use real photos instead of canned images. As you see here, we have our local artists downstairs in our art gallery. And it's an easy way to promote this event, also to give some weight to the artist himself. And people just like to see real pictures. Spread your posts out over day. Don't clump them all at the beginning of the day and nothing for the rest of the day. Don't use a scheduling feature. Save some photos and post them the next day and let your personal voice be heard. Right? I'm not a wallflower. I'm not quiet. Everybody knows that. And in a small town, everybody knows who's doing your Facebook page. So you might as well not hide your light under a bushel. I have, as you can see in this post, way too many capital letters, way too many exclamation marks. But that's how I work. So that's me. People know it. And this is actually a beautiful post. This is one of our rug-hooking artists. And it was well received, got lots of hits on it. And it's lovely, right? You can see the library books in the background and you can see the work and you can see the person. I love that post. Use your social media to build relationships with businesses and groups and communities, people, interact with them, make comments, post. I mean, it's not all day 24-7 social media. So you have to be careful and use your time wisely. We also have a Twitter account from our library. And the Twitter feed is fed through Facebook. So our Twitter stands alone, but my Facebook posts, rather, go to the Twitter account and are fed into the Twitter account, which is nice, except my Facebook posts are not 140 characters. So the rest, 140 characters are on Twitter and then it's hyperlinked to the rest of the post, which is not always an effective post on Twitter. So what I do is post to Twitter separately a few times a week with a fresh image to make my Twitter more live and more relevant. It does take a bit of time, but it's worth it. Always use the hashtags, use the comments, use the shares, give people credit, but you're always engaging with people on social media. And it is amazing to see what happens as a result of this. You'll form bridges. It's really good. Our website is clean and clear and consistent and updated. If you're talking about your Thanksgiving dinner and it's February, I'm sorry. I'm not going to linger on your site because that's a sign of a dusty old library. You have to be fresh. The picture on our webpage is not time sensitive always. So there's no date on it. There's no snow on it. So that picture can stay up for a while. We update it every once in a while. But don't put time sensitive things on your Facebook. Or if you do, you've got to update that baby quite a bit. At the end of the day, all this social media does take time. You get better at it. You get faster at it. Much more efficient at it as the time goes by. But it is an effort. And you are changing people's expectations. Most people don't go to the library for their social media. But hopefully, you will change their expectations of that. And even more. My number. Yeah. Do you use a particular scheduling feature to have the posts go? Or do you pre-schedule them in any way? I do. I use the scheduling feature of Facebook, which then schedules it onto Twitter. I know on Twitter, you can use Hootsuite for Twitter. I haven't done that because I don't post as often on Twitter. And when I post on Twitter, I post live. But certainly scheduling. The built-in that Facebook has worked really nicely, too. Have you ever paid for any of the Facebook ads, done any of that? Yes. We have paid for Facebook ads. It's not very expensive. For example, when we have big events, we'll have a paid ad. And for $12, you can watch the analytics very carefully. And you can see how effective it is and how many people that post reach. And so we have found the $12 actually to be a good investment. And we have big events. Not for everything, necessarily, but for some sort of special event would be a good idea. Only for the special events because the regular schedule events have to stand on their own. Really? Right. And just what a couple of people did ask, your website, is what program are you using to do or software for that? Or how does that run? I think it's with Wix. Okay, cool. Yeah, Wix is good. We have an intern, I'll show her picture will be coming up. She does the web page. She keeps it updated. And it's very important to have a dedicated domain name as well. We used to have our web page under our regional server with a bunch of libraries. And it was a very awkward, long URL. So now we have www.PoisonLibrary.com, easy to find, easy to get to. And it's working much better for us. And also the ability to tweak your website and make changes quickly is much enhanced when it's in-house because when we had to deal with out-of-house service, it took days and sometimes a week to make any changes on a website, which is a bit frustrating. Yeah, yes, definitely. Okay, go ahead. Thank you. Okay. No problem. Number four is building bridges with the media, right? The media out there, they have an agenda. They want to attract an audience. And so you have to work within that agenda. First of all, I would say my first piece of advice when dealing with the media is to always be thankful. We have our regular cards that we send on card stock, 8.5 by 11's cut on two. And this card was our Christmas card this year. And it was a hand quilted card from a local quilt shop. And we were very glad to highlight her work. The year previous, we used the artwork of a lovely Amish woman and highlighted her work as well. So Christmas is an opportunity to highlight local work for us. And then this is our regularly scheduled thank you card, one size fits all. So send these cards to the media, get to know them, follow them on Facebook, follow them on Twitter, comment, but get involved with them. And if nothing else works, invite them to the library. And this has been a real boon to us. The past year, we've had the editor of one library do a photography class. And the reporter from a different newspaper do another photography class. And we've had two writers with the newspapers do writing workshops in our library. If nothing else, they'll figure out where the building is. But all this is building bridges with the media. If there's library related events in the newspaper, I'm very quick to take them and post them on our social media with a public thank you for their efforts. And we've had really good success with local media. And what about if they don't show up? So you send a press release and you do all the right things and the media doesn't show up. Don't worry about it. Right? I mean, they've got a million things to do every day and believe it or not, your industrial library is not on their agenda. So what you have to do is send the perfect photo. So the perfect photo for me is when there's one or two or three people in the photo, their names are all spelled correctly, left to right or right to left. And importantly, you have permission to use that photo. Keep it very, very simple. This to me was the perfect photo. We have a canoe company in our town, Giesler Boat Works. And we had a tribute to this business in our town at the library this week. So I took this photo. We put a canoe in our library. We put Jerry Giesler, owner of the Boat Works company with all the books in the background. Sent it off with a nice caption. And it wasn't printed the first day and I thought all was lost. But two days later, this was printed just in time for our event. And it was really good because we had people drive down the highway half an hour to come to our event. So I was really encouraged. Don't worry though if they don't show up, keep sending those photos. The problem that I find is taking pictures of events that haven't happened yet. We're always in the business of promoting, promoting, promoting. What's the next thing coming and what's next after that? So you need to send them a promotional picture of something that hasn't happened yet. So this is where you have to get creative sometimes. Here is what we submitted for our cocktail party. And our cocktail party happened last fall and so we rimmed the glasses and put fake colored water in them and a colorful serviette and we sent it off with a good caption. And that worked. The next thing we did was take pictures of people who bought tickets to the cocktail party. And this is the mayor of the community close to us and I took his picture with his ticket at the front desk. Amazingly, the mayor of the next town bought a ticket that same week. So I think a little political rivalry rather was at play in this instance and it worked really, really well. We had a Valentine's Day murder mystery because nothing says I love you like a murder. And we had to do a promotional photo and this was a bit difficult. So we dressed up my future daughter-in-law in Sherlock Holmes type costume with the magnifying glass and took it with our sign outside the library along with a caption of the who, what, where, when. And it worked. It was printed in both our local newspapers and we got good results from that too. So that was some occasions when those pre-events photos worked well. The number five suggestion that I have is to experiment, right? Get out of your comfort zone and really as much as possible get out of the library. Take it to the streets is what my suggestion is. This is me at the local hardware store that's been very good to us and we had blind date with a book as many libraries do at Valentine's Day this month. So most libraries will wait until people come in and we handed out free books. We wrapped them with newsprint and put little ribbons on them with the tag. We gave them out free but not everybody, in fact the majority of people are not coming into the library that week. So what we did was got a basket of books and hit the streets. And this is inside the hardware store with the owner of the hardware store dressed Valentine's Day appropriately. And I had the basket with the Valentine's Day stuff and it worked really well and this picture got printed in the library under blind date with a book this February. The next thing we did was actually hit the streets. This is Chelsea, our amazing Facebook intern and multimedia intern, technology intern. And she came with me and we handed out books to random people on the street asking only for their photo in return and they were really excited and it was a chance to put local faces on our social media page and it all worked really, really well. We also use this opportunity to go into businesses and take promotional pictures. In this case, we went to the bank and they loved it in a small town. You probably couldn't do this in a city, right? In a small town, went over great. And we went to the grocery store which also worked wonderfully well. These three people are library people and because there was a magician coming for the event, we brought my bunny and I brought my daughter. A lot of people in these photos, in these local businesses, never come to the library. But in a small town, particularly, if you bring the library to them, you can guess what they'll be talking about for the rest of the day and maybe the week. Last summer, we went to the huge shopping mall in North Bay, Ontario. They asked us to come. Interestingly, they bypassed their local library, the next library south and came to our little library and asked us to do story hour at the mall, which we did with great success. We had singing and books and a fake campfire and we did songs and we had grandmas skipping rope in the mall. I wished I had a picture but I was on the end of the rope, turning the skipping rope. And we had people stopping just for the joy of seeing what was going on at the mall. And it's not something that happens at the mall usually. So it was so out of the ordinary that, again, great newspaper coverage. After we have an event or at any time possible, we take pictures of our volunteers. And this was the cotton candy team for the Christmas walk last year. And this is our public thank you. So took the picture, posted it on social media and sent it in the cards, the thank you cards afterwards. And it's just a nice thing to do. Again, the hardware store, we had an event coming up where we were making small racing cars at the workshop at our library and it was in promote. And then those cars would be put at the Fall Fair and there was a competition. So what we did was put a wooden track, a 20 foot wooden track, took over the middle of the store for a week. And the kids and the older men put the cars on the track and there was an opportunity to race three cars. And they spent the time playing at the hardware store. And it went really, really well. In fact, one of the newspaper reporters made a special trip for this little endeavor and came down and gave us really good coverage. But again, you're out of the library. Go to the cenotaph at Remembrance Day, put a wreath on behalf of the library. Invite big trucks and big people from the community to come in. You're reaching out and you're building bridges and at the same time, you're enhancing the public profile of your little library and celebrating the people. My number six suggestion for how to transform your library is change the atmosphere within. Do you want to say something, Krista? Okay, change the atmosphere. No, there is just one nice comment which actually relates to what you're doing. And this, I think, someone says they love that you and your staff are willing to go out there and be a bit goofy. It reinforces the library is a fun place. And I thought that too, yeah, the rabbit and I laughed, the big canoe just on top of all the bookshelves, that's awesome. And that's something, get creative, think of something different. And I also liked the staging, the drinks for the cocktail party. If you don't have something already, just make something up. Make a little, yeah, be a photographer type person, yeah. Very fun. Okay, the goofiness, the serious goofiness is coming up, so stay tuned. All right, my best piece of advice and it might be a little difficult, a little dangerous even, get a coffee machine. Now, whatever kind of coffee machine you have or don't have, you need to really get this coffee machine going and you need to enhance it. You need to have tea and you need to make it accessible. You need to make it cheap. But you're changing the atmosphere instantly in your library. You've become that destination. You're also cozy and warm and comfortable. We had an Amish man come into our library this winter with his coffee cup in his hand. And he was telling us that at that big library in the city north of us that they took his coffee cup away from him and he was just outraged. Of course, he's walking into our library, coffee cup in hand. And we said, I can't believe it. We were just outraged. And we proceeded then to hand a plate of cookies over the front desk and ask him, would you like a cookie? And off he went to the computers. You have coffee at home, you have books in your home, and nothing disastrous happens. So why don't you have coffee and gasp, even food at your library? Every single person who comes into our library is greeted for the most part by name. Whether you're a kid or whether you're an adult, we greet them by name. And that is seriously our signature dish at our library. If you come in, you will be greeted. And if we don't know your name, we'll find out your name. And it makes an entirely different atmosphere. Once you know their names, then you know their families. And then sometimes you get to know their lives, right? And sometimes you make a difference in their lives. We like to celebrate our patrons. We talk to them and we get to know them. We do above and beyond things for them. If they like a book, we'll recommend another. If they get season one, would you like us to reserve season two for you? We cultivate that. We make a serious commitment to do that. We send condolence cards and congratulatory cards. It's lovely to send a, oh, I heard about your wedding and we're so excited, as opposed to I'm sorry about your uncle or your mother. But we send those cards anyways. We celebrate the people in our community. If you're having lagging social media numbers, put your volunteer of the month on your social media and watch the numbers fly. Right? And this is our, Teresa, our lovely volunteer who comes every week. And she's very deserving of anything that we can give her. This is our local dairy farmer who came to give a talk. These people aren't, especially the dairy farmer, not always connected with the library, but it makes ripples in your community. New patrons are always asked if they'd like to put their face on our social media. And usually they say yes, and it's a really nice way to welcome them into the town, right? Welcome to our community, welcome to our library, and their faces get to be known before they enter the main street even in some cases. Oh, I saw you on the library Facebook, welcome to the town. It's lovely. My best patron story is Paul, and Paul's very involved with our library. He's visually impaired, and we purchased a library computer specifically for the visually impaired, and so he's here quite often. Last Christmas, his wife offered to buy him the internet for Christmas, and Paul refused. And when asked, Paul will tell you that he didn't want to leave his library friends. So he'd prefer to come, you know, he has to drive at least 20 minutes every day to come to his library, and he'd prefer to do that than miss the action at the library. So have fun, celebrate your patrons, take goofy pictures, get kids involved, kids love their faces on the internet, parents are pleased and proud to have their kids featured on the social media for the most part. One thing I will say is that you have to be seriously careful with children's photos, and other people's photos as well, but particularly sensitive to children. There's many cases where children's photos can't be on the internet, so make sure and sure again that you have permission to post. My number six suggestion on how to transform your library is to work with local businesses and to align your goals with them. Now of course, everybody has local businesses, and everybody knows that their goal is to have happy customers and make money. So if you can align your goals with their goals, then they'll be your biggest allies. You have to know your businesses and not over ask. Realize that every day someone's looking for a handout from these businesses, and it's quite tiring. So you have to be creative and involve them without using money. So here's an example of two local restaurants, and last summer during our kids program, we asked them on separate days to come and make a presentation during food week. So one restaurant made quesadillas, and the other made ice cream with the kids, and it was a huge success. Now these restaurant owners took time out of their lives, provided the supplies for free, but the trade off for them was all the advertising money that we provided. And I made sure that there was a lot of advertising for them, both before the event and after the event. So they thought it would be worth their while to do it. Here's our gingerbread house that we did last Christmas. We had a workshop with limited enrollment, and if you can believe it, an excavation company sponsored the gingerbread house. He gave me the money, I provided the receipts back at him, and I went and bought $100 worth of candy at the store. And I got a few stairs, but it was fun, and the gingerbread house workshop was lovely. And I sent him a thank you card afterwards, but the next week I had a photo printed of one of these children and put a special thank you, a secondary thank you in his mailbox. The photos told the picture. We also have a real estate agent in town who sponsors our Easter egg hunt every year. And she buys the Easter eggs and a few baskets in advance, drops them off on Holy Thursday. We hide the eggs after the library closes. The libraries close good Friday and on Saturday morning. The day before Easter we open our doors early for the Easter egg hunt, and for about 15 minutes the library is wild with excited kids. It's an amazing event, but worth the publicity for our sponsor, and also a great event for the kids and the families, they really like it. My eighth suggestion is to read Unselling by Scott Stratton, he's a Canadian author, or Zig Ziglar, I love Zig Ziglar, I follow Zig Ziglar on podcasts. His motto is you can have everything in life you want, if you'll just help other people get what they want. And then Unselling, Unselling is also is actually required reading by our library staff. This book is about over the top experiences, customer service experiences, and it really is what we strive for as a library in Poisson each and every day. Not merely meeting people's expectations, but exceeding them and doing the unusual to do it. My ninth suggestion is programming, and this is near and dear to my heart. We started out with a lovely library with books and some weekly events. Then I decided to add a local history night, and again my advice to you is if you have sagging numbers, pick a wintery night and have a local history night, and I guarantee that your numbers will go over the top, we had standing room only in our library. And it was history night that really convinced me that things could go much better and much bigger and use the space better in our library, really to get creative with programming. We packed the downstairs room and just went on from there. The next thing I started, I've been a homeschool mom for 25 years, so I started a homeschool group in our library, and the kids and the parents, again, loved it. One thing I will mention is for a few groups, for example, beekeeping, homeschooling, our photo club, we have a specialized email list, and the week before that special event, I will send them a reminder notice, which seems to be working in our case. We had chicken night, of course, and this is my chicken henny penny, and the event was how to raise backyard chickens, and it was really well received, again a packed room, and the local newspaper loved this photo and we got great newspaper coverage. We had a dog walk, which I was skeptical about, but the dog walk was over the top successful, and you can imagine walking 30 or 35 dogs through your little small town and how much attention it received. We have all sorts of events of all shapes and all flavors and all sizes, and the amazing part is where I first struggled to come up with the ideas. Now people are coming to me with speakers or ideas for workshops and asking me to find speakers, and it's been very, very encouraging and very rewarding for me. Number 10, my final suggestion is to have fun. Always, always be professional, but laughter and a sense of fun are contagious. So I really try to enjoy life along the way. And also I've been doing some short videos, so we had some architect students come, we're in the midst of doing an expansion. So here's our little video with Henny Penny, of course. I won't show it all, it's not very long though, that's the secret. People's attention spans are not very long these days. So without further ado, here's me and Henny Penny. So that's my little video with Henny Penny all the way through the video. And finally, on Valentine's Day this year, here's what I did for Valentine's Day. Again, very brief, it was minus 40 that day, and minus 40 in Canada is minus 40 in America, so you can appreciate how cold it was. So here it is. Nice. That's it, that's my theme song, I try every day to be amazing. So I'll take questions, and again, thank you so much for the opportunity to speak. Great, yes, thank you so much, Kathy. That was very inspiring, a lot of fun events you're doing there. I love the short videos there, of course, at the end. And like you said, yes, short bits of information gets people's attention and they can watch that, yeah. We do have a bunch of questions that came in, all I'm going to send the next few minutes here, trying to grab as many as I can, as we have about, we have lots of questions, lots of people on the line, so we won't be able to get to all of yours, but we'll do the best we can here. So going back to more towards the beginning of your presentation, can you give specific examples of the, you mentioned that 60% of the posts, you're supporting neighborhood posts on Facebook. Yeah. Can you give specific examples of what that is, or what you're talking about for that? Okay, so for example, yeah, in a small town, you have small town events, we have the Maple Syrup Festival in Pwason, we have the Fall Fair, we have a rodeo. For those events, I take the time and I go to those events and I will take still photos, or I'll take a little video. In fact, you can make an iMovie or an iMovie trailer off your iPad, and I took the time to do that. So you're not promoting the library in the strictest sense, but you're promoting the community within it. And interestingly, my municipality has recognized the library as a team player and as a promoter of our town, so it works both ways. Yeah, go out there and do it and they'll see you doing it. There'll be a little reciprocation there. That's what I'm hoping for. For the events when you do promote, about how far in advance do you promote them? Well, okay, I don't know the answer to that, and I agree that there's some gray areas there. You promote too far in advance, they forget, right? And because we have a built-in system of promoting the month in advance, usually the events are all done by the middle of the month before, so the 15th, and then we start making our monthly posters, and then by the end of the month, we start posting them onto Facebook and around town. So really, I'm working from a month to month schedule. And for the big events, probably a month in advance as well, with increasing publicity as the time gets closer. Right, right, step it up, yeah. How many staff do you have at your library? Okay, we have seven. Okay, we work efficiently, right? And everybody has their expertise, and everybody jumps in and out of different jobs. With a small staff like that, and you have to pretty much do that. And was it easy to get them on board? How did you get them to do a lot of these, you know, the goofy things? Well, mostly I'm the goofy one in the photos, in the videos especially, but it, and because they are more professional than I am, right? I try to be professional, but I'm a professional goof. So I'm not really, I'm very willing to go out on an edge with stuff like that. And I think they have come on board just by the sheer momentum of what's happening in the library, and they feel that pride of their work being much, much more meaningful and more engaging, right? It's much more exciting to be in a happy, dynamic place. Mm-hm, the being proud of it, having ownership of it, it really makes a difference to getting your staff, I think, involved and wanting to promote the library and wanting to be there. Again, I have asked different staff members to do workshops, right? And that's even more, it gives them more of an ownership in the process, too. Oh, sure, absolutely. And the last one I'll pull out of from here, what is your PR budget like? How much did you spend on things like the cards and coffee and the extra things? We don't spend anything on coffee because the coffee is self-supporting, right, which is lovely. And for the most part, my programs are self-supporting, too. I think I know I have a summer budget of $200, and that might be my annual budget. I don't care. My boss has designated a special fund to collect programming monies and programming donations, which is lovely. So for the most part, I'm self-supporting, too. So the community is donating to it, as well? Yes, they see value in it, and we always try to have free, free events, or else have the price so low that it's only covering the supplies. But for example, we started a seniors lunch program with a guest speaker twice a month, Friday at noon. And that program, we got a little bit of a grant from the government, but people have been so generous and liked it so well that we have enough money to continue it for a year, even after our grant has finished. Nice. All right. OK, I think that will wrap it up here. I know we don't want to go too far over. Thank you very much, Kathy. It was great to hear what's going on. And you had asked earlier if we have the similar things in the US as municipalities and areas like that, and I said that, yes, of course we do. But it's not that big a difference from a different country. I mean, Canada, the US, you're doing the same things that I hear libraries doing here and having the same struggles and issues and things going on. I think it's just great to see that. Thank you, Krista. Thank you very much. All right. All right. If you do have any other questions or anything for Kathy, you can sure find our website for the library. Reach out to her for anything else you may want to ask. So that wraps it up for our first session of the day.