 Good morning everybody, this is Bill Fisher. I'm on the faculty of the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State. I want to welcome you to this colloquium presentation, part of our spring colloquium series. Today, we have a couple of people representing everylibrary.org. We have with us today John Krashka, who is the founder of everylibrary.org. John is, has a extensive background in dealing with associations, association support, membership recruitment, governance activities, things like this. He is also, or was also the head of membership development for the American Library Association and is currently the president of the Board of Trustees for the Burwin Illinois Public Library. With John today is a, everylibrary board member, Patrick Sweeney. Patrick is a branch manager for the San Mateo County Public Libraries. Patrick is a 2005 graduate of our program here at San Jose State and he is very active in ALA. He's actually on the governing council, is a member at large. He's also active with the California Library Association and let me turn things over now to John and Patrick for their presentation. Bill, thank you very much. This is John. I'm going to take the first half of the presentation and Patrick's going to take the second half, unless of course I stumble on something and Patrick needs to come in and correct me. The chance to talk to the San Jose community is wonderful and the chance to be able to participate in the extension of what you guys do in class all the time is great as well. There's a lot of what doesn't, what don't they teach us in library school? I think San Jose does a better than average job of teaching it in library school but there's some things about working on the ground when it comes to political campaigns, election days that are focused on libraries that isn't necessarily part of the core curriculum. So I'm very glad that we're here today to be able to talk about that, not only for libraries that are looking to go out for a vote, have something before the voters, but also to look at this information, this data, this way to talk about library campaigns for everyday advocacy. The sub-pilots of this project today is how to run against your own library and win. If that intrigues you, we will certainly have a lot to talk about when it comes to running campaigns. Before we get into the material, I want to tell you a little bit about every library. Every library is a new animal in the library advocacy ecosystem. The historic posture among libraries and library associations, foundations, organizations is that they're set up in particular ways that date back a long time. They all have validity, they all have their role, they all have their strengths. In fact, you know, I did active member of ALA in the Illinois Library Association as an active participant in legislative days and advocacy moments for my own library. I like what associations do, but there's a place that we don't focus on historically because we were built as the way associations and foundations and other organizations are built, and that they tend to be election day. Also, the public libraries themselves, as public entities, are hampered by certain things that keep politicians honest, the Hatch Act of 1912 is what we can point to with immediacy, that says you cannot expend money on the conduct of a campaign, you cannot expend public money or use public time on the conduct of the campaign. Now, within that scope there is a lot of information that needs to be conducted, transmitted to the public, and we're going to talk about ways to do that with some verb and alacrity as we move forward in this presentation, but every library is set up in a way that is different. We're set up as a, instead of a charitable organization or a unit of government, we're set up as a 501c4, it's a super PAC for libraries. As a super PAC, we're set up primarily to work on supporting local libraries when there's a measure before the voters. It might be a bond to build a new building, maybe the first time since Carnegie died, but you're going to go out and ask the public for a couple of million dollars to take care of the space that we do librarying in. Other kinds of referendums, parcel taxes, levies, millages, warrants, articles, there's a lot of different names for those funding measures, but they're all the basic taxes that public libraries function on. Libraries appropriate monies in two different ways, of course. One is through some sort of a regular process that the Board of Trustees or city or county government conducts that levies taxes, usually they're based on property around the country, sometimes they're based on sales or use or special taxes, but when those measures are before the voters, it's a different matter because we have an election day and we need to talk to voters particularly, the uninformed voter is our biggest challenge. Every library exists in a way to help support both the local library when it goes out with an informational campaign and the local vote yes committee that's organized in order to help citizens move this issue forward for the good of their community. Every library is also set up in a way that helps support legislation that impacts the library's ability to function as a district. What that means is when there's something that's moving through state government or if there's a statewide ballot initiative that influences the library or impacts the library's ability to raise and expand revenue, we would like to be in that kind of a place. And Patrick, if you have one second to talk about what every library California is doing around that, this would be a good time to jump in. Sure, sure, John. Yes, so right now, we are working on every library California, which is set up not as a C4 as we're talking about every library national, but it's set up as a general ballot committee in the state to campaign on behalf of any statewide proposition that comes out around libraries. So, right now, we're specifically talking about a proposition SCA7, which is a state constitutional amendment which would allow the voting threshold for library tax measures to be lowered from 66% down to 55%, which is just more democratic and we'll be able to win campaigns easier for libraries specifically. There's a couple other statewide propositions that could come out that every library California is looking at that we are willing to back if SCA7 doesn't go through SCA7 and there's another building bill that just came out are both the credit to getting those into the legislation. The first place is totally and completely with SCLA and their lobbying. Once that happens and it gets before the voters, that's where we take over. So, that is what we're working on. If you're interested in getting involved in that, we can talk about getting involved in some kind of voter impact activities that we're going into next year. When it gets back down to the library national, so that voter activity, the chance to focus communications out to the public in an information only setting, or to work with a vote yes committee and campaign that's been set up in town, every library is built in a way and we receive donations nationally from individuals, corporations, unions and other political action committees to do this, so we provide consulting, we provide pre-planning and assistance polling, we work on the roles, defining the roles and encouraging the roles that staff, trustees, friends, and foundations have, and we really look to make sure that the issues that are in the public trust that we're about to become a new appropriator in that community. We're about to ask people to pay additional or sustaining taxes for our library. Those issues in the public trust are what we focus our work on. We focus at work based in two areas. One is data about the library when it comes to voter perception. And I'm going to get into that really heavily in the next moment or two. The other aspect of it is for the political sciences, looking at how candidates, campaigns behave when it comes to voter activation. The library is a little bit different than a candidate. The library is a little bit different than even a school bond initiative would be or a parks and rec bond because of our unique brand. In the data, OCLC and Pew and ALA and all these different groups are asking the voters, asking the public a lot about what they receive libraries to be. We did a major release from Pew data for yesterday. The data looks great, but data says 94% of parents, say libraries are very important to their children, or something like this is going to be very important, 94% of all parents say that they're an important institution. It's a wonderful, it's a great place to stand on. 58% of Americans have a library card, 52% of card holders have come to the library, at least once in the past year. Those are all good places to start from. What really matters to us when we're talking about elections though is what do the voters say. This information about the 37% of voters who will definitely vote yes for the library comes from OCLC's From Awareness to Funding. From Awareness to Funding, we could do a master's class on the data that's looking at it because when they were not talking broadly to the American public, they were talking to registered voters. The behavior of registered voters on election day is all that really matters when we're talking about election days. The fact that they have a library card or they don't have a library card, now we'll get into that. But 37% of the American voting public says on a model or sample ballot, but they will definitely vote for the library. 37% additionally will probably vote for the library if they can have a question or two answered, if they have a chance to engage in the material. If they have a baseline of support, you would look at this and say 74% of the American public, the American voting public would vote yes. Unfortunately, this is not for a particular campaign. This is an in general. This is not taking into account voter turnout for that particular election day. This is not taking into account any of the particular demographics in the community, that specific zip code level community, nor is it necessarily taking into account a voter sentiment around that particular measure that particular day. But there is a natural environment of support by voters. The 94% of parents that's cool, they're somewhere in this Venn diagram, but the 74% of voters who are swainable to say yes on election day for new funding does exist. The 26% of the American voting public who probably or definitely will vote no, they tend to fall into two groups. One is a zero sum game approach where if the parks don't get it or the police don't get it or the you know some other unit in government doesn't get it, then why should the library get it? The other group psychographically here is essentially anyone who says that any tax is a bad tax. The Tea Party types, they're a group that we need to serve every day when they come into the library, but on election day we don't necessarily talk to them. We're not looking to convert hearts and minds here. We're not necessarily interested in making sure that they love the library. I'm perfectly comfortable with a group of people who are rationally in Europe but favorably disposed to the library who can activate as our voters. Why do we talk about politics when we talk about libraries? Because your funders who are the public at this at one moment or elected officials who control your city or county general appropriation or your state representatives and senators or your federal senators and representatives listen to voters. And when only 37% of the American public is a definite supporter, we've got some ground to cover. The big question that we have for you and the big question that we're trying to answer as a new super PAC for libraries is how to activate this 37% to our definites and sway those other 37% to our provables. In many states we need 50% plus one. In some other states we need 60%. In other states like California we need 66.7%. 66.7% of the voters in that particular election to say yes, to vote yes for that funding measure. There is a lot of ground to cover. In the data, back to OCLC for more honest of funding. The characteristics of individuals who are in that 37% who definitely or 37% who probably will vote yes. The biggest thing that came out of that series of services that they did at OCLC is that someone's willingness to support increased library funding is not driven by or limited by their use of the library. Baseline on this is that somebody who has not been to the library since they were 14 years old somebody who's not darkening your door who's now 24, 54, 84 years old they could still vote yes for the library because they believe in the institution. The individual likewise who comes in every single day uses all of your stuff, builds their life around what they've found at the library may not vote for you. If we strictly rely on an inbound service model to communicate with voters or advocates, we are potentially missing half of our electorate or half of our big advocacy support. Use does not matter when it comes to actually saying yes to the library. What the voter perceives about the library, the belief that the voter has about the library is the driver in many ways for whether or not they're going to punch a chat for you or if they're going to go out of their way to help you lobby kind of government, city government, state and federal. The perception the library is not just a provider of practical answers and information. Committed supporters hold belief and I love that they use the word belief here. The belief that the library is a transformational force. It may define reason and logic. It may define actually your current service plan. This goes back to why do we run against our library sometimes because, you know, right now we might not be doing it great. We might need some additional resources that come from funding or allies and endorsers or other kinds of support but the belief among the electorate is that the library has the potential to be a transformational force. If you are currently in a library that is doing that sort of work and many of you are and many of you strive for that every day, activating that belief drives additional support either at the ballot box or as advocates. There's not a demographic in the data. There's not a demographic that drives residents' willingness to increase their taxes. It is a perception and attitude about the library and this is revolutionary from our sales use from awareness for funding perspective. It's not just about the library as an institution. It's also about the librarian. That is going to be a place to hang our hat, to frame our discussion and to communicate with voters that there is the library which does things and is a place that and it is also the librarian who is him or herself the change agent in their community. Activating that, giving them a perception of what you do every day and showing that you are engaged in that work of the library is the thing that really drives home decisions to support. Okay, let's talk just for a moment about who these people are and their characteristics. It's actually about their belief structure but how do you identify them? There's a lot on the page here. You're going to get the slides later. I'm going to take you through it real quick. These are individuals, the people who are in the 37% range who are destined supporters or even the probable supporters, they are involved in their communities. They are involved in their communities does not mean that they are necessarily civically engaged. They are individuals who are involved in some community of intention. That might be somebody who is a midder or co-opter who makes little baby booties for premature babies and they do it in a community way. It might be somebody who's involved in a church, synagogue, mosque. It might be somebody who is a volunteer coach, you know, for a sports team. There's a community of orientation that they are involved with. If they're, that doesn't preclude anybody who is more of a solo practitioner but it is easier to find people in communities because it's also possible to make allies with those communities. They recognize the importance of the library in the community as an anchor institution as well as to a child's education, how the library stands in a gap. They're not always heavy users of the library. Again, the word belief is in here. It's a noble place, important and relevant to the community. We are at an interesting and critical junction about people's perception of library and the transformation of collections from being printed material and other tangibles into e-books and other downloads. It means that we have to, I think, work a little bit harder as we move into the 21st century on making sure that we are continue to be viewed as an important and noble and relevant place in the community. The library is a vital community resource. They believe that on a continuum between police and fire, parks, schools, public recreation, you know, sports teams, that whole thing, the library is part of that continuum and they are willing to increase their taxes to support it. You've got to give them a good reason so that we do good strategic planning. But the biggest thing here is that they recognize the value of a passionate librarian as the true advocate for lifelong learning in that community. The passionate librarian, I've got a whole slide for this. I'm going to hang here for a second. It is the perception not only of the institution, but of you as the professional. And I want to say like when the public comes back and says librarian, they mean everybody who works there, not just the MLS. I have a great deal of respect for the MLS. I do not have one myself. That being said, I understand what it's like to walk into the building and have the front-line clerk be the librarian. If they are passionate and engaged the same way you are, we are in a much better place when it comes to talking to voters and talking to potential advocates. So to recap, there's no difference between somebody who is a user and a non-user. My favorite example is the fact that before I had kids, which was many, many blissful years, before I had kids, I voted for the parks all the time. Even though as a single white guy hanging around the parks, it would probably have been a class whatever misdemeanor if I got, I didn't use them. I didn't use them at all, but I needed a place for those kids to go that quite frankly was not my lawn. It's a perfectly valid reason for me as a voter to say yes to an initiative and improve the parks. Same thing goes for somebody who's not been to the library in an awful long time. Likewise, the person who's coming in to check out materials, use your services all the time, may or may not vote for you and may not be your best advocate. We need to figure out how to activate those people with the belief that you and your institutions are transformational. In the data, and you can dig into it really hard, there's no difference between the progressives and conservatives. We can use that as a cipher for Democrat-Republican. We can use it as a bi-wave example of the mom who comes in with the homeschooling mom who comes in with her kids. Looking for materials and for some connection, looking to actually use a program, extend her child's education. Is she part of a traditionally progressive hippie collective or is she part of a base church homeschooling movement? And if we can use those as proxies for progressive and conservative, there's an opportunity for her to vote yes or to become your advocate because she understands the transformative power of what you guys do. The one group that does matter when it comes to attitude, of course, as I said before, is the anti-text, is a bad text community. I think we, as an industry, need to pay a lot of attention to that. Fundamentally, nothing impacts a voter or an advocate's behavior more than their perception of you and your institution. There's a lot of institutional perception out there, how many people know a librarian? Okay, campaign land, political sciences land, what activates voters? These seven factors activate voters for the president, for the governor, for the mayor, for the city council members, for any initiative that's on the ballot, including library. The pick two are when you have an information-only campaign that you're waging as a library, for us to activate the people who have a culture, tradition, or habit of voting for the library by informing them that there's something on the ballot, but people like myself who've voted in every election since the caucus versus Bush, I go in and I vote for every single thing. If the first time that I have ever interacted with your ballot measure language is there at the polling place, and I'm not in the base of 37% who definitely will vote yes when the library, when the word library is on the ballot, the other 37% who need to have some Q and A happen, if the first time I'm looking at an appropriation of a couple million dollars is on the ballot box, you can flip a coin about whether or not I'm going to vote yes. So information-only campaigns need to make sure that they hit people who have the culture, tradition, or habit of voting. But every single campaign, the vote only and the vote yes side need to expose people to the candidates for the issue. The single biggest difference between the Obama campaign and the Romney campaign was a knock on the door in certain precincts, a knock on the door that said, hi, I'm John. I'm with the Obama campaign. That never happened with the Romney campaign. Romney said, never happened. There's people that are going to be doing doctoral dissertations on that campaign for years to come. But in certain key precincts that tip certain states, which tip the electoral college, the Obama campaign had a on the ground get out the vote campaign that said, hi, I'm John. I'm with this campaign. I want to tell you about my candidate. You see it all the time, people walking the precinct, getting out in front of the voters and saying, hi, I'm John. I'm running for mayor. I'm running for city council. I'm running for whatever it may be. The thing that tips people on election day, which is a weird day out of the other 365 of the year, is knowing who that human being is. How do we get the librarian out in front of people? Because nothing impacts voter behavior more than the perception of you and your institution. The institution has a record, but do you have visibility? And then, of course, the awareness that there's a measure on the ballot, which means we've got to do effective information on the campaigning, our thesis at every library. And the thesis that we're helping to win campaigns with is that the librarians need to view themselves as the candidate. When there is a measure on the ballot, we tend to talk about the library. The library is the incumbent in the race. Incumbent see both as an anchor institution, but also with a record. When we want to run on our record, we say additional money, new money, renewed money, will help advance what we've done already so well as your incumbent. But I am the candidate here. Me and my colleagues do this kind of work all the time. We are the candidates that we want to put in front of you that says we're manifesting it. Likewise, if there's an incumbent record that is not so good in the community. What is new money on election day? What is new money from city of county governments? What is new money from state or federal look like? Or from funders, or from donors, or from grant makers, et cetera, et cetera. What does that new money do to fix the problems that we have? You can run on or against your library's record, as long as you are the one who is running that campaign. It means that you are the candidate. It means that you are out there in front of the voters in a way that may be different, massively different than how you do service, 364 days of the year. But on that election day, on that day where the budget is being approved, you need to be in a position to talk about what your vision is and how it moves the community forward. How do we extend that influence out there further? That's our next big question. Election day, you can do it. I'll look at that. But we need to also be aware that when we're not in an election cycle, working like a campaign does, working in terms of putting the voter, I'm sorry, working in terms of putting the candidate out in front of the voter works every single time. You might not win every single time, but you've moved the conversation forward about what librarians do, the relevance of librarianship in that community, and the relevance of librarianship in the modern age. Okay, we looked at seven things that activate voters. There's seven very similar things that activate advocates. Hey, yeah, we need to go talk to city council. We got to go talk to county government because our budget is going to potentially be cut, or we've weathered cuts over the last several years to the recession. What does it look like to extend or restore funding? They need to have experience as advocates of the issue and prior success as an advocate. It lines up pretty neatly with what activates voters. The personal contact with the candidate, the hi, knock on the door, I'm John. I'm with the campaign, hi, I'm John. I'm running for city council. It's also the hi, I'm John. I'm your librarian. You know what is happening in this building, or let me tell you what's happening in this building that impacts our community, that experience of the issue, the same techniques, the same little mental touch points among either voters or advocates. Somebody that you've motivated to become an ally and to stand with you in front of your funders, this is all valid, and you're still the candidate. If you're not up for election day where you're running, you're up as an advocate, and you're still inspiring people to move with you towards new funding opportunities. There's a whole series of exercises that we do with campaigns around who is your ally, who's your endorser, but the biggest thing is, quite frankly, early contact. The chance to move through the seven different areas of civil society of our ecosystem, through our educational partners, you can go through and do the inventory. Who's our K-12, who's our pre-K, who is our community college and university, who is our for-profit or non-profit tutoring allies. All of those different groups, when you're going to be mounting a campaign, if you were going to go out as a candidate, you're going to go look at them. If you're running for office, you need to go look at all these different groups. The governmental partners, the civic partners, the politicians who are out there, the earlier you can get to them. And even if early is a couple of weeks before this current ballot initiative is to sit in the voters, get to them in an early way as you and the librarian, not as a representative of your own institution. It's what the friends do, it's what the foundation folks do. That's what the citizen committees do. They're your representatives, but you yourself are the authentic candidate who goes and talks to them about what new or renewed funding does to advance our common cause. Your allies become your endorsers, your allies become your funders, your allies become your volunteers. The drive exclusively to win on election day that is going to win at all costs is not something we ever recommend. In the 365 days of the year, election day is particularly weird. Budget hearing days are particularly weird, but the other 364 days. What happens today after the election? Your campaign needs to be anticipating both a win where you're moving things forward and a loss where you need your allies and endorsers to be. Same thing goes for the budget hearing day. What happens the day after? If you have gotten your signature society in alongside you, but it's not magic. It's not magic coal, but it does make for a better coalition for your local library. Campaigns do it every day by walking a precinct or canvassing for voters. They're driving towards that particular election day because putting a candidate out in front of the voters, putting a candidate in front of the advocates attracts attention, it activates people's perception and activates their willingness to say yes to a new measure. Walking and following work great, social media, and Patrick's going to talk about this a little bit later, but social media is a place that also puts you as a human being in front of them in a way that's different than online advertising. The stuff that works less well is towards the bottom of the list. The newsletter that goes out is great, but the newsletter that has stories about how you who are the librarians are working and doing this kind of change in the community works much better. Routing at your biography. Well, Patrick's going to get into that now in terms of rooting at your biography. Patrick, you've been probably following the chat more than I have. Is there anything that came up in this first half that we need to address? There was the discussion about where funding comes from. Sylvia, I think, posted, you know, she made a comment that a lot of people don't know where library funding comes from. And that was one of the things that we run into, John and I run into quite a bit, a terrifying amount that people don't know where the paychecks come from. I don't know if you want to touch on that real quick. Sure, sure. Depends on your jurisdiction, somewhere north of 90% of public library funding comes from locally appropriated taxes in the zip codes that the library serves. Some states, some libraries is 93%, some places it's 97% of your entire operating budget is appropriated within a few feet to miles of your library. That is appropriated under two or three different kinds of regular order. One of that could be the work that the trustees do every year setting a budget and moving the tax rate around to fit that budget. The other could be with city or county government that is making some sort of a levy on property taxes generally that's done as part of the normal budgeting process for the library and for the city, for public works, for parks and rec, for running the city hall, all those kinds of things were bundled into that. And there's a lot of horse trading that has to go on when it's city or county government because no politician wants to raise the taxes for no good reason. The other process, of course, is what we've been talking about when it comes to going out for election day, when there's an extraordinary measure before the voters, something that needs to increase above what the limiting rate is that the trustees are empowered to do by statutes, or it's a big project, like a bond initiative to build a building or remodel a building. And that's when the voter agrees to have their taxes changed. Or disagrees from that as well. That's one of the things we're trying to work on. So the other couple of percent that comes in for the average public library, it might be 10%, it might be 7%, it might be 5%, it might be 3% comes in from federal, state, and other soft money sources. I'm not casting any aspersions on what friends and foundations do, what our grant making partners do, what appropriations look like in DC or at the state level. But last year, on ballots alone, there was $253 million being appropriated or being asked to be appropriated by the federal voters. The entire federal appropriation for libraries is somewhere between $147 million and $187 million, depending on who's, you know, sequesters and all the other stuff that's going on. There's a lot more at stake in a per annum basis on those local elections. The entire library industry is about $12 billion a year, if you spread it out across all 9,500-ish library systems in this country. That's an awful lot of money being appropriated in county government, city government and by trustees. The particulars of moving any single budget thing forward are always particular to that budget hearing, but the techniques we're talking about here are consistently useful and consistently successful when you identify yourself as the candidate in a legitimate change agent in the community for this anchor institution. So, thank you, John. So, I'm going to start talking about messaging. And messaging is one of the key things that you can do in any campaign or even better to start doing your messaging when you don't have a campaign so that later on when you do, you don't have to message so hard. All the money that's being spent in your campaign is being spent around making sure that your message gets out in front of voters. Excuse me. Now, one of the things that your library has as a message is its vision statement. John and I did a presentation at PLA just a couple of days ago, and we asked the room of about 40 people if they could recite their libraries vision statement. And two people could do it. And that was kind of terrifying. One person had a terrible vision statement. We can, if you want more help talking about that, and what a vision statement, how to draft a vision statement, we can talk about that some other time. But know that message and live that message is really important. And I'm going to talk about getting that message out and what that message means. So, first thing you need to remember when you're talking to your voters and your community about the library is that you need to remember that the voter, that whether or not they are a library user doesn't matter at all. If they're in your library, if they're outside your library, they're just as likely to vote for your library. So, you need to talk to them in a little bit different way, but either way, you need to be talking to both groups of people equally. So, for example, people who are in your library, people who are library users, people who are in there all the time, it's really easy to, after messaging for them, you know, it's just as you know, this is what happened in the library. As you know, you use your computers all the time to apply for jobs. As you know, the librarian, Mary, helped you with your resume. As you know, those kinds of things. So, that's very, very easy. To non-users, just a slight shift in saying, as you can imagine, our librarians help community members apply for jobs. As you can imagine, there's a strong visual divide in our community. And the library provides a service to bridge that gap. And that is the difference between communicating with library users and non-users. Once again, remember, whether they are a user or not, doesn't matter. You need to talk to them equally. Voters typically see the library as a transformative force. They see the library as the incumbent. You are the one who was there last year and the year before. So, they already have an idea about who you are and what the library does and what it, they already have a vision about the library. They see it as an educational department, an educational development engine. And just real quick on the economic development engine, every library is doing a lot of work working with startup organizations and entrepreneurs to let them know about library services in communities. They just sent a bunch of librarians to yourself by Southwest. If you haven't checked that out, take a look at some of the communication that happened between librarians and the startup community. It was, I think it was pretty huge, innovative, sponsored, a booth there and everything. So, it was a really big deal. The best part of getting that message out that the library is an economic development engine. As a social leveler, place of discovery, personal refuge, all those things are important. That is the messaging to use. The library as the incubator, I'm talking once again about that stuff by Southwest. We have a lot of businesses that come into our library. They are excited that we are there when we communicate with them that we are more than well willing to work with them to give them the resources they need to start up their businesses or to improve their businesses. We have things that, databases that would cost their business tens of thousands of dollars if they're to purchase them on their own. We provide that stuff to businesses. I think that's a huge area that we need to move into a lot more and promote that we are the incubator in a community for startups and for businesses. I think that fights a lot of the any taxes of bad tax. I think it helps get out the message that libraries are just a social welfare organization. We also promote the arts. We help cultivate a community identity. So many libraries have that historical center and then, of course, library as leverage. We help government organizations get grants and build capacity. We allow access to tech and retail anchors. Libraries have one of the most prominent retail spaces in a lot of communities. A lot of the businesses around my community would kill for my foot traffic. We are probably the busiest thing in our business district. And that brings a lot of people down to our business district. So we also have that as leverage. So once again, O'John was talking about the perception of the library. Of the librarian. Nothing impacts the little behavior more than the perception of the librarian and the library's institution. Really what I'm saying is that you are the candidate as a librarian. You're the one that people vote for. And it's their relationship to you that they are voting for when they're talking about funding libraries. So that's why it's so important to become the passionate librarian. You know, if you know your own story, your own biography, and why you work in the library, that is what is important. That's something that you should have in your elevator speech when they're talking to your community, when you go and you speak to city council. Think about why it is that you work in the library and why it is that it matters to you so much. Because that story really, really matters to people. And the second part, what is your best story about helping an individual or the community change? Change is a great messaging device and talking about changing the community. I mean clearly it was Barack Obama's big message, right? So what I want to say about this is that we do a lot in numbers. We talked about statistics. We talked about the number of people who checked out books, how many people came into the library, how many people were at the story time. None of that matters when you're talking about messaging. One of the big things that I would love to see happen is librarians stop talking to politicians about the 5 million people that came to their library. 5 million is just such a huge, ridiculous number that you can't really tell them what that actually means and the politicians, if you want to see their eyes glaze over, walk into their office and say, you know, last year 5 million, 547,346 people came into my library, they checked out 12 million, 700, you know, none of that worked. They don't really understand that. But how many of you guys still remember Joe the plumber, right? And that was one guy in a community. His story wasn't the same story that everybody else has. It wasn't the average story. It was an outlier story. But it really did a lot for the campaign. These are the kind of stories that shape campaigns. These are the kind of stories that when the politician goes in front of voters and they want to talk about getting voters behind the library, these are the stories that they need to have in their pocket to be able to talk to voters about supporting the library. Politicians can be your biggest advocate if they have the tools to become your advocate. So if you guys go to a library and the report has a whole bunch of numbers in it, seriously sit down and try and talk to people about collecting the stories. Our own library system switched from being very, very numbered, heavy to being very, very story heavy. And we collect the stories all year long for our annual report. We do that every year now. It's really those stories of impact that really, really matter and really resonate people. That's what people remember, stories of impact. So as you go about your day, one of the great things that you can do and one of the tools that you can use is if you have a great story of impact, write it down. Write down, you know, I'm the librarian who helped Steve find a job after he'd been homeless for two years and, you know, he used our computers to access the job and Susan, the librarian, helped him build his resume and helped him submit it. And now he has a job and he's a productive member of the community and bringing in so much money into the community. I am the librarian who helped Johnny learn to read and now he's going to. That's actually one of the stories that our annual report has. We have an after school reading program, an internet after school reading program. One of our students hated to read when he first came in the third grade, refused to do it. We have a great passionate staff member who helped him learn to read and he's going to Stanford on a scholarship from a very, very poor family who couldn't send him to college if they wanted to, they couldn't pay for it. So these are the kind of stories that really resonate with people. So take some time to write your day or write your week or if something happens that you think is outstanding that you want to get before city council and talk about it. We'll put the voters and talk about it. Just take a couple minutes and write those down. So here's what you can start doing tomorrow. These are things that you guys can do in your library that you can walk away from this webinar with and implement immediately. These are great things and just tools and tactics that we've taken from campaigns around the country that libraries can utilize right away to make an impact in their community. So first of all, John kind of touched on it, phoning and walking. Those are two of the most significant ways to hit in front of voters. They're also the most time consuming and they're also the most uncomfortable. I'm working with my staff to try and talk them into doing a door-to-door library card campaign for September. I would love to get my staff members and my friends out in the community knocking on doors asking people to have a library card, signing up for a library card. They already have a library card, handing in the information, or talking to them about the library and what the library means to them. But that direct community access and that direct community contact is so important to building up a relationship with the librarians. Once again, anybody behind it has to be the librarian to them. So it doesn't matter who goes out. Phoning is a great tactic if you are running your campaign. It's a little bit more difficult if you aren't running your campaign. The random calls aren't as accepted unless it's political or something. So that was kind of hard. But events and socials, you know, having events outside your library is something that quite a few libraries are starting to do, having book clubs in the local bar or the local pub. It's a great opportunity to identify people who are advocates and activists of the library, but who might not come in to the library. If you build these events into the culture of your organization, people are going to start feeling that they have a strong connection to their library in places where they might not otherwise. They won't see the library as some, you know, a stone-walled institution up high on the hill. They'll see it as part of their community. The signs and mailers, you know, they do present a tribal identity, putting them out in people's lawns, having bumper stickers that just say, I love the library, helps people identify with other community members and builds up that community of supporters and just helps them identify themselves, which is something that they feel good about. Mailers, you know, aren't as effective. They're high-cost, low turnaround. They're okay. They're okay. You know, let me talk about one more thing here, though. Email lists. John and I have talked about this quite a bit, but email lists are one of the most significant things that you can be doing right now. If you don't have an email list to mail to your community when you have a new program or event, you need to start building it. You can use MailChimp or something or some other free. There's lots of free email services. And building that email list is super easy. Every event, every time you have a program, every time you have something that draws in a lot of people, send around just a clipboard with a sign-up sheet. And people will sign it up. I mean, it's amazing. If you put a clipboard with a sign-up sheet in front of it, it says name, email address, and pass it around the line, people will just sign up. It's that easy. And with a big enough email list, it is incredibly easy to let your community know about some of the events that are going on in your community. It's incredibly easy to tell the stories of impact that you have from the month. It's incredibly easy to let people know and discuss spaces and then build up that relationship with them. It's also incredibly easy to fundraise with a strong email list. Now, we can talk about that too later, but all right. Community engagement. I have to tell you that I am super excited because our library system just hired a librarian whose entire job and responsibility in my library right now is to not be in my library. John made a comment on Facebook talking about librarians without the library. And that's going to pretty much be his job. He's going to be out in the community. He's going to be out doing programs and events and service delivery outside of the library. He's going to be talking directly to the community, tabling at events, and being engaged in our community. And that's once again that tactic of building up a relationship with community members directly with our librarians because it's that passionate librarian that they are going to vote for and that they're going to connect with and that they're going to have that relationship and that strong, positive relationship with the library. Training and role playing. For those of you guys in California, Henry Bankhead is the director of Los Gatos Library and he does an amazing staff training for community or for customer service. And it's an entirely role playing through improv. It is supposed to be one of the most amazing things of all time but that training with role playing is super, super important. Social media. We engage quite a bit in social media and a lot of our campaigns. One of our most significant campaigns was the one in Louisiana, in LaFouche, Louisiana where we had a council person, I don't know what to call him in this parish in Louisiana but it's a councilman who made horrifically racist remarks about people who use the libraries and he said it about three days before the election happened and we built a social media campaign within 24 hours and had funds raised from that email list that we talked about earlier. And enough funds raised to really reach out and flood the electorate with this message about how horribly racist the councilman is against you and a vote for this councilman's proposition against the library was a vote for racism. It was basically our message. But in that time we significantly impacted the election and turned it around. Social media is so, so significant. Take some time and put some money behind your Facebook ad, direct your Facebook ad to your community, target them. Most importantly, again, put some money behind it. All right. So community services, community surveys are a great way to introduce your library. You can have a community assessment survey, specialty planning surveys, key stakeholders surveys. You can also find out quite a bit about what your community thinks of your library and what you can change or what you need to do with some of the important things you're doing in your strategic plan to allow the community to give input to feel like they're a part of your community or to feel like they're a part of your library. It's an excellent way to get your message out to your community. Program events, you know, we talked about this just for a minute. But having programs that support your allies and endorsers, if the Rotary Club strongly endorses your library, you know, there's having the Rotary Club in your library or having programs and events around that. We talked to Oakland Public Library who wanted to have Clorox Bleach do a program in their library about what Clorox Bleach was and kind of the science behind what Bleach was and have them endorse their, endorse the library. And having and reaching out and targeting local organizations to come into your library and work with you is a great way to get that organization to want to partner with you or want to support you later on. So, community engagement. So, like I said, new resident visits, I really would love to see some kind of library program where, you know, some kind of gift basket gets sent to anybody who moves into the neighborhood. In San Mateo County here, we had a program through Redwood City where anybody born in the county got a book and a piece of paper about the importance of literacy with, the importance of literacy with new, with babies and toddlers and stuff like that. So, it hit them right in the very beginning. In better librarians with key allies, this is my, this is that new librarian job that we have, you know, getting him involved in the Rotary Club, getting him involved in Q1S or the Chamber of Commerce. We're just getting involved in City Council. Not being on City Council probably because, you know, there's some conflict of interest, but going to City Council meetings or going to the PTA meetings, there's so many things going on in any community that having a few person there who is the voice of the library will build up such a strong relationship with your community that it's incredibly important. Library card sign up month. You know, I talked about that door-to-door library card sign up. John, I don't know if I can make the offer, but I'm going to do it anyway. But if anybody wants to do a door-to-door library card campaign, every library would love to give your library pizzas for the night in order to help thank the people for getting people out for library card sign up month, for going door-to-door. And it's just such a huge concept. All right. So things you can do. Don't walk. Go around your community. Walk around your community. Just take a walk and say hi to people. Tweet at the Mayor or City Council. Volunteer Library Brigade. We're starting one in the Bay Area who wants to start a chart, that cheerleading group for libraries to do like parades, cheerleading at parades, you know, having many libraries set out, those small free libraries. Our great just as a concert reminder that libraries are there and around. And showing off your staff on social media, getting people out and getting their face in front of the people is really, really important. So to do this, in three days, start spending some money on your Facebook pages. Show off staff on your social media and start ramping up your social media by targeting your ads to your community. Three weeks, do the personal community inventories. Set that first new meeting and have two with old allies. So I mean that just means going out and showing up at a City Council meeting, emailing your Mayor or your City Manager or somebody on your City Council and saying, hey, let's go out for coffee. Let's do something together. Let's get involved in a project together. That's super important. In three months, walk the precinct. Once again, the library card sign-up is still the door. We'd love it. We want to get you involved in that. In three years, convene the Library Coalition of this place. And I want to leave off with a message for you guys. And this is something that we learned from Ken Haycock, who was the previous Dean of SLIS, and he sat down and he talked to us for a little while. One of the key things that he said to us that just resonates with us over and over and over again is that people don't do things for you or for your library or for your librarians because they like you. They do things for you or your library or your librarians because they perceive that you like them. It's just a radical shift in changing, I think, a radical shift in thinking. If you have any comments or questions, we are here to answer them. Great. Thank you both, John and Patrick, for an excellent presentation and helping us understand a little more the importance of this and also pointing out both legally and what a library can do, what a board of trustees can do, and what an organization like every library can do with regard to your status. As a sort of a super PAC versus a nonprofit type organization and it certainly seems to fill a niche in our field that was sorely lacking. So we do have some time. If anybody has questions and you would like to ask John or Patrick something, you can either put it into the chat box and we'll read it or if you want to grab the mic do so or raise your hand and let us know if you have a question or comment. Sure. There's a question coming in from, sorry, it just jumped from Dina Gould. She says, and Patrick, I want you to fill this one in. She says, attending library union meeting this weekend, it's I'm not a hired librarian, is yet what one message can I bring to this meeting? Well, a library union meeting can mean a bunch of different things, so I'm not sure what the purpose of the union is or what the purpose of the meeting is. The one message I would have is some kind of story of impact, some kind of personal reason, maybe why you're a librarian and why libraries are important to you specifically, some kind of personal story. And I would think, in addition to the stories, pictures or video or some other type of illustration or some kind of media certainly with regard to the way in which people respond to media today in addition to text I think would be effective as well. If I can also say about a union is set up, if this is a labor union and Dina, if you can jump on the chat and let us know. If it's a public employees union, they're set up as a 501C6 which lets them do some things. Okay, thanks, it is a labor membership meeting. They set up as a 501C6 which means that they can be an ally, an endorser and a funder of groups like every library as well as local ballot initiative campaigns, local vote yes committees. The union has in many jurisdictions, not everyone, but in many jurisdictions the chance to bring out their members to do walking and phoning on behalf of library campaigns that are happening out in the field. So, you know, if there's something that's hot in your area, we should probably chat a little bit about strategy. But in general, the union community can and should be showing up in support of these public funding initiatives. Let me thank both John and Patrick for being with us today. I also want to thank my colleague, Dr. Anthony Bernier who's online with us today. It was Anthony who actually put John and Patrick in touch with me to help make this colloquium possible. So, I want to thank him for that and thank everybody for your time and attention. And let me just remind everybody that our next colloquium presentation will be on the 16th of April, the day after you've done your taxes. So, you won't have that to worry about anymore. And it will be our own Dr. Michael Stevens and Kyle Jones who did the hyperlinked library a class last semester as a MOOC and they're going to be reporting on that experience and what they learned and how MOOCs can be used as an educational tool. So, that's about a month from now and we will get some messages out about that in advance. Thank you again for being here today.