 There it goes. Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Library Commission's weekly online event, where we cover various Library Commission activities and anything that may be of interest to Nebraska librarians across the state. We have guest speakers that we bring in and we sometimes have our own staff during presentations as we do this morning. We do these sessions every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. They're free last for about an hour, give or take, and they are all recorded. So if you cannot attend a live session or if you want to listen to it again or share it with colleagues, you will have the recordings available to you. This morning, as I said, we have one of our own staff here, Mary Jo Ryan, our communications coordinator, right? Yeah, good job everybody. I don't know, I communicated that to her. And she's going to tell us how to communicate. I'll give you some ideas anyway. We'll share some ideas and hope it'll get you thinking. I'm just going to pass over to Mary Jo and you can get started. Thanks, Krista. As Krista mentioned, I am the communications coordinator for the Nebraska Library Commission. For many of you, you know the Nebraska Library Commission intimately. But for some of you, you may not know that the Nebraska Library Commission is the state library for Nebraska and that we have the responsibility and the joy of working with libraries all across the state to help them communicate with their customers. I think that it's always kind of important for me to remind myself that, that that's my work here and then also to let you know that. Let me just say a little bit about myself since some of you know me and many of you don't. I am a lifelong library supporter and lover. I actually learned to read in the library because I was one of those kids that somehow got through first grade and didn't know how to read. I was one of those kids that gets dropped off in your library on a Saturday morning because my dad had to work Saturday mornings and his office just happened to be across the street from a wonderful little brick Carnegie library with a whole basement devoted to kids. Oh ours is in the basement too. Was it? They often are. They were in those days anyway. So I spent my Saturday mornings in the library learning how to read and learning to love to read and learning to love libraries and I have a passion for libraries that started then and it's gone on my whole life. So I'm thrilled and it's my pleasure to be able to talk to you a little bit about communication and to be able to do this work with all of you. I just want to say we're going to cover a lot of topics in an hour. It's just the way of the world. We're going to hit them very lightly but because all of you drive what we do at Encompass Live on Wednesday mornings, please do let us know if any of these topics are things you'd like to hear more about because many of these topics we could do a whole one hour at Encompass Live on or you could do a whole hour or two in a board meeting or a staff meeting on. So we want to be sure and let you know that we're not going to get into depth on these topics but we're going to hit them lightly and hopefully get into more depth if anything strikes you as something you'd like to do. So communication, getting the word out. I'm trying to get this slide Joe to work. Click on it first and then try and then hit the space bar. Okay first thing it's not. Go to webinars talking to us on the computer there. You probably hear it too. Okay. It's not how to make sure that they hear what you say but instead we want to focus on how to make sure we say what they can hear and that may not be, that may be a very fine distinction and may not make a lot of impact on you when you first hear it but the main thing I think that it illustrates is that it's really not me. It's you. It's not about the library and those of us who love libraries and work in libraries but instead about our customers who may or may not know what we do, may or may not know about us, may or may not love us and so we want to keep them in mind and say things in ways that they can hear it. One of the things that I think will help you do that are some communication tips. The first one is that the communication that we do in libraries is not focused on the library and that right up the bat is a hard thing because we have so much to say about the wonderful work that we do and the wonderful library services that we have to offer and the resources that we have to offer and pretty soon we're off and running and we're talking about all these wonderful things but really we're going to try to communicate about these things in a way that's not focused on the library but instead is focused on the customer and if you think about it in three ways, broader down to narrower. Our communication is focused on the community. It's focused on the audience or the market and then individually who represents that sort of mass of faceless shadows that you see on your screen? Who are those people? The customer? A specific target audience. Personalized and represented by a specific person. So let me give you an example of this just real quick. I was in a meeting in a hospital meeting room and you know I thought it was a great meeting room for a lot of reasons. It had good technology. It had tables and chairs that were comfortable but it also had posters hanging all around the room on every wall. They were giant pictures of people and if you got up close to them there was text on the posters and it said things like here's a picture of a woman and you see this sort of attractive middle aged woman and then the text says hi I'm Lori. I'm a single mom. I've got diabetes and I'm working to control it. I don't have health insurance and she went on to tell her story and all around that room there were different individuals like that that represented what they believed to be the hospital's customers and what I thought was so beautiful about this was it was diverse and it was personal. It told the story of some individual people. I don't know if they were really their customers. Probably they weren't but you know someone took the time to think about who is our target audience and what's a person that personifies that target audience and for me I thought boy the hospital meetings that are held in here are never going to be able to get away from focusing on these customers because every time they're talking about something they're going to see those people. They're staring at them. They're staring at her and I thought it might be a little artificial way to do things but it helps us to think in those ways I think sometimes. So I guess one of the other things I wanted to mention besides when you're specifying your target audience is that you always think about a target audience that may not be the one that's standing in front of you. So that Lori who didn't have health insurance may not be the person who presents herself to the hospital for an outpatient surgery or something but she's a person that we know is in the community who may eventually or at some time need hospital services. Same way with libraries. The person who's standing at your circulation desk may not be necessarily a member of your target audience. You might have to go and look for people who are not necessarily customers right now. So what is communication? Well it's not one way and I say this all the time people who are used to working with me know I'm always talking about how one of the pitfalls of communicating is sometimes we think I'm going to tell them this. It's not that way. It's not really one way. It's at the very least it's two way but most of the time it's more like this illustration. It goes in lots of different directions from lots of different people to lots of other different people and it's a circular kind of activity. It's a group activity and at its very, very best it is a planning process and that may not sound completely straightforward to you but I hope that by the end of this time it'll that'll make a little more sense and sometimes I just like to use a circle to think about a planning process and there's many, many more components in each one of these little pieces of the circle than the ones that I've illustrated here but these are just the very, very basics of this kind of a communication planning process. The first of course is to know your community. The second is to know your library. The third is to do something, implement something. The fourth is to communicate and the fifth would be to evaluate and find out if actually what you did made any difference. We'll kind of go through our comments today with this framework. First thinking about knowing your community. I think that one of the key things that people have a tendency to forget is that we don't actually know our community as much as we think we might. I mean I have lived in this community of Lincoln, Nebraska for many years so I might think I know it pretty well but the truth is my community is always changing. There are always new populations moving in. There's new trends that the community is reflecting. There's new businesses starting. So it's really important I think in order to keep a customer focus in our work that we always try to get to know our community fresh as if we're new there. And there's tons of ways to do this. There's excellent online resources for doing a community profile. I could do and have done whole training sessions on how you in fact do this, how you get to know your community. But I think that the most important thing is that getting to know your community keeps your services with a customer focus and the best way to get to know your community is to listen. One thing that is absolutely a fact is that we can't, we simply can't select a target group unless we know our community. I mean that sounds like a very simple thing but so often people will say well I'd like to do something for the teens in our community. Like well I think that's probably a good thing. Let's get to know the community a little better and find out what's already there for the teens and what the gaps are, what the needs are, how many teens are there in the community compared to how many elderly there are. Those kinds of things are essential in selecting a target group as opposed to a sort of seat of the pants. We know what we know and we kind of just move on that kind of attitude. I'm going to go ahead and see if I can move to the next slide here. Communication always starts with listening and getting to know our community starts with listening. One of the first things we do is we ask some questions and we listen to the answers. Seems kind of simple but one of the things that I know you can do and that we could do a better job of actually is actually getting the facts. We may think we have the facts but our information might be outdated or incomplete so let's target let's actually profile the target and try and find out about purchasing trends in our community, voting patterns in our community, philanthropic contributions in our community, literacy rates, health statistics, etc. In order to segment the market we have to first have facts about that market in order to pick out a portion of the market. We have to know something about the big picture. I like to say that this next one is one of the most effective ways to do learn about your community and that's to consult with others. There are local and regional and national organizations in your community that can tell you a boatload of information about your community. I'll give you an example. I did a little bit of national research recently on the business community and decided that one of the areas that I wasn't very familiar with was the Chamber of Commerce. So I joined their listserv and started doing research on their online resources. Now I may have found some things out about the Chamber of Commerce that I didn't particularly like. I may have found some things out about them that didn't really jive with my world view and you know what that doesn't matter. That's not what it's about. It's not about me. It's about them. So I'm trying to learn about them, the business community, by consulting with or scanning or learning about their organizations that speak to them and speak for them. Now I know this is a generalization and not every business person is in complete agreement with the Chamber of Commerce but it's good for me to know more about that organization and that channel of communication if in fact that is going to be a target market for us, the business community. A news media scam. I think this is a fun thing to do. I think that you'll enjoy doing it. You can RSS feed some news sources and you can get some information very easily sent straight to your desktop. You can do it the old fashion way. You can read some magazines and this is a fun way to learn more about the trends that are happening and challenges and opportunities within your target market. Listening posts, setting up listening posts. Now I personally can relate to this. I like this. Not everybody likes to do it. I like Facebook lurking. I mean in fact some of my friends are like, I know you're on Facebook. Why don't you ever say anything? Well, I'm on there but I'm looking. You know, I'm listening. I'm trying to see what other people are talking about. It can be as crass, as spying and eavesdropping. One of the things that I know a particular library director in a small community does is she makes an effort to get to meetings of organizations that she may not actually belong to just to hear what their issues are. Go to the city council for example just to hear what they're talking about. Are they talking about water resources? If so, she makes sure that she lets them know what kind of water resources information there is in the library. What kind of help she can give them getting access to online water information. Are they talking about the economy and how it's affecting the community? She makes sure that if that's what's being talked about at a particular group, they get information about what's in the library. So it's setting up listening points and doing some eavesdropping and you don't always have to be in on the conversation which a lot of you know me know is very difficult for me. Sometimes you just have to listen. You have to test your assumptions. And by that I mean that you need to check what you're thinking with other people who are real representatives of the target market. And at some point that means focus groups. It means informal discussions for five people. Sometimes what I do, I don't really set up a formal focus group. I'll just like go and talk to four or five people that I work with about what they think about our customer's needs. And I'll just listen. And you know, I don't say to them, oh, I'm testing my assumptions. Oh, I'm doing an informal focus group. I just listen to what they're talking about and take notes. Other times it's more formal. It's a focus group or you do individual interviews with key informants, people that who can really tell you what is going on with that target market. And then I put down something that I think just kind of personifies listening. And it is to keep an open mind and an open heart. And I can give you a couple of examples on me of what that means to me. Years ago, many years ago, when the Nebraska Library Commission was spending time across the state showing people physically what could be done on the internet at a time when not very many people were using the internet, we would have exhibits in which we invited the library community and also the business community and a variety of other people, the public officials to come and look at what is available on the internet. And it was always fun for me to go out and do those demonstrations, set it up. You know, I just felt like I was leading all these people towards this brave new world. But I remember it was that long. Yes, it was a long time ago. And it was it was very fun to be able to show people this. But I remember a good looking older gentleman came up to me and said, well, this is all fine and good. This is all great for you library education people. But business people know that not one person has made a dime on the internet. And that's true at that time. That was true. E-commerce did not exist at that time. No one knew how to make money on the internet. They thought, well, maybe we make money on the internet by using it for advertising. But in fact, e-commerce had not really gotten started at that time. So my initial thing I wanted to say back to him, I mean, I just had to bite off my tongue. I almost said, oh, you old bogey. Just look at it and see if you could learn something from it. But I didn't. I managed at this one time not to say the first thing that came into my head and I instead said, yeah, that's true. That's really true. What do you think the reason is for that? Yeah, I make him think. And he just stood there and he just looked at what I was showing him and he started talking. And he started talking about how well people don't understand it. People don't know how to use it. People are scared they'll break it. I mean, I started taking notes just the minute he started talking because I began to know things that I couldn't have possibly known from my own experience because I was so embroiled in it. But he started telling me exactly what the barriers were. And he went through a mile and by the time he finished going through a mile and I'd written a mile down, he said, but you know, people could get over that and people could figure out how to make money on the internet. It was like the biggest greatest circle. So it was a good example of me not saying the first thing that came into my mouth, I mean into my mind and trying to keep an open mind and listen and also an open heart and allow another person to talk. So I thought that was a pretty good example to share with you, especially because it's one on me. I think that that the next the next that leads into the next thing that I think is really important, which is finding out what the audience already values. If they already value education, that our message is going to be about our role in education. If they already value a stable community, then our message is what the library's role is in creating a stable community. If they're particularly interested in health or economic vitality, our life, our message is going to be somewhat different as well as if they value return on investment, family or social values. I mean, I think these are the kinds of things that you hear if you listen and it's challenging, but it's kind of fun too. The next thing is a discussion of knowing your library. And I think that this is an area where I always really caution library, particularly librarians, not so much our library supporters and our friends groups and our trustees, but our staff to just try to look at the library as if you don't go there every day and don't know it as well as you do. And there's a million ways to do this. And we can go at some point in time, I'd be happy to do a session just on how to get to know your library. But there are exercises you can do with your staff and your board, your friends, groups, their guided visualizations. I've done photo safaris with people, which basically is exercise in sending people out into the library from the front door on, pretending, almost blinders on, pretending like you've never been there before and taking pictures with your phone or whatever camera you have of what you see if you are a stranger. It's really fun and it's a great analysis exercise in a group. You might get the idea as we talk about this, that a lot of what I'm suggesting are group activities that you should do. I really believe that communication is best done as a group process, so I'm really going to suggest that over and over again today. One of the things that I also think is fun is to enlist some mystery customers, have them come in and have a customer experience and then they have to be willing to tell their story, maybe videotape it and play it for your next staff meeting. It can be a lot of fun. It can also be somewhat painful. You may hear some things you don't want to hear, but you know, we're big, big kids, we can do that. There's also a formal communications audit that I've taught people to do and SWAT analysis, these strengths, weaknesses analysis, which I'm sure many of you have done, and I've also had staff to scavenger hunts, but the main point of all of this kind of activity is to determine three things. And these three things are, I took these three words from the book, Marketing That Matters, but you can use any words you want. Marketing That Matters uses these three words to describe what we're looking for when we try to get to know our library, the value of our library, the values of our library, the voice of our library. Value is just simply what is the value of this library to our community? What's the value of the collection? What's the value of the staff, both in monetary and social terms? What's the value of the programming? And this is a great exercise, by the way, for your board. They come on the board with many, I think, grand ideas of being of what they can contribute, and it's really great to know what they think the value is. Then the next beyond the list is values. What are our core values that are fundamental to library service in our particular library? Now that's going to be different from library to library, but I bet that some of the values that will show up will be consistent, such as intellectual freedom, community service, no fee for service or for most services. These values are really important to your communication, because you're going to be communicating not just the value of the library to the community, but the values that your service, that your particular library embodies. And then what's the voice? And so by that I mean what tone or personality do we want to project? Is it a fun, relaxed personality? Is it a professional, competent personality? Is it a thoroughly modern personality, or is it some combination depending on what service that you're actually projecting to what particular target audience? One of the things that I have been very interested in is a toolkit that the Public Library Association put together. It's the Public Library Association Advocacy toolkit. And it's really valuable. I don't know if all of you have seen this. You can go online. I've got at the end of this the last slide of this slideshow has the link, the online link to this toolkit. But if you haven't seen it, take a look at it, because there's a ton of things in here that you can use to plan your communication strategy and to work with people in your library or in your customer group on communication. But one of the things is this thing they call a values message exercise. And just to kind of make a suggestion, I would do this in a group and I would do it as a brainstorm. But I think that because we've got a limited amount of time, I'll just give you an example of one way that this exercise was filled out. The primary value theme in this particular exercise when it was filled out was this. Our library supports the community, especially in tough economic times. So there's the theme that they decided to focus on for this particular communication. Then they broke it down into supporting things. Our library is an essential resource for business development, job hunting, education and lifelong learning. Second supporting theme is our library provides excellent return on investment for our community. Okay, just hearing those things, you're starting to think about how you could communicate them. I think that's great. That's exactly what this exercise is supposed to do. The need, we have to be sure to focus on the need. So we might say our library will meet the needs of the community. To do that, we need more money, more open hours, more volunteers, whatever it is we need. We tell what it costs. And I always suggest that we tell what it costs per capita or per household because it sounds a lot better to say it'll cost less than $50 a household than to say it will cost $25,000. Just an idea. Benefit, what's the benefit? Increased hours and more public computer center workstations will mean a percentage more job hunters will find jobs and stay in our community. A percentage more businesses will find employees, resources to ensure competitive advantage and stay in our community. Volunteer fire department and ENT training can be completed online in our community. Remember, we're still talking about why we want the computer center. What's the benefit? More computers for public access means it covers weight less for service. More library hours on the weekend and evenings mean that customers can more easily find a time that works for them. See, it's all about them. We're saying that we need more computers, but it's all about them. And also, you might want to mention that it'll beat the after school log jam for any adults who's ever tried to get in the library, but all the kids are getting off school and get in and use the computer, they'll be able to relate to that. Every time we talk about a message, every time we talk about communication, I always say, what's the call to action? What do we want to do? Because if we don't want anybody to do anything, then maybe we don't really need to communicate. In this case, it's tell a friend, vote, volunteer, support our funding request, donate. There's different call to action for different target audiences. So you can kind of see how you could do this same exercise around your own primary value theme. And it would be, I think, a good exercise, a good brainstorming exercise for your staff or your friends group or your board of trustees. I do have a question. Yes. Someone wants to know if you can share anything about the staff's scavenger hunt or the communication analysis that you mentioned. I will do that. I certainly will do that. I am going to send out an evaluation after this. And in the evaluation, I will include some of those some links to some of those things. So we can also put them in the recording goes out as well. Yeah, when we put up our recordings for these sessions, we need links that are mentioned here. So you don't have to try scribbling out these URLs. Right. No, put them into the library commission's delicious account and we link to that. So it's all there. You don't have to write all this down. Yeah. And also, it's another thing that we could do. We could actually do another Encompass Live on just those tactics and maybe even do a demo of a group doing them or something, you know, depending on what would be of interest. So just let us know what you're interested in. We build these Encompass Live sessions according to your interest. Yes. So nothing actually happens unless something happens. So here we are at implementation. Implementation is actually an intersection of planning, service delivery, communication, customer service. When all of those things come together, then something starts to happen. And what I hope happens is that we're creating relationships. And I think that that we do a dynamite job of this in our libraries. I gotta say, if we are strong in anything, we are very strong in creating relationships. The business community would give their IT to be as good at it as you are. In fact, you'll notice that bookstores are copying some things that you're doing. They're having your story hours. Yeah. They're having their authors come in and talk because they know you're good at this. Now, the main thing is, if we're so darn good at it, let's figure out how to communicate that we're so darn good at it. So that's my big challenge for the year, is to help people find ways to communicate how good we are at creating relationships in our implementation of services. One thing I always mention here when I talk about implementation is library merchandising. I'm not gonna go through all this. But if the business community is learning from us and copying some of the great things we do to create relationships, then we too can copy from them and look at what bookstores and other stores do to create library merchandising. I won't go into a whole lot of detail on this, but we can actually do a whole and compass live on library merchandising sometime if you're interesting. I mean, if you're interested, if it's interesting and you're interested, this is a good example of a library merchandising idea that I always show when I talk about merchandising because it's not a library, of course, it happens to be a bookstore. But I love what they've done is they've used this space between the tops of the shelves and the ceiling, which isn't a huge space, but it looks huge because they used the whole dang wall of it to create a photo mural. And I think about what could happen if we did something like this in our libraries. We have young people who could take the photographs. If they take them at a high resolution, we could get them blown up by a printer in the community for free and have them put them up on the wall. And these are, you can't really tell if my photography is not great, but these are just pictures of people playing instruments to put over the music section. You could do this with every section in your library. If you think about it, you know, the garden section, think about the pictures the kids could take and blow up to put there. Anyway, it's something to think about. There's always ideas to better merchandise our libraries, and that's part of implementation. Okay, let's talk about communicating. This is, again, a part of it. This is probably what you thought we were going to talk about the whole time. And here we are halfway through, just getting to it. But communication is a whole big process. It's a big ground circle. It's not just this section. But this is where we get to tell the story. This is where we get to brand it with whatever represents and personifies our library. This is where we get to personalize it. And a word that I kind of like because it's not a word, storefy it. So personalizing the message, the main thing for personalizing the message is to make sure that we make it from us to them, from the library person in the library to the customer, the person, person to person, make it real to them. I'm going to suggest that, and I think I've got a slide on this. Let's see. Nope, I don't. Let me go back. We'll find out. Yeah. Okay, I don't have a slide on this. I'm just going to have to try to remember everything I wanted to say about personalizing. I'm going to suggest that you speak to both the heart and the head when you personalize a message. And I'm also going to suggest that you speak to the heart first and the head second. And by that, I mean try to get people feeling first and thinking second. That might not sound quite right, but let me just give you an example. The reason why we say is pretend like I'm telling a story to funding. Maybe this person is a member of our community who's very highly regarded. He's an influencer and he happens to be the head of an independent private foundation. I'm going to tell you a story art about Mary Jay. She came into the library yesterday and I can't get her off my mind. She's a great person. I've known her for a couple of years because you know, she's the front office face of XYZ business. She told me she's worked there 25 years and she's been laid off and she doesn't have a college degree, but she has amazing skills. I mean, she's been there 25 years. She has done things for them that go way beyond her education. She has done bookkeeping work for them. She has taken care of the receipts of their business. She's gone to the bank. She's made deposits. She's made withdrawals. She's the person who takes care of the safety issues in their business. She's the person who's kept on top of human resources in their business. They don't have a human resource officer. They're small. So now she's 25 years into this job with no education and she's been laid off. The business is actually going to close. I mean, they aren't talking about it, but they're going to close. I mean, they're laying off all their key employees. So I'm thinking, what is she going to do? She's come to us because she thinks that we can help her because she's heard that people have been working on resumes in our library. She's heard that people have been taking classes to learn more about how to use certain computer software that they think might help them get jobs. She's heard all this, but you know, our business center in our library, our public computing center, is overrun. We have waiting lists. We have people standing around waiting, for I don't know how long, sometimes as long as an hour. I mean, they can read. Luckily, they're in the library, but you know, that's a very good service best to be providing. And I heard that a library in the community down the road has got a support group, but we don't have the staff to help job hunters with a support group or to help job hunters with interviewing training skills and the kinds of things that people are doing in the bigger libraries. What I'm wondering is, what are we going to do about this? Do you have any ideas? I mean, you know, we're talking about 9% of the people in our community are unemployed. That means that there's nine houses on your block. There's a person in one of those houses right on your block that's unemployed. So what are we going to do about this? Do you have any ideas? I mean, I think, I think if you've got any funding, we could put together more computers for our library and we could get some volunteers and some people that are paid, you know, pretty minimal contract helpers to come in and help these people with their interviewing skills and their resume building. Would you give us the money for that? Would you invest in our community in that way? I would. Okay, Krista would. What I was trying to do there was to get into feel something first and then give him the data about unemployment and then ask him for something. I tried to put myself in his shoes. I tried to think he's a foundation person but he's also probably a businessman. So he's going to be able to relate to the person, the individual who came to our library but maybe also to the plight of the business. I tried to talk to him in a way that respected him but that also made it clear that I understand he's not a library insider. He doesn't really know all this stuff. He doesn't know what our library has. He doesn't even know what we don't have that we could have because the library on the road does have it. So I tried to treat him not as an insider, not the way I would talk to an insider because I think a lot of times I preach to the choir. I talk to you. You and I, we agree on stuff. We know. It's easy. Yes. It's easy to find yourself preaching to the choir instead of talking to our target audience. I have another example. A friend of mine came up to me and said, oh, Mary Jo, I just, I love the library. I just love it. And I'm like, oh, what do you do there? Oh, I check up books. But what I love about the library, he says, is that it is a place in our world, in our community, where anybody, regardless of who you are, what you have or what you know, can go in and can learn anything. And I thought, well, isn't that wonderful? I'm writing that down. And I did. But then I thought, but who wants to hear that? I mean, you know, me, I want to hear that. Insiders love that little scenario, that little testimonial. But I don't know if I'd necessarily say it to somebody unless I knew that they too value education greatly and also value library. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's a hard thing because you hear these things and you want to use them, but you've got to save them until you find a place for it. And hopefully remember it. It applies. Yeah. Tailor it to the exact person who it will connect with. And so I'm going to use this word connect because that is exactly what we're trying to do. We're trying to connect, connect with the audience, connect our library services and what we know we have in our library to what we know our community needs. We're trying to connect to values, the values that we have in our library and the values that we know will resonate in our community or in our target audience. And we're going to storify the message. And what does that mean? Well, it just means that we're going to try and tell some stories. And we're going to make those stories memorable by making the connection between the library, the person who's telling the story, the success story. And if we make that connection, people will remember it and they'll not only remember it, they will take action. So in order to do that, we have to really know our audience. We have to present the story as a problem with a solution and an opportunity. And I guess I would challenge myself, did I do that? When I was telling the story to the foundation head, maybe a bit. I'm not sure I was strong enough on the opportunity. I should have had, I think probably a little stronger statement of what the opportunity was for him to contribute and to make a difference in how much money he could spend and what he'd get for the money, what it would be. So it would be a more specific message of specifying that the library needs excellent amount of money to meet this need in the community of this target customer. So I probably could have hit that a little harder at the end if I wouldn't have been hurrying. And then I'm going to try and hear that message from his perspective. And I'm going to do this all the time. I'm going to tell stories in formal settings. I'm going to tell them in informal presentations. I'm going to tell them when I meet you in the parking lot. I'm going to tell them when I meet you at the grocery store. And that's what's going to make the difference is how many of those stories I can tell to the right people, the right story to the right people. Let's don't critique Mary Doe. Let's critique someone else. See how these people did telling their story. This is from a site called Libraries for Real Life. I love this site. It's filled with stories. And Amy Gilland got a hundred dollar prize for her story. So let's go right to the top. This way we won't have too much hard critiquing. Here's what Amy says. Without the library I probably would have ended up frustrated and unimportant and unpleasant person. The library saved me and gave me worlds to explore beyond my own household. When I was 12 my parents separated and my mother and I moved to a small town in Colorado. It was 1974 and we knew no one. There was no radio and the television only aired the Watergate hearings. My mother drank a lot and got involved with people that wanted nothing to do with me and my schoolmates shunned an outsider. During my second week I found the library and spent three or more hours there every weekday. The librarians must have recognized how lost I was and found tasks for me to do so I felt useful. They saved up books for me to show. I ended up reading Vonnegut philosophy and feminist theory as well as many romance novels. I had somewhere to escape to instead of running away drinking or taking drugs. We were only there six months but it set a pattern for my life. In any town I've ever lived in I patronized the library and gave back as a volunteer or donor. Through the portal of my local branch I've traveled all over the world and a few lively spots in the universe. My love of information has never ceased. This summer I will graduate with my doctorate degree just shy of 50 years old something I never could have done without the support of many helpful librarians. Thank you. Okay what do you think of that one? She doesn't ask for anything but of course I think that's more because she did it she wasn't like told to ask for anything in this message. It's a heck of a story isn't it? I'm damned if I can get back to my PowerPoint here. Oh there it is. It's a pretty good story. Let's see how this story turned out. These are two examples of very different ways to present stories obviously. I hope this works. I can see it but yeah I don't think it's picking up the audio on that's just your click close the tab. I want to do this tab there. Okay sorry about that. See this is live. This is a live broadcast so we were unsuccessful and gave work. No problem. We'll link to the video so you can watch it yourself. That's right. We'll link to the video. Please do watch it because I do want you to think about whether this was successful. One thing I will tell you is they led with the head not with the heart. So there's a little hint. Take a look at it see which thing. When you've got a storytelling modus operandi which I hope you will have the best way to get the story out there is not be the only storyteller. Obviously the best way to get word of mouth going is to create some word of mouth and I'm going to suggest creating some customer ambassadors and not just customer ambassadors but staff and customers and friends and trustees to help them tell the story. And the best way to help them tell the story is to solicit from them their story. Ask them to tell you their story then ask them to tell it to someone else. I usually think that tools are helpful as well. I've seen a number of things that have struck me but two things I saw just recently I saw these baseball cards that the staff and the friends and the trustees of the library had. They had their own picture on it and they have their contact information and if they're the president of the friends group that tells how to get a hold of them how to join the friends. If they're the head of the business reference department it's a little more professional looking it's got all the access points on how to access them but every one of those cards has got a message on it that helps tell helps them start their story. So for example one of the cards I saw said the library is our community's lifeline in tough economic times. So it was obvious to me that was designed to help this person tell the story about what the library's doing to help the community in tough economic times. I thought that was really cool and would kind of help get the conversation started for people. Another thing I've seen are stickers that staff wear and because they're these like little peel off cheapo stickers you have big role of them you can give them to other people not just the staff but customers want to wear them if your friends group people want to wear them your volunteers but one of the stickers was what's your plan for the library tell me. And that one actually of course there's a big responsibility with that one because if someone tells you what their plan is for the library you have a responsibility to listen and to record it and to make sure that it gets listed. And I know one way it's that this library is doing it is that they have a place on their website that says what's your plan for this for the library tell me. And on the website their people are saying what their plans are and so then if the staff hear something they record it right in on the website too. Another one I like is love your library question mark because everybody's always saying I love my library love my library. Well the next part of it is the other shoe is tell a friend. And that gives you an opportunity to talk about your friends group but it also gives you an opportunity to give that person the go ahead to become a customer ambassador to start speaking for the library. I have heard this talked about in a variety of different ways. One book that I really like is the book called The Name of It is Creating Customer Evangelists. I don't usually say evangelists because I think that can have a different connotation for some people but I think an ambassador evangelist if it's someone who will speak for you who will go out and help you get the job done that's dynamite. Creating the buzz. I heard the buzz talked about lots of ways. I've heard about it talked about as word of mouth on steroids. So it's trying to get not just word of mouth from person to person but word of mouth which is the aggregate of what everybody is saying about you at any one time. I've also heard it said as word of mouth plus word of mouse because of the huge power of consumer generated information and communication in this day and age. I mean obviously you've got to be aware that that is a huge part of it. One of the things we're doing here at the library commission to create word of mouth plus word of mouse is we're working on our Flickr group showing how our building is falling apart. Yeah. We think that might help get the word out. So I just put some new pictures. Just put some new pictures up. Today I saw them. They involve computer equipment with water and plaster on it. So yeah, I mean word of mouth plus word of mouse it's consumer generated communication and it's dynamite in creating your buzz. Pay attention to social networking when they're talking about you and use it to talk about yourself. Your library. Exactly. I'm not even, I'm gonna try I guess to click on this. This is a Facebook example. I like this one a lot because because one of our coworkers, Catherine Brockmire is doing the work on this and she's just doing a fabulous job. This center for the book is a group that we are very closely along. It's actually located within the library commission. We staff it. The library center for the book Facebook page is, I think, a great opportunity to show how you can help create word of mouth. What Catherine's doing here is she's doing every day a book pick that says something about Nebraska or that was written by a Nebraska author or that is published in Nebraska. And you can see here the one for, well this looks like this was yesterday. The one for yesterday is Take All to Nebraska. The one before that. Oh here's more information about Take All to Nebraska. It's a bison book edition which is bringing back into the print the first of the novels comprising this trilogy. And oh, look at this cool thing she did. Find this at the library. So it takes you to WorldCat. Maybe slowly. Here we go. It takes you to WorldCat and you can do a search to see what libraries actually have this book. I think the other link took you to the publisher. If you wanted to buy it. I have a budget. I always thought it was too expensive. I noticed she does this every day. But okay. Here's a star thrower by Lauren Addy. He's looking for some pieces that are online really captured most. I'll have to check this out further. Hey, is that not exactly what we want? I mean that perfect example. Catherine's getting what she wants. I love it. So you can see that the Facebook and other social media I shouldn't just use this one example. But others, all kinds of social media can be a fantastic way to get us and create word of mouth. Word of mouth is this great advertising concept and publicity communication concept. But of course we can create it. We can make it happen. This is an exercise I usually do with people in the somewhere in the planning process when we're doing communication planning. And that is an exercise where we choose the tactics that are going to meet our needs and not just the needs of the library, but the needs of our customer target group. So if we were doing this in a group meeting or you could do this in a group meeting with your staff or a focus group, you could go through what we know about the library customer, what some of these options are of tactics and what we're actually going to do here in the library. Well, we're going to actually go out and do some off-site workshops. We're going to actually do them on these dates. These are the people that are going to do them. And this is what we expect to have happen as a result of them. So these are some outreach strategies here. These are some word-of-mouth strategies. Paid advertising and direct mail strategies. Probably not going to be the basis of your communication, not in these economic times. But there's something to be said for what you can learn from some of these strategies. And it's possible to get other funders to pay for some billboards. If that's what you decide we'll reach your target audience. You know, things like that. Always offer to say funded by so-and-so so they get their little, you know, promotion in as well. Absolutely. Christa knows, Christa knows. She knows that we are, if you're talking to the funder, they want to hear that. That's something they want to hear. What's in it for me? I have this collateral print materials, for example. I have that lower down on the tactic list because I want to think about what the people can do first before we think about what the print can do. Because I think the people are more powerful. You telling your story and you getting your customers to tell your story much more powerful than a newspaper ad. Public relations work is important as you're thinking of these tactics. But again, not as important as some other things you might do in the upper part of this exercise. One-on-one selling sales promotion. We do this in libraries a lot. With coupons for free finds, fine bind days with discounts and specialty advertising pieces that we give to kids during summer reading program. We use some of this. I just challenge you to think about how you might use it with the specific target audience if it may have meaning. And then when you're actually creating a communication piece, I usually try to answer these questions for myself or get someone to help me answer these questions when I'm thinking about it. The first one is what business goal is this communication piece designed to advance? And that usually can lead us away from anything that's just designed to make us feel better about ourselves or have people feel better about us. We probably can find better ways to do that than designing a communication piece. If it's got a business goal that we're trying to advance, if we're trying to get our talking book and for all customers to take a look at our new digital players and check them out, then that's a business goal and we need some pieces to do that with. We have a target audience. Who are the target audience? People who can't see to read or hold a book. What do we need them to do? We need them to try these things so that they know if they like it or not. What do we need them to know? We need them to know it's easy. It's not going to be hard. They can do it. It'll be easy. How are we going to distribute this communication piece in order for these people to get it and to take this action? Well, we want to distribute it where they are. So if one place that the people in this age range go is to the state fair, then we're going to the state fair with this communication piece. And what's the attraction of this? How will we get them to look at it? Well, maybe we'll put them right on it. Front and center, big, a picture they can relate to that looks like them and gets their attention. I mean, there's a lot of different ways to answer these questions. I was just showing you kind of an example of how we've answered them in some cases when we're working on a specific project. But I always challenge people to think about asking these questions whenever they are thinking about a project like this. I just want to say we're almost out of time and I'm almost out of slides. So please bear with me for just a minute or two more. Because we can't forget to evaluate. We always have to know, especially with communication, if it's working. We can measure it. We can measure whether or not there are more people taking our job skills training since we started communicating about what we're doing in providing training on how to write resumes. We can measure that. We can test. We can ask ourselves in observation. Are there more people there in the room? Write down how many people are there. I mean, we try to find different ways to evaluate and to analyze what it costs and what our cost benefit analysis actually is. And I always think it's very important to get outcome information from customers. So I'm going to be asking you in an email, did you do anything differently after spending this hour with me? Was it at all useful to you? Because I really think that's a good question to ask people after you're done communicating something. If you have any questions, there's my email. I'll be around here for a little while longer on this call. If you want to go ahead and ask questions, either using your microphone we'll open up the microphones or typing them into your text box. So we will be around for a little while longer. I know some of you have to leave. I want to make sure that you go to our delicious account here and take a look at these. All these links will be in a delicious account. The PowerPoint presentation will be loaded on. I'm sorry. Is our audio working yet? Nope. I don't think so. All right. Wait. Now someone says they can hear us now. Maybe you hear us now. It says you've lost someone. So we can audio. Yes. They can hear us now. Okay. Yes. Quick follow-up then. Yes. All of the links that are on here will be put up with the recording in our delicious account. The PowerPoint presentation we put up with the recording. So you'll be able to download that. View it. All of this will be included out there. And you will all be sent an email when the recording is ready later today, maybe tomorrow. And we will also repeat this information when we send out the evaluation. It will also include the information that you're asking for, how to get to the delicious account, how to get to the recording. Do apologize for the audio problem we have. It was just, it was just we went to this slide that was it when suddenly everything fell apart. Oh, I'm so glad it was only this slide. Well, I was just saying email me if you have questions. Take a look at this great resource that's now of ALA. Take a look at this great resource that PLA has done. These are two books that I love. So if you do have any questions, feel free, as I said, to contact Mary Jo. We probably should wrap up since we're a little bit over. Yes, thank you. I just look like anybody had any urgent questions just where can we get the slides? Where will we get the information later? And you will always send an email with links to all the recordings and all the information that you need. Thank you all very much. Appreciate you giving us your time. And we'll see you next time. Bye bye. Bye.