 Good afternoon, and welcome to Running a Value Proposition Exercise in Your Library. How-To Lessons from the ARL Liaison Institute. My name is Judy Rutenberg, and I'm with the Association of Research Libraries. It is my great pleasure to introduce today's presenter, MJ Delia, Head of Learning and Curriculum Support at the University of Guelph-McLaughlin Library. We have muted all participants today to reduce background noise. We do encourage your participation through the chat window box in the lower left-hand corner of your screen. This session will be recorded, captioned, and made available on the Association of Research Libraries website in approximately one week, along with the presentation slides. Yesterday, you should have received a facilitator's toolkit to accompany this webinar. That toolkit will also be made available along with the recording. We thank you for joining us today, and look forward to a terrific session. Over to you, MJ. Thank you, Judy. Yes, so welcome to Running a Value Proposition Exercise in Your Library. I first should begin with a quick thank you to Redivine at the University of Toronto for improving whatever title I had before this. She definitely improved it, and I'm really excited today to share with you. We'll just move ahead here as some of you are getting your audio sorted out, it looks like. For today's session, I've broken it down into smaller segments with each segment divided by this purple slide, and at the purple slide is a good chance that we can pause. If questions have come in, and I encourage you to ask questions if you have them, you would just type them in the chat box, and then Judy can highlight them and ask them. So we'll have sort of these pauses at the purple slides where we can have a conversation and clarify anything that's come up that we don't have to wait until the end. So once again, I am MJ. I'm at the University of Guelph. You've got my email address there and a caricature. And if you want to tweet, there's my Twitter address. And you heard from the intro, I work in the library. I'm essentially learning commons, but I also teach for our College of Business within the University, and I teach entrepreneurship. So the stuff we're going to talk about today actually comes from some of my work with the students who are studying entrepreneurship, the students who are trying to invent new business ideas, and that sort of thing. And so what I like about being able to bring it back to the library is I think there's some great transferable principles, well admittedly of slightly different disciplines as in business. I think we've got a lot to learn, so I'm hoping that you see that today and like I said, encourage questions as we go. What are you getting yourself into? Well, here's the basic agenda. I want to provide you with a bit of context and overview, which would include a quick mention of the ARLEs on Institute and sort of what we did there, as well as where does this value proposition conversation actually come from. And then once you've got that foundation jump into the actual stages of designing a value proposition and because this is a little bit more practical, this is the how-to portion, we want to wrap up with some things to think about if you want to have this conversation at your library with your staff, what sort of considerations do you need on the front end as you prepare, what works, what doesn't. And I'm sure some of that will also come out in the questions that we have that you guys posed today. And at the end if there's any overarching questions, happy to to deal with that as well. So that's where we're headed. Really I have two basic objectives. One is to introduce you to the basic elements of a value proposition design exercise, kind of what is it, how do you do it, and really why would you do it. And the second objective is, as I hinted there at the agenda slide, is just to offer tips for how you could do this, how you could start this conversation with your staff or with various groups. So I thought I would start, we're going to work color-coded here. So here's a yellow, kind of an ugly yellow slide, but I wonder if, just to give a sense of who you guys are and who's on the other end of the phone that I can't see, in one sentence, if you wouldn't mind typing in a chat box so why did you choose to attend the webinar? What worked or what jumped out to you? And yeah, go ahead and I see some answers coming in. I'll just give you a second. Basically we'll see if we can crash the chat box. How about that? Yeah, tips and tricks looking for ways to present stuff interested in the concept, intrigued by the title. That's good. I want to learn to pitch my ideas, preparing for future assessment anticipating potentially using this in the retreat. Nice one, Erin. I'd like to try it again with more information. Good. I'm glad people have already tried some of this stuff. Excellent. So alright, I didn't see anyone say I joined to heckle MJ, so I'm excited about that as well. So let's jump in. I want to give you a bit of context here and some of you will be, I'm sure, familiar with the ARL liaison institute from last June. I should say at the outset I was not on the original organizing committee and was more brought in as a consultant to help with the kinds of activities that would help the conversation. And so just a quick refresher. Really that institute was a combination of librarians from Cornell, Columbia, and Toronto at Cornell. So it was about 45 to 50 of us. A lot were liaison somewhere, AUL, that sort of thing. And my understanding again, as not being on the primary planning committee at least initially, was starting to think about liaison work and the future of liaison work. And when they asked me to help them with the session I would like to say, well what do you want? What do you want to do? And we chose the value proposition activity which we're going to talk about today in an attempt to help people to think like users, or imagine themselves in the shoes of people who use the library. And it was sort of a way to flip it on its head instead of always thinking about it from our angle. What about the users? And the other part of the value proposition exercise and impact today is that it's about articulating the value that we think we bring. And I should point out here that last bullet point on the slide is not meant to be fatigious at all. We bring lots of value. It's that we often only talk about it on our terms. And so the value proposition is an attempt to say, okay, we think we're bringing this value. Let's find out if that's actually accurate. So we chose that activity. I'll explain roughly how it worked and we can get into the mechanics towards the end of the webinar today. But we basically spent about five or six hours doing a value proposition, a set of conversations around the value proposition. And it was spread over two days. So we started the afternoon of day one and then we had a number of things to reflect on on the morning of the second day. Sort of all in maybe six hours. And lots of conversation, lots of activity. So we structured the conversation this way just so you can get it in your minds that we had basically 10 groups. So we took the 45 people that were there, divided them into groups of four or five. So we have 10 groups. And we assigned each of those groups different customer segments. And we'll talk about segmentation in a second. So we had groups looking at what does the liaison work look like when we're serving faculty, when we're working with international grad students, or when we're working with administrators, and started to try to unpack what liaison work actually looked like in relation to these segments. Now, the irony of today's session is we're doing a webinar on an activity that is typically very hands-on. So at the institute for instance, these small groups had a bunch of markers and sticky notes and lots of flip chart paper. And they're together in their conversations and really writing a lot of stuff down, debating and discussing. And here we are on a webinar with sort of a one-way conversation. So I'm going to talk a lot about how this worked so you can imagine that kind of scenario where you're in a room, you've got a bunch of groups, and they're typing their ideas, or they're writing their ideas and marker on sticky notes and they're debating and that sort of thing. So why don't I pause just for a second and see if there are any questions. Just about the institute if I've clarified that for anyone, if there's anything related to that that would help you for today. No, looks like you're good to continue. We're good to go. Thanks, Judy. Alright, so hopefully most of you received your toolkit. And I've tried to mark on the purple slides the approximate spot in the toolkit where the content comes from. So for this overview, it's really just that second page where I want to talk a little bit about it and give you a sense of where the concept of the value proposition came from, at least not way back in the history of the value proposition, but just where this activity comes from. So you get a sense of the source material and also so that you think, that I invented this, I want to acknowledge where it came from and encourage you to look up the original sources too. But before I jump in I should acknowledge that there are business terms ahead. And I say that kind of jokingly, but the reality is business conversations can be challenging in libraries for various reasons. Some people are uncomfortable with the management jargon and even just the philosophy of business to make money. And so I would just say a healthy suspicion is totally fine. We shouldn't stop critically thinking at all, but that we shouldn't also let the terminology be a barrier in the conversation that this technique can indeed be insightful and helpful. And so I'm hoping it's not a barrier for most, but it's helpful to know this as well if you plan to run a session that you might get a bit of pushback on, for instance, the use of customers. And I think your challenge as a facilitator and even today is just to say customers is that stand-in word, that catch-all word that's either if you prefer user, patron or stakeholder or constituent. It doesn't really matter. It's the people that use and need the services we offer. And similarly with the idea of value in a business context various value often just means can we make money? And in libraries that's much more problematic that way. And so we can think of value a little more as are we delivering what people need? And I threw that last one in just as a joke because there's no synergy in today's presentation, I promise. So my journey to the Value Proposition Exercise actually started with this book known as the Business Model Generation. And this book hit the scene and then became like best seller around the world. And I think what was interesting about this book was it was an attempt to say spending all of your time planning your business and writing huge financial plans is almost a waste of time at the outset. What you want to do is figure out how your business works. And it's sort of seductive in the sense of this book focuses on a single tool which I've got here known as the Business Model Canvas. And really the premise of the Business Model Canvas is that you can describe your entire operation on one page with nine building blocks. And obviously it's beyond the scope of this webinar to talk about each of these building blocks, but I just want to point out that the Value Proposition is right in the middle. So your whole business pivots on the idea that you can provide value. In other words, provide something that your customers want. And if the right side, if you look at this Canvas on the right side, you see everything that's customer facing, your customer segment, how you're reaching them. And on the left side is infrastructure based. So it's all the things that we have to do as organizations to deliver the Value Proposition. Now what's interesting about this book is there's not actually not a lot on how to write a good Value Proposition. And I think they must have realized that because their sequel was the book more recently, last couple of years, published I think 2014, called The Value Proposition Design. And this is really the book where the activity comes from. And so it's very similar, I would say, what's perhaps different and very useful about this book is it's full of techniques and strategies and ways to have these conversations. So I'll cover the basics today in terms of what we did at the Liaison Institute. But this book is a very helpful $23 kind of. It's not expensive and it just got a great way and lots of tips for facilitating the conversation too. So it might be worth looking it up if you're really keen on this conversation to get your own copy. So again, a quick pause for questions. There's been a few questions about getting the toolkit. Hopefully you guys can get that. Get someone to send it to you if you haven't seen it, or search your email again. But are there any questions at this point around things we've covered so far? I know we're still kind of intro at the intro stage. Looking okay. There was one comment that this is a given that our universities may use this kind of business language that it's good to be familiar with it. It's definitely good to be familiar with it. You can be comfortable or not comfortable with the language, but it's helpful to at least be aware of it. And I see a question there around how does this relate to a book? The book Start with Why? It's actually very related. That's a great book to read. This is more the techniques of how to have that conversation and hopefully getting to the why. And I think you're going to see that in the next section here. Okay, so let's jump ahead. First basic definition, what is a value proposition? What are we trying to do? There are lots of definitions, some more complex. I just like this one. It's simple. The combination of products and services that create value for a particular customer segment. But I should point out here, the first point I want to make anyway is that second part of the definition is that the value is actually in the eye of the beholder. It's in the eye of the customer segment. So we may say a lot of things we do are really valuable, but if that value isn't at least recognized by the customer segment, then we have some challenges. And when you're doing value proposition design, one of the ways you understand the customer is using what they call the customer profile map. And I promise we'll unpack this in a second, but I just wanted to show it to you. And really the goal is to think of your customer and think of the three broad buckets of what they're facing. The kinds of jobs that they need to do, what they're trying to accomplish, and then the frustrations they encounter. And so as we think through this that's a way to understand the segment. And again, we'll talk about it more in a second. Back to the definition here. The other part is that it's a combination of things we offer. And very tangible things, products and services that they see value in. And when you're doing this exercise there's a similar map called the value map for us to think about our response. So what do the customers need is the first part understanding who they are. And then the second part what do we offer and how do we help them achieve what they want to achieve. So you've got a circle map and a square map kind of straightforward hopefully. And really the whole activity is based on these two maps. And these two maps together form the value proposition canvas. And so this is really what we did at the liaison institute and what we'll unpack over the next little bit here. And as we dig deeper into each of these sort of segments in each map we hopefully arrive at new insights and we hopefully see opportunity. I think when it comes down to it value proposition is really about trying to answer the question why would people choose us? Why do they want that product or service? And sometimes that's an easier way to think of instead of trying to match a product and a service to a customer statement. Just ultimately what we're trying to discover is why they want us and what we have and what we want to tell them about that. So if you're kind of on the fence here you'd say why have this conversation? What are the advantages? And I've hinted at a few of them already. And there's more in your toolkit on page 5 maybe if you want to jump there. I just put a couple on the slides. But I mean for me, so this is again my perspective, but I think what's really valuable is it really does force you to look at the customer first and look at the whole customer, the user. So we're not just concerned for instance on how an undergraduate student uses the library. We're concerned about what is an undergraduate student actually experiencing in their life. Because we have to compete with all the other things going on. And so starting with trying to understand who they are. And this touches on other areas. It touches on design thinking and building empathy for the user and that sort of thing. So I think it's aligned with other trends in libraries like UX or design thinking. The second reason I think it's really valuable conversation is once you get familiar with working in libraries it's easier to make assumptions about the work and about the people who are using it. And it's not an assumption at all. It's just over time we do short cuts and we make assumptions. And value proposition design would encourage us to challenge and test those assumptions as we go. So the process actually builds in the way to check with your customers about whether they see the same things that you think you're seeing. Third reason, and this one we talked a lot about this when we did the Liaison Institute is just actually articulating the value. That can be a challenge we like to believe. We offer lots of value to campus for instance and want to believe in sort of the public good of libraries. But then when it gets to the nitty-gritty we're not always great at actually just clearly and succinctly in that short few sentences tell someone why they should come or why they should use that product or that service. And so this forces that kind of articulation which I quite like. And then a side benefit and having run this exercise a few times in different contexts one of the best parts of having this conversation in your organization is it builds a shared purpose. You start to realize we don't all think the same things. And so for instance at the Liaison Institute you would overhear groups talking and they would start to realize oh we don't mean that when we talk about that or we don't have that here that's not the same in the department I serve. And so then you start trying to hash that out. Are those differences real? Are they perceived? What does that mean? And so it's a really helpful way to work together. I do want to jump into the steps but we're at a purple slide here so let's take a minute and just see what kind of questions have come in. So we have a question here from Brian Moynihan. Do you have any examples of completed business model canvases from libraries? Like don't offhand, I mean I think it's an interesting activity to do even at a project level. So if you you know we can go back to the canvas but the project level is a way to sort of map out the resources that might be required on the left side and then ultimately who they're targeted at. The challenge with the business model canvas and you kind of hinted at it with your question is that the bottom of that canvas is all about the finances so sort of the cost and then the revenue. And as revenue grows then you can reinvest in that sort of thing. And that doesn't always work in libraries so you have to have a bit of creativity to determine it's not about increasing revenue, it's about maybe increasing return or number of users. So you have to redefine that a little bit. Hopefully that helps. We can chat offline about how you might run a business model conversation if you want. I think we should stick to value propositions for today. Great, thank you. We have another question and comment from Steven Bell. Does the term solutions provider describe the value libraries could bring? Solutions that help you gain something you need or eliminate a problem or pain they have? Or is solutions too vague? I think that's something we could maybe play with throughout the rest of the webinar to be honest. When we get into the value map particularly I think that's where you can sort of see the value that or the gains that the libraries can create or the pains that we can reduce and maybe how that is seen. I think solutions provider is a fine term but it's pretty generic too. I think my telecommunications company is also a solutions provider so we need to be careful but still something worth thinking about and keeping in mind throughout the rest of the webinar. I think we'll move on. The first stage really is just landing on your customer segment. I don't assume that segmentation is a common well known term but it comes out of marketing. It's really just how you break up a large group of customers or a market into a smaller and sometimes more definable group of customers. This can be really important because you may have to not only market or send messages differently to these subgroups but just they have different needs. While we are libraries one of the best things about libraries is they're really open and serve pretty much anyone who can come through those doors. The reality is each of the people that come through that door have different needs and need different services from us so we should be aware of that. High level here, how do you segment? Sometimes we get that question. It's going to depend a little bit on the context but common areas in marketing anyway are geographic segmentation, where do you live, demographic stuff around maybe your age or stage in life, that sort of stuff, income or whatever. The third one, more behavioral and this one is interesting in the sense of it's a little maybe harder to define it depends on context but one example in the library community might be dividing by frequent users of the library or of the collection or whatever the topic is versus infrequent or non-existent. So you can see you can sort of divide it might not depend what age people are but their frequency might be really important in a particular context. The last one, marketers love the psychographic really just your opinions and values about a given topic might put you in a different category. Even what we've already talked about today your comfort level with management terminology might sort of segment the group of people attending the conference call today for instance. So I just highlight those. I would give you a couple of tips if you're going to think about how to do this in your library. The first is it's best to choose a customer segment or user segment that you can actually access and talk to. It's pretty tough to offer services to people if you can't access them. So in this activity you're going to think about who these people are but then you also want to test your assumptions and so you're going to want to talk to them at some point. So someone who's readily accessible, very helpful. If possible you want to try to move away from broad generic categories and I think we have a tendency to do this in higher ed and especially in libraries where we say while we serve faculty we serve undergrads, maybe graduates, we have alumni and so we group into these really large categories but even within those large categories we can probably segment further. And at least for me I've found if you can focus on for instance faculty and turn it into early career faculty or to faculty in a certain discipline you at least are starting to narrow it to a manageable set. Now does that mean all early career faculty think the same? No but it's a smaller group than all faculty and so they may have different needs. And it can also be helpful and this may emerge over time as you do the activity to find a segment that has a common objective. They're trying to accomplish the same thing or a common frustration or obstacle. If they're all facing the same pain then they can sometimes be clumped as a segment to figure out alright that's a pain that lots of people have, lots of people across whatever spectrum they're looking at and so what should we do about it. So the first step is as simple as figuring out who do we want to know more about. If we pause there really give you a chance to throw in a question or two if we need some clarification. Any questions? I think we have a question which is would an example of the pain points be all remote users to the library? That depends on how good your remote access is I guess. Yeah it's a good question and in fact pain points leads us nicely into the next section so I think we can hold that for a second. All I'll say at this point I think is pain points depend a lot on the context and there may be very obvious ones such as accessing maybe remotely but there may be things we hadn't considered as we start to talk to this customer segment or talk about this customer segment with people who work with them. I guess the short answer is yes it definitely could be but it doesn't necessarily have to be. Anything else Judy? We also have a comment from Rita Vine that on the issue of solutions that solutions may be more about us than them and she suggests maybe it's more of a conversation and collaboration rather than solution. Yeah that's a good point too. Thanks Rita. Alright let's jump into stage number two here. So we've picked our customer segment and now we have to understand this customer segment and as I mentioned earlier we really want to understand them at least using this activity and there are other ways to do this but for this activity it's to think of this segment according to the three buckets you see here. So we want to think of their jobs and tasks which we'll talk about in a second in terms of gains and gains is kind of a weird word but ultimately what are their desired outcomes in life? What are they trying to do? What do they want to do? And then their pains and frustrations. And so if we take a look at the first one here jobs and tasks. So it is our chance to sit back and think alright we've got this customer segment in life and I highlight that because one of the challenges in this activity is there's a tendency always to look at them through our own lens in the library and say well they need to do this and they need to do that and they're a very library focused sort of thing and those are important to list because we're a library but the goal of this activity is to really think from and be in their shoes so think from their perspective and so the goal then is to think alright what else are they trying to do in their life. And I hinted at it earlier we're competing with everything else that's going on and so we actually want to acknowledge that right now and get it up on the board. And this if you're going to do this with your library I'll just tell you right now this is a challenging piece because we're so used to focusing on how we provide services to them instead of understanding where they're coming from. And so something to think about. Now I've done a ton of talking which is unusual for an activity like this usually I would give instructions and you would go away and work on it but we're in a webinar and that's kind of weird. So I thought we would do another chat scenario and I would just give you a customer segment so I want you to think of teaching faculty who are working on your campuses what do they need to get done in their work and in life and just throw some answers into the chat box again some library related so some are trying to publish some are trying to design a course for next semester. Grade papers, manage email research, do advising, they're trying to teach imagine that get home in time for dinner perfect so there's one that's outside the library save time, grade papers, they may work at several campuses so they've got travel, research, design, integrate media and technology into their courses, get tenure deal with their errant children, nice one create engaging curriculum, also learn how to teach over distance, get tenure, pick up kids from school, answer students' email, exercise, be productive on several levels apply for teaching awards, create conference presentations minimize teaching time to maximize research time, emotional balance get grants, look at these, porn and excellent, exercise, run a marathon excellent so I'm just going to jump ahead I think you guys are right on that these are people in their whole sense have a bunch of other things including and often dealing with family stuff and negotiating that balance and so while we deal with one side of their life and involve all their family stuff the reality is we have to be aware that that stuff exists because we have to somehow get a space in their work life and so if you look in your handout this is page 7 starting in your toolkit I've listed a few prompting questions that can help this conversation so as you guys just did in the chat box here you were top of mind the first thing to come to mind is a short and quick brainstorm which is great and you've got a lot of great ideas but sometimes it can be helpful to add some deeper prompting questions and so I don't have a slide of them but if you have your toolkit handy just look through some of those questions around what do your customers need to accomplish that requires them to interact with others, what are the functional problems they're trying to solve, are there problems that you can think of that they might not be aware of that they maybe haven't encountered yet and so it encourage you and in fact if you buy the Value Proposition book that I hinted at earlier it comes with a whole sheet of prompting questions as a way to facilitate I didn't include them because they're not mine I think some of these might be adapted from them but it's a great resource so the slide here in this light purple is just an example I borrowed this example from one of the groups at the Institute so they were given the graduate student segment and said what are graduate students trying to do and you can see lots of stuff that is definitely in the wheelhouse of the academic library but you can also see other things some of them may have kids and some of them want to socialize and actually meet colleagues and dealing with being a teaching assistant and so as I start to see here the task can vary quite a bit but it's important to understand at least in the Value Proposition exercise what are they trying to do from there we can go to the pains, the frustrations things that they encounter and to be honest this one is typically the easiest to brainstorm everyone has a set of complaints in the bank ready to go and so if you think about it what a noise is these customers or this user group what prevents them from doing what they want to do and again I'm going to ask you to just throw some ideas out there so we'll stick with teaching faculty what prevents them from doing their jobs so we've got lack of time, time, tech that doesn't work firewalls, IT issues, meetings that presents me from getting stuff done large class sizes absolutely, committee work horrible websites, institutional passwords copyright, ebook, digital rights management demanding students at 2 a.m. we don't want to go to bed helicopter parents, yeah compliance issues, lack of sleep, lots relating to time bureaucracy, no that's not a thing in universities unware of resources department politics definitely, course management systems rate my prof, that's an interesting one pressure to publish, assessment things, student complaints I must say I didn't have a timer but you guys were much faster on that one so lots of pains and frustrations that we're aware of simple things and things that not all of these things we can address and we'll deal with that in a second and a similar list again from the institute excuse me around the graduate students, they may have conflicts with one of their advisors or one of their co-investigators or maybe they can't get the data they need maybe they're just depressed in general about the job forecast outlook, broken technology similar to the one ideas you mentioned earlier, lack of study space just dealing with life at that age if you went right from undergrad to grad and dealing with relationships, lack of time is another theme. So again we're itemizing a list, not all of these things a library addresses or deals with. And then the third part of our wheel here is the gains and outcomes. This one can be interesting because it can be really tangible objectives but I always try to push the group to ask the why question and say what's the deeper reason for why we're doing all of this so what are the outcomes or the benefits that the customers want? Like I said it could be as simple as we want to succeed in school but then the deeper why question is why do you want to succeed in school and if you just keep asking why you can sometimes get to these deeper challenges or deeper aspirations, sorry. And again let's just do a quick brainstorm while we're here. So what are the outcomes or benefits that teaching faculty want? They want a better job, prestige, tenure contribute to the deeper knowledge base, career success, better pay, they want more successful students, promotion, financial security, help students develop a passion for the discipline, they want a happy life, stipends, make a difference in students lives, they want interesting projects, high score and teaching evaluations, maybe earn a sabbatical, accolades, make their moms happy. It's a good one Jeff. Yeah I mean absolutely these are all real pressures. So again just the other example with the grad students, you know they're looking for their future. They want to build their personal reputation but also develop skills that make them employable. Looking for grants, maybe they want to start a family or continue raising a family. They want to improve their scholarly self-esteem which is a great phrase from the institute. Employable skills, attracts grant money. So there are pressures that we absolutely know about and can probably insert ourselves into and then there's a bunch that we can't. So again we'll pause for a second here for questions but if you're doing this activity and I'll show you an example of one that I did with some staff here, you're imagining this as a series of sort of three micro-conversations and what we typically do is we put a big circle on the wall and then we put sticky notes in the right categories. So this one was one we did a year and a half ago or so and we were just looking at a pretty generic undergrad student and I would probably change that now. But we were trying to understand what does someone who's transitioning to university look like and this was with staff from our learning commons. And I show it not to show you all the examples but just to show you that now you're starting to populate this circular map and you get a fuller sense of who these people are at least who they are through our eyes is maybe the point to make at this right here at this juncture. So you can imagine at the Institute we have 10 groups all having these conversations about different segments and so around the room you've got 10 maps, sticky notes everywhere, lots of ideas. I'm going to pause right there and see if there are some questions around doing the customer profile side. Okay we do have a couple questions. We have one from Catherine Steeves who says that libraries do often group users broadly and that campus partners like the Registrar or Alumni Affairs might help us to identify segments we're overlooking so who aren't our users but could be? Yeah absolutely and in fact there's a lot of really interesting things that happen in the smaller segment and so as you start to identify them getting to know those segments whether you map them or not but just trying to understand what they want to accomplish can be really helpful. That's a good point Catherine. Rita Vine from the University of Toronto also has a blog post that we'll share in the chat window with some visuals of how the value proposition exercised last summer at the Institute. So in addition to what you just shared on the slide MJ, people can take a look at that in the chat box. Awesome. That's really good. And then we have a comment again from Steven Bell who says that the value of the library for faculty can largely be about helping save time but they don't always know how we can do that for them. And really that's the crux of the issue is that we know we can offer that but we're either not communicating it or articulating the tangible ways that we do that and so hopefully this kind of activity can start to have that conversation locally and to understand that and then start to be we have a consistent message then and then faculty start to see that hopefully. Okay we have another question here from Martha Conway when in the process do we ask the customer segment itself about their jobs and tasks and pains and frustrations? Martha great question. If I had a chocolate bar I'd give it to you but no this is the key and so you've highlighted the one drawback to sitting in a room by ourselves guessing about the customer segment. So let me just go back a slide when we did this one we took our best stab and then before we moved on we went out and we have a lot of undergraduate students here so we just started asking them when you look at this map does this make sense to you? Do these things really matter? Did we miss things? And we open the conversation and you don't have to do it with too many people before you start to see oh there's some glaring omissions or there's some things here that they don't actually think are frustrations and so I would definitely recommend that in the case of the institute part of it was having a conversation between these who although have similar models are very different culturally and so it was a bit of sharing among the profession but absolutely you've hit the nail on the head is we wouldn't want to do this too long in kind of a meeting room and determine that we've solved all the problems of people that we haven't talked to yet so you have to figure out the best way to engage and I've got a few suggestions at the end of the process but this might be a chance if you're doing this in your library to press the pause button and then go access that customer segment and just double check. That's a great point. Anything else Judy? Nope, I think you are good to continue. Good to continue. So we've talked about the customer segment. Maybe we've gone out and even talked to them which is the ideal as we just mentioned. Stage 3 then in page 10-12 in your toolkit is really looking at what we offer starting to describe the products and services and just like the customer profile map you've seen the square one here has three categories the first where you articulate products and services that we think there might be a match that they might be interested in and then perhaps a little bit more challenging and we'll get to these is how do they help? Not just that we think they will want them but what gains and frustrations do they relieve and what gains or desired outcomes do they help our customer segment achieve? We'll take the first one here in green, the products and services which to be honest is really straightforward. What products or services do you offer that your customers would in fact be interested in? Again I'm going to throw you one last brainstorm here and say if we're thinking of teaching faculty or faculty that have a lot of teaching what do we do in the library that they might want and you can think of your local context and throw some ideas in there. So we've got course reserves, interlibrary loan, tech support, e-reserves we maybe help create assignments, assignment design support webinars, systematic reviews research guides, copyright clearance, information literacy classes 3D services, full text of articles classroom tech that works great we can have them check out technology like iPad we've got writing centers, information apps we can offer them scanning, a coffee shop helping with their student study groups, help them purchase materials provide support for open access. Exactly so as we start to articulate all of these things we again just brainstorm them so when I gave this task to the group at the institute related to graduate students of course it depended on who is in the group and what they knew and what the library offered to this particular group but it can be specialized services like GIS, it could be future services like here's your salary expectations in this field we could help them document their impact for promotion or for applications that sort of thing, provide a place for them to put their stuff in their repository so you can see there's a range of things that we think they might in fact be interested in. So as we push on to the second part it's simply the things that, the frustrations that they have that we might help relieve. So again how do your products alleviate the customer pain and how will you reduce the frustrations and maybe their experiences as you go. So in this case I didn't give you a brainstorm because it depends a lot on the local context and there's a bit more thinking involved here. You have to say ultimately are we saving them time? Are we saving them money? Are we saving them some sort of effort some way? Are we making things easier? And so there's usually when you do this in a group it's a longer conversation. The ideas don't come as quickly because you're trying to articulate what exactly are we relieving when we have this. If you flip to your toolkit on page 11 again you can see some of the deeper prompting questions. So can the library's products or services produce savings in terms of time, money, or effort? Can we fix underperforming solutions? And which ones can we fix? Can we eliminate or eradicate common mistakes that the customers make? Can we eliminate barriers? And so what's interesting here is it does tie back to the set of pains that we discussed when we talked about the customer segment. So if we understand what their frustrations are which ones can we relieve? And it's hinted at in the comments and we can't relieve all of them. We still have to stay on mission as a library but we have to relieve the ones that are related to us what are we doing about it? And so that's kind of our task as we start to wrestle with these questions. And for the students, for instance, at the liaison institute, the group talking about grad students thought I've only picked a selection. They had way more ideas than the ones I've listed. But we offer citation management tools. Those can be really helpful as they embark on long term research projects. We're always here to help and we're not judgmental about it. We can help them find and we can save time by giving them good quality remote access from anywhere in the world. We obviously pay for a lot of very expensive resources and that is a real value because grad students can have access to them. We help them reduce some anxiety about teaching. So you start to see these aren't just quick off the cuff ideas these are an attempt to articulate how and why and is it the time? Is it the money? Is it the effort? What is it that we're doing through leaving their frustrations? And then the last one, the third one is the gains. What are we doing that helps push them forward? Really isn't a way that I like to think about it. How do our products, how do our services help them accomplish what they want to accomplish? We want them to achieve what they want to achieve. And so how do we do that? How do we give them that momentum? And again I'll just point you to page 12 now in the toolkit for the same sort of set of prompting questions. How do our products and services exceed their expectations? How do we make their lives easier? And not just, I mean better usability in a more intuitive website is good but is that sufficient? How do we push for really helping them accomplish what they want to accomplish? And how do we push out some of the deeper stuff? They have broader aspirations than just getting a good grain on an assignment. So how do we help them with those broader things? And these sort of challenges, and again these aren't as easy to just rhyme off. There's typically a lot of discussion among groups, what are we helping with? And this is why I think this is where the meat of the conversation can do a bit of inward, as we look inward this is where the meat starts like, okay do we all agree that this is why we do this? And this is the value we're actually creating and this is the gains we're creating for them. So if I can just example wise the institute for grad students, well we help students enhance their communication skills, give them access to resources and provide again, here's your citation management angle, we help them enhance their efficiency. Maybe we even promote their work through some of our programming or poster sessions or that sort of thing. And we also know they need to study so we've got dedicated quiet study space. So we'll pause here in a second for some questions, but again just as I think back to a project we were working on where we were trying to come up with some digital strategies, this is our kind of response. So as we think of how do we reach our goals, especially undergrads more digitally, what kinds of things, why are we doing this, what is it that we're helping them accomplish, what is it that we're relieving, what are the frustrations we're relieving, and then having that conversation. At the institute this would be the second map that they've done. So after we've gone through this we now have 10 groups, two maps each, we have 20 maps full of sticky notes trying to draw lines between what we think the customer segment needs and what we offer and recognizing that some things don't fit. So I'll pause there for a second because I think there are maybe a couple questions that have come in and I'm happy to try to answer those. Okay, we have a question here. Should we also be asking how are our products better than our competitors? For example, how is the library institutional repository better than academia.edu? And how is the library citation manager better than whatever faculty tell us they're using? So the short answer, I mean that's a fantastic question. The short answer with the value proposition exercise is really this is just the first part. We articulate our value but we have to be aware of the broader environment. And so for that I would refer you to the business model generation book. There's a whole set of questions about the competitive landscape. So remember it's a business book so they're talking about the environmental scan you know the external factors that impact your ability to succeed. But I think even that could be really well adapted to our context and we start thinking like alright we have to be aware of these other things that the faculty in this case and this question are maybe looking at or considering and not just be afraid or dismissive of it. If it's being seriously considered by our segment it's up to us to have some sense of why they see value there. I know it's not a great answer but I would just point you to business model generation book. I think it's maybe the fourth chapter where there's a lot around the environment, the broader environment. Thank you. We also have from Brian Moynihan, have you ever employed design fiction narratives about a future state to help envision new solutions? I mean I'm aware of them. I haven't facilitated that kind of conversation myself. I might say if you want to employ that strategy in this technique one way to do that might be to actually go to the customer segment that you're looking at. So for instance teaching faculty and start to ask them about what they want or what they might see value in new solutions. I think a design fiction narrative might be a different technique slightly outside of the value proposition but that would be my first take at it. Again happy to chat more offline and if that wasn't satisfactory. Okay practical question, how much time would you recommend allowing for these exercises if for example the department was on an all day retreat? Yes, good question Adriana. If you go to the last part of the toolkit I've set up a couple of agendas for you. So if you have three hours here's how you might have the conversation sort of a half day scenario. If you have a full day the kinds of timelines you might need obviously these would all be adjusted based on whatever else you wanted to cover and whether you wanted to spend time talking with the customer segment that you were focused on you'd have to incorporate that. But I think minimum if you want to have it in a one sit down conversation you probably need to move pretty quickly. You've got three hours maybe. Another strategy is just break it up over a series of meetings. So do the customer profile map in one meeting maybe take an hour come back after some reflection and do the value proposition or sorry the value map canvas the square one at the next meeting and then just debrief it over a series of meetings which can work too just depends on the size of your team and pulling everyone together. Okay we've got a couple of questions here too about can you make the distinction or is there a strong benefit to making a clear differentiation between what is a gain creator and what is a pain reliever to question about that distinction. Yeah actually that's a fantastic question that always comes up at this stage and I'll wrestle with it myself. And it's not really well defined in my opinion in the book differently and I'll tell you the resolution I've come to and that is you can phrase a pain reliever just more positively as a gain creator and then it's sort of like they're the same thing but where I think the distinction is is whether the customer side views it as a pain or a gain. So for instance if they really feel like remote access is a frustration then I would keep it in the pain reliever category because what you're doing is recognizing they see it as a huge pain we're relieving that pain rather than say they see it as a pain and we're creating a gain if that makes sense. So I like the alignment of going back to where we think the customer segment would categorize whatever the issue is. I hope that helps. In some ways it's six of one and half dozen of the other like if it's a gain creator fine and a pain reliever it could still work. It's not like it's invalid in one of the sections. I just think if you tie it back to the customer there's a better chance that you're going to send a clearer message later. I hope that helps. That's great. Thank you. I think we can move on. We can move on? Okay. So in the fourth stage in some ways we've done two separate activities. We've looked at the customer segment and then looked at the value that we create or produce as the library and really what we want to do in a true value proposition and you saw from the definition earlier is bring those two together so that we're acknowledging that the library has certain elements that appeal in a certain way to a specific set of people. So this is that point where we're taking all of this brainstorming conversation, hopefully some confirmation, and we're looking at where we're at. Putting them together in C, so this is just the examples from earlier, and in this context we were looking at undergraduate students and as a number of you have pointed out already in the chat the library is not going to address everything that an undergraduate student needs. You come to campus, maybe you want a romantic partner probably not something the library wants to really facilitate. You may meet in the library but it's not on our mission to make that happen. And so we have to acknowledge and then this is that stage where you go, okay, these are important things we should be aware of, important desires, important frustrations but that we can't solve those, they're not really for us. But which ones can we solve or which ones can we assist with? And so that's where there's a bit of sorting out early on at this stage. And there are many ways to go from this to a set of sentences. I'm going to show you the one that we did at the institute because I think it's the most straightforward and I'm on the learning side of the library so when we write learning outcomes for instance it's a little more like that where there's a rhythm and an expectation. And so the activity that we did was called the value proposition and ad lib. Basically a fill in the blanks kind of activity. So the parts that are in purple on this slide are the parts that you swap out. So it's a little bit it's awkwardly laid out here but I think the example on the next slide will show you basically what you want to do is think of making a clear statement. What are the products or services? Who do they help? And what are the people that they help? What do they want to do? And then the last part is some clarification of how. So I know that looks really confusing. Let's take it one step at a time here. So the first one is some libraries have an open access fund so we want to say alright if we're going to come up with an explicit statement of value let's try this one. Our open access fund helps mid career faculty. So this is a particular described segment that we've been thinking about and how does it help them? Or what do they want to accomplish? So in this case what are mid career faculty trying to do? Well one option and this again is borrowed from the example from the group Institute. So our open access fund helps mid career faculty who want to amplify their scholarly impact. Okay that's good but why or but how does it do that? How does it help them? So we have this fund because it increases access to their research. So this statement then this is our attempt to take all of what we've been talking about and boil it down into one statement. Now the question here is to say great we're done. But the reality is there are many ways and the encouragement in the book really is that you're prototyping multiple statements because we don't know for instance whether this is of any value to mid career faculty. We think it is in our conference room and in our retreat but we're not sure. And so the goal with Value Proposition Adlib is to start producing a number of these. And so at the Institute we actually did that. We had each group start to produce these statements. And then the following morning when they came in they were up around the room probably had 20 statements, 25 statements up around the room about the value of liaison work. And then in that case we just said respond. Write notes on it. Do you agree? Disagree. What's working? What's not? So we've come down to a succinct explicit statement of value but even then we're not sure if it's right. And so this is part of that process. It's just iterative. You're continually asking but we're getting closer now to understanding why we have an open access fund, who it's for, what we hope it does for them. And now of course and just going back to one of the questions from earlier we need to find out whether they see that same value because it might be a great idea in our circles and our libraries and our profession but is it a good idea to mid career faculty? That's the thing we still have to pass. So like I said, if you get the value proposition design book there are a number of other ways to get to a value proposition statement but I like this one because it's simple. It's a bit of a plug and play and it's easier to do that in the group. And at this point I see a couple more questions that might have come in. So let's pause again. We're nearing the end but let's pause again. Okay we have a question here from Rebecca Stur in keeping with the idea of thinking from the user perspective, would it be better to start with the need first? So our users need to accomplish XYZ. We can help through and then move to the services by developing such and such services. Yeah I mean and I would encourage you to experiment. So I don't know that there's a right answer or a wrong answer to that question or even to drafting a value proposition statement. The one I showed you in the Institute partly because it was a formula that meant everyone in 10 different groups came up with a similar sentence structure which made comparison easier. But in the case of your context it may absolutely make sense to go actually let's start with the user and then end with our response to the user. And if that seems to just fit better, absolutely I would encourage you to do it that way. I think really the point that we're trying to get to is that we understand what needs we're actually meeting and who we're meeting them for. Good question. Thanks Rebecca. Okay I see no more questions at this point. No more questions. Alright so the last stage and we've talked about it a little bit earlier is really we have to get to that validating that we're even on track. So there's lots of ways to think about this and in the case of the liaison institute was really difficult to validate and check anything because we were doing a retreat with three different libraries sponsored by ARL and so there's sort of a broader conversation there. But in marketing terms and business model terms and in value proposition terms they talk about fit. And so there's three types of fit and if you're on track you'll sort of negotiate through each of these stages. And I want to outline them a little bit and then talk about what you need to do. And if you're in your toolkit they're there as well. There's a lot of text there so I apologize for that. But page 14, the first fit is what we're looking for is a problem solution fit. So we want to understand the problem and that we've designed or at least imagine a solution that matches. And typically if you've done the exercise we've just talked about where you've looked at a customer segment and identified the job pain gains and started to articulate a value proposition at the end of that, you're kind of at that problem solution fit. But what's absolutely missing is whether the customers agree with your value proposition statement. And so really you're still at the creative writing stage where you think you're on track but you don't know for sure. And so the next step is really to test whether the customers see the same value. And you could do this in lots of ways. Sorry, I'm just getting over it cold. And this is on page 14 in your toolkit. I mentioned the first strategy earlier which is just sit down and talk to the customer segment and say this is what we thought when we're trying to describe people in teaching faculty facing the challenges in work and life that you are does this make sense to be missing anything. So just doing a bit of customer interview style. Another approach is to just start looking at the matches between your two canvases. So are there pains that have clear and direct pain relievers? And are there gains that your user wants that have direct and clear gain creators? And where are those obvious lines? And so I will say one of the groups at the institute spent a lot of time and they did the matching strategy. They just spent a lot of time connecting a sticky note on one side of the canvas to a sticky note on the other side and trying to articulate what exactly that relationship looked like. And I cut them a little closer to understanding why we think that problem can be solved with this solution. But really it's still early days. So you want to move on to the next kind of fit which can take some time, but it's called the product market fit. So again these are obviously from business context, but at this stage you know customers are using your product or service that probably usage is increasing. So a market is starting to emerge and usually you would say this is starting to show that the value proposition is on track. That there's some value here. And people are seeing that and so they're folding at their feet. They're starting to use it or they're moving away from whatever they used before to your solution. And so you're not quite done though. People can really use your service but they can also overwhelm your service. And so you've got to figure out alright, what is the demand going to look like? We're on track people like what we're doing but is the value there? It moves you into the last fit which is really beyond the scope of this webinar but what they would call a business model fit. And that brings us way back to the beginning when I showed you the first kind of business model canvas and you remember the value proposition was right in the middle. What you would have at this time when you have a business model fit is you would have a value proposition that customers want. So you have a set of products and services clearly articulated value. They keep coming but you also have an infrastructure, a support setup. You've got resources allocated and you've got a balance. So you balance between we can deliver this value while we also have all of the infrastructure behind it. So again I would refer you to the business model generation book in this case and just look through some of their advice for how to balance. This would be an indication that not only is the value worth it but that the organization can continue to deliver that value and that's one of the things you have to face in libraries too. We have limited resources. We can't do everything for everyone. So it's entirely possible if I just go back a slide that we have a growing market that really loves our service but that service is too costly for us to deliver for whatever reason. It's too user or staff intensive or time intensive or money intensive and we might have to actually say either we change that service a little bit or we have to stop because the market we can't actually reasonably and sustainably deliver that. So I want to jump to more of the mechanics of the how as we wrap up but let's pause here for questions. Thanks MJ. We have a question from David Cher. Could you articulate, could one articulate the business model fit as library strategic plan fit? Can you articulate the business model fit? Oh, yeah actually that's a, let's go back a slide. Definitely one way to think about it. Each organization is a little bit different but I mean ultimately if we're seeing the traction that a particular service or combination of products and services are getting then recognizing that that then fits the strategic plan but that means resources have to be diverted or found for that kind of thing and that there's a commitment to that. I think that's a great way to think about it because in a business model sense it's about alright now we can scale, grow, we've got revenue, we can reinvest that sort of thing. That's not typically how libraries think about things so yeah maybe it's more about we now fit within the strategic model. Great. Or the strategic plan, sorry. Thank you. Another question, are value propositions being used as a foundation for assessment? That's a great question too Rebecca. I would say they could be. So remembering that value propositions come out of management literature assessment to be craft comes down to the bottom line. People like it enough to keep buying it and keep making money and sustain the organization. I think our challenge might be to turn that internally and say is it enough then if we think of assessments as more than just usage metrics for instance. Usage is a good indication that we're on track. We've got people who like the service and keep coming back but we might want to challenge ourselves to dive a little deeper. I would say I haven't done myself a ton of work at the assessment stage. Typically I'm facilitating the upfront conversation around value proposition but I think it is a really good conversation to talk about assessment. I think we are talking for instance about our assessment often lands at just assessing products and services and if you can somehow connect it back to this segment and talk about assessment from their eyes, from their perspective might be valuable as well. Apologies I don't really have a better answer for that but I think it's an important thing to think about if we're going to start to articulate our value proposition then how will we know we're successful? Still a helpful question to ask on the front end. Okay. Ken List asks what is the relationship between value and outcomes? Value and outcomes. Can we get a bit of clarification on that Ken if possible? I'm not sure about the outcomes part. Or Judy if you have a sense of what? I don't but why don't we give it a go. Okay so should we have a question? Mora suggests value is what you deliver. Outcomes are what you measure. Oh so I think I would put that along the same lines as my answer to Rebecca then. If that's the distinction we want to make we definitely want to continue to deliver the value. I think asking the question then what outcomes would we expect if this was successful and we're on track. And then the question that always happens in assessment then is like how do you measure it? Because good will and even good usage is not always enough. I think the question will depend a lot on whatever the service or product is that you're actually trying to measure. Ken List. Okay a quick comment from Steven Bell perhaps. We'd want to identify the outcomes we aspire to and then identify the products and services that deliver value related to achieving those outcomes or that outcome. Does this backward design work here? Yeah I think I mean part of this activity with value propositions at least the reason I like using this activity is to have that conversation. I think what it also does is provide you the freedom to figure out what works in your context. For instance if we want to work backwards after we've talked through this value proposition canvas and we've looked at customers and looked at the value then say alright what do we do now? It's an important conversation to take the reins back as a staff group or team or whatever context you're looking at and determine where do we go from here. It's a process that provides that freedom but at least provides a foundation initially to dig into the customer segment to try to understand where the needs might be. Again I'm not sure that I'm fully answering this. I'm happy to take that to a phone conversation or something offline if you're really keen. Sounds good. Let's move on. Let's move on. So I think we're right on track here. So we've talked through basically the theory, the mechanics of the activity but I know some of you are on the call here because what you're interested in is how do you actually do this conversation? And what do you need to think about? And I've had a few of these conversations again in various contexts so I'll just throw some questions out to you again. I don't know for sure what you're after but these are things that I like to think about when someone asks me to come and do a session or I'm thinking about doing one here. And I'll talk through them a little bit but I want to leave some time again for questions at the end or questions about these. So I'll go fairly quickly through the next few slides. What is your objective is one of the things you have to think about right away. Do you want to start a conversation like we did in the ARL Institute or liaison institute or do you actually have a problem that you want to solve and you need all hands on deck for? Depending on your answer to that question and maybe other possible answers will impact the design of your workshop. The second thing I like to think about is what do you want for the takeaway? So what are the deliverables? If we're going to invite everyone to come to a three hour workshop or a full day retreat, what are the tangible takeaways that they're going to get? And then you will always get the question at the end so what are we going to do with all this work? And many of you will know that and many of you may have asked those questions and so thinking a little bit ahead, one of the next steps after you ask all of these people to spend their time working on this what is your commitment as a facilitator or as an organizing group or whatever. Timeline is important and I'm sure many of you are planning sort of staff retreats in the spring-summer season so when is everyone available? It's just a simple logistical question but it's also helpful to know when do you really need answers on some of this stuff? When? What's going to impact the change? What are the other organizational realities that you're facing? Where should you host the meeting? On-site, off-site? I have no opinion on that one other than it's really helpful if you have a flexible space with movable tables, that sort of thing. Who needs to be there? Usually when I'm invited it's just staff but I think it would be really interesting to have this conversation with more stakeholders in the room including even possibly members of the group that you might be trying to understand. Even if it's just an hour panel with early career faculty to understand them and maybe ask them questions or have lunch with them, it can be helpful. I'm often asked what's the best group composition and how do you assign groups and if I'm not asked it then I usually ask whoever's wanting me to come and this again depends a bit on your objective so three options I can imagine right off the top is you just randomly assign people to groups. It gets people working with people they don't usually work with but sometimes people lose interest too if they're not with someone they want to be with. You can let them select. You can also just assign groups ahead of time. As far as group size I think four to five people is probably the best and they get too big. It's either harder to get to consensus or people disengage a little bit. If it's too small it can feel overwhelming so I like four to five people. How will participants select their customer segments? You can do it randomly just draw out of a hat. You can assign it. You can let them choose. Again depends a bit on your objective for the meeting. If you want to solve a problem then you don't want to leave a lot up to chance. If you want to just have a conversation then random can work. Should you order food? Yes you should always order food. Always. People like that. Buzz through. We've only got a couple more slides left because then we can have wrap up questions. You've decided to have a session. You've got it set. You've answered all of those earlier questions on Timeline. What should you do in advance? Obviously gather your materials. I like to draw the charts, the maps that you saw, so the customer profile map and value map ahead of time so that they have a big chart and they're not trying to draw it themselves. If you've got handouts or prompting questions on some of that kind of a team toolkit for what they're going to encounter get that done ahead of time. If you are planning to assign groups then you definitely want that done ahead of time. I sometimes ask whether you need PowerPoint or not. I tend not to rely on PowerPoint but the advantage of PowerPoint in a room that's full of small groups talking is that you can put clear instructions up on the screen. So it can be really helpful to have a screen with something with PowerPoint so that they can see and groups can self monitor and stay on track. The last thing, and someone actually hinted at it earlier outline your rationale. So start with why. When you begin that session make sure everybody knows why they're there and what they're trying to accomplish. That sounds simple but it can be hard. You have to help them understand the context, the need for the conversation which you hope comes out of the conversation. Doing some upfront thinking there can really help. Just one last slide. Remember the basic stages that we just went through of the activity. Get your customer segment. Understand your customer. Think about your library's response to that customer. Try to connect them by articulating the benefits and then really start to validate. Start to figure out whether we're on track or not. So we've gone through a lot of stuff. We're pretty good on time. We've got a few minutes left. If there are any questions I'm happy to take them. I should say just before those come in, if at any point you're reviewing this and you have questions or you want to run a session and you want to give me a call I'm happy to try to help. I'm not an expert but I've done this a few times so I can give you my two cents. Sorry, go back to that last slide. Yes, happily. So are there any outstanding questions? Well we do have a comment from Rita who reminds us that in the final report for the Liaison Institute which is available on the AERO website there is an appendix that has additional kind of organizational details about how to do a multi-library event which that was. So people want to look at that report as well. Definitely. Okay. Got a question here. How do you or do you publish to customers? How do you publish? From Andrea Stewart, can we get a bit of clarification on that? Publicize maybe? Oh, share the work. Yeah, I mean I think that may depend a little bit on your local context. I like to do it in the sense of just laying it out as we're working through a process and we're at a very rough stage but we don't want to get too far afield and so help us understand this. So that might be for instance when you've done your customer profile map, that round one but you could also do it later when you've got a statement and just ask people to respond. So what do you think of this? To be honest some of the more challenging conversations actually come from staff so you're debating among yourselves whether you've got the phrasing right and so that can be really helpful. But I think if your organization has a culture where you're comfortable being open, there's really nothing here that's private in the sense of confidential. You're trying to understand the environment you work in and deliver services accordingly so if the team is comfortable with displaying the work I don't see any reason not to. Thank you. We are just about out of time so MJ I just want to thank you so much for a fabulous presentation instead of tools. I know this is going to lead to a lot of wonderful and fruitful conversations in our libraries. So thank you for being with us here today. Glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Absolutely. So this concludes today's webinar. I want to thank all of you for joining us and wish you a pleasant afternoon.