 Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. The show is broadcast usually every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But we do record the show, so if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You can always go to our website and watch our recorded archives at your convenience. And I'll show you at the end of the show where you can access all of those archives. Both our live show and our recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please prepare your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. We do a quite a mixture of things here on Encompass Live. The Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries here in Nebraska, and that's all types of libraries. So you will find things in the show for public, K-12, academic, corrections, museums, basically anything that has a library in it or is library like, we could have potentially have a topic about it. And we do a mixture of types of things on here, interviews, many training sessions, demos of services and products, sharing things that we think are just cool that libraries are doing out there. We have a Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations for us on things that we're doing here out of the Library Commissioner here locally in Nebraska. But we do bring in guest speakers from libraries across the state and across the country to talk about things elsewhere as well. And that's what we have this morning. Today we are talking about, as you can see there on the screen, advocates of all ages recruiting and keeping younger friends and trustees. And we have a group of people here. We've got four people on the line with us this morning to talk about this. One special guest potentially later. And I'm just going to hand over to you guys to introduce yourself and where you're from and how you're all involved in this topic and what we're going to be chatting about today. Okay, great. Thank you, Kristin. Thank you everyone for joining us to discuss how to recruit and retain younger generations as trustees and friends. My name is Linda Bertonelli. I'm the workforce librarian at Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. I'm going to let everyone else in our group jump in to say, hey, and introduce themselves. Good morning, everybody. My name is Madeline Jarvis and I am the adult services manager at the Marion, Iowa Public Library. Welcome. Hi, everyone. I'm Kathy Kosinski. I am the statewide library services analyst for the Library of Michigan, which is the state library over in the state of Michigan. Hi, I'm Tess Wilson. I'm the community engagement coordinator with the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, the Middle Atlantic region, which is housed at the University of Pittsburgh. Okay, we also have David Page with us today. He's not on this slide, but David is the president for United for Libraries. So if you have questions about United for Libraries, which is the association of library trustees, advocates, friends and foundations, he can answer those questions for you. So our research started in January 2018 as an ALA emerging leaders project with United for Libraries. Madeline, Kathy, Tess and myself were selected to be the group working with United to answer the question. If millennials are the largest adult generation of public library users, which they are according to 2016 Pew Research, why are they underrepresented in library advocacy groups? And when we say they are underrepresented, underrepresented, we surveyed members of library boards, friend groups and foundations. And over half of our respondents said there wasn't a single millennial in their organization. It's not intentional. 82% of our respondents also said that having diversity in our membership was important. And it's not just that you can say that your organization is diverse and you have so many millennials on your board. Obviously, representation is important, but you should be recruiting, people should do more than fill a box on your board assessment metrics. If millennials are core library users, we should want them to get involved behind the scenes and to fill us in on their perspective in their needs. So going back to our initial project, after digging into the reasons why millennials aren't more involved, we also wanted to look into how we could remove some of the barriers we discovered. We wanted to develop strategies to support volunteer organizations who want to increase millennial engagement. And we wanted to provide support to millennials who want to get more involved, but maybe they don't know how. Our original research involved conference sessions, literature reviews, and most importantly, we reached out and talked to people. The interviews we conducted in the online survey we put out were used to gather information about the general generational makeup of the respondents, advocacy groups, their motivations for service, their recruitment strategies, onboarding process, their time commitments, and any other challenges they may face. We ended up with 866 responses across 41 states. And we found a few common themes. One of our biggest takeaways is that millennials are really not that different. The differences that do exist really relate to life stages, not the actual years people were born. While doing our literature review, we found articles that discussed how to engage baby boomers as volunteers because they were the younger generation at the time. Also, when you look at some stereotypes about millennials, I'm sure some of you have heard that millennials aren't as loyal to companies as older generations. But when you look again at the statistics, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, baby boomers did just as much job copying between the ages of 18 to 24 as millennials did. So it's not really about being a millennial specifically. It's more about being new to the workforce. To the point that while our original project was focused specifically on millennials, we were really talking about younger generations in general. A lot of what we're talking about applies to Generation X and Generation Z as well, especially as Gen Z enters the workforce. A lot of people have some misconceptions about how old millennials even are. We again, we're using Q research to use their timeline to define the generations. Other institutions might use slightly different years, but everything's going to put millennials in their 20s to mid or late 30s even. There are millennials who attended their 20-year high school reunion this year just to put that into perspective. So we're definitely not teenagers anymore. Going into this project, we had some ideas about why younger generations would want to serve on a board or in a friends group. Again, we thought being new to the workforce, they might use their involvement to network or to add something to the resume. But ultimately across generations in our survey, people got involved with the library for altruistic reasons. They joined because they wanted to make a difference in their community and because they love the library and because their kids love the library. Kids are actually a major motivator for volunteering across industries. According to the Corporation for National and Community Service, 39.9% of parents volunteer in the U.S., so it's a large portion of the volunteer force. It may seem obvious, but volunteers want to be involved with organizations that have a mission that they agree with. More than that, they want to feel like they're contributing into that mission. They want to feel like their time is well spent and that they're adding value to a noble cause. So speaking of time, one of the largest barriers we found to service for the younger generations was inconvenient meeting times. The majority of our survey respondents were baby boomers and many of them joined the organization after retirement. Someone who is still working and who is relatively new in their career might not be able to take off work on a Monday afternoon to attend a meeting. On the other hand, if you schedule meetings after work hours, you're asking members to take time away from employees and other obligations. So there's no perfect solution, but little flexibility and maybe alternating when and where meetings are held can alleviate some of that stress. You also want to be sure that you're making the time commitment worth it. We've received a lot of comments about inefficient meetings. Is everyone prepared going into the meeting so you can focus on the action items? Is everyone allowed to contribute at the meeting? Is everyone being taken seriously? Again, you can't just recruit one millennial to your friends group or your board and say your generational diversity problem is fixed. We received a comment at one of our presentations earlier from someone who felt really patronized by the other members of her organization. You won't be able to retain your younger members if they feel like their time is being wasted and their opinions are being valued. The other major barrier is that younger generations just aren't being told about opportunities. In our survey, less than half of millennial respondents learned of service opportunities through word of mouth compared to 62 to 63 percent of all other generations. Younger generations haven't had as much time to form the connections that word of mouth systems rely on. So you have to actually go to where they are to find them. And since we already know that millennials are at the library, 53 percent of them in 2016 anyway, that seems like a pretty good place to start your recruitment process. And now I'm going to turn things over to Kathy. Excellent. So we're going to ask for a quick show of hands so you can either there's a hand raised function that you can use or you can just type in the chat when it's going to advance the slide and this came up when we were doing a lit review of all ways different other industries recruit volunteers. So if you take a look at these articles, I'm also going to read them out loud. It's recruiting retaining volunteers in 2019. They voted us down pushback by increasing your community visibility, the declining membership of the volunteer service, reviving your volunteer program, or how demographics have changed the volunteer service. Now these are all different topics that came up that we all kind of thought, hey, this sounds a lot like libraries. And I don't know, maybe it sounds like your library or something that your friends group or trustee board or foundation has to deal with today. So hopefully this is maybe something that applies to you. And I thought I thought it was really surprising that all of these articles came from if Lina wants to do the big reveal, fire engineering magazine. So yeah, it's really surprising. So we were wondering why all these great articles kept coming up with fire and coming from this volunteer fire fire kind of magazine situation. And if you can go to the next slide, it's because 83 percent of fire departments in the United States are staffed by mostly or entirely volunteers. That is an incredibly large number. If you go to the next slide, Lina, thank you. This is a full breakdown. We have 91 percent of fire departments have volunteers that make up at least some level of their workforce. The all career, the 9 percent that you see there, those are the ones who cover about 52 percent of the US population, so the cities and a lot of the suburbs. But everywhere else, you're going to have a mostly kind of volunteer sort of situation going on. And when we look deeper in that, we found out that 65 of the firefighters, 65 percent of the firefighters in the United States are volunteers. And of those volunteers, 42 percent of them have had over 10 years of active service. Can you imagine what it would be like if every single volunteer that you had that came to your, you know, friends group that worked on your board, all of these things that they all had 10 years of active service. Lina had a word bubble up a little few bits earlier and it kind of the biggest things that they had was actually presented, engaged people who aren't just a body in the room that show up and work and do perform with this. And that's what these volunteer firefighters are doing. Furthermore, 51 percent of the volunteer firefighter population is under 40 years old. So that's exactly the kind of target that we're looking at right now. So what we learned from all of the different literature that we had going on here is that you need to learn your ABCs again, something that we should all know in libraries very well, but they break it down to recruitment and retain retention of volunteers as accessibility, buy in and confidence. And in the corner, I have the kind of the exact article this comes from, but we're going to have a list of a list of sources at the end and we're going to share the slides out so you can all you don't have to hurry to write these down. They're going to be available later. OK, so if you go to the next slide, please. So accessibility we're breaking this down into two facets, easy to join and easy to understand. So for easy to join, essentially what we want to say is avoid becoming a secret society. There are so many things that you can do to keep your group accessible to everyone there is. First, if you go back to the bullet point that Linda mentioned earlier is invite people personally. If you can get out there and you can ask them, you'll have a much better impact of getting them to come back and continue doing things because people like other people to like them. It's like the secret key to getting humans to work out is everyone is desperate to have everyone else like them, for the most part. So if you ask someone, they're going to be more likely to do that than rather than just seeing a flyer up on the wall. The firefighters have other ways of getting out to talk to people. They do community mailings, volunteer fairs and open houses. They mentioned junior firefighters clubs. I think a junior friends club or even a junior trustee board would be an interesting way to get those first steps of kind of interaction going on there. They have a local newspaper column. They have Facebook and website information, but and I put this is my caveat. If you have enough content and then the other big thing is an online membership or application. I were all millennials. I don't know if you may have noticed that from the earlier slide and I am probably the most. Kind of my embarrassing story of this is it took me a very long time to join my local friends group simply because I pay all of my bills online and I could only apply to the friends group by mailing a check. I didn't have any stamps and because I commute an hour to work, the post office is usually closed by the time I get back from work. So that would mean I would have to take time off at my lunch and hope that I have the car pool that day so that I'm driving in order to go out and purchase stamps to do all these stuff. So it was just this online going thing where I ended up putting it off to two to three weeks. Whereas if there had just been an online membership, I would have been able to join much more readily, much more easily. So just make it more accessible and easy to join for everyone. And then if you could do the next slide and then going back to the content, one of the firefighters said once potential members have expressed this interest, their next step is going to be to research it. You need to make sure that you are giving your best first impression wherever you are digitally. If someone looks up your friends group, looks up your trustee board, they can't find the name of anyone else on your board. They're not going to be interested in joining because they don't know who to follow up or they don't know anything about it. If they look up the friends group and all the information is from several years ago, it looks like that friends group is inactive or not around anymore. You need to make sure that if you have enough content to do your own, you know, website, your own page, make sure it's there, make sure it's up to date and you can keep up with it. If you don't have enough content, talk to your library, see if you can get simply a single page on their website or something like that. Just make sure what you're doing is sustainable and that you're able to keep it up to date. OK, the next one is people need to be able to understand what your friends group is. That's essentially that you exist in the first place. It's good to know that you exist and what it is you do. And let's be honest, this isn't something fire departments need to face. People know that they put out fires. So this is an extra step that as a library organization, you're probably going to have to take. And I've included this picture. It's a harrowing picture of a teenage driver going on a closed course incredibly fast. There's blurry cones, hopefully a still alive instructor in the back. We don't really know what's going on, but I'm including this because most people have probably either written with or had to teach someone how to drive a car at some point, usually teenagers. And it can be absolutely terrifying because not only do you have an utter lack of control over the situation, but because everything that makes complete and total sense to you is incredibly difficult to put into words. You just know the amount of pressure to put on the pedal. You know, you shift gears when you feel it do that thing or is there enough space to parallel park? You can kind of eyeball it hopefully and figure it out. So you are the expert and you have all of this knowledge that's just second nature to you at this point and you're communicating it to someone who may be used to cars, may have been around them their entire life, but have never been in the position of driving. So it's difficult and weird and new. So similar, I think everyone on this webinar understands what a friends group is or what a trustee board does or what a foundation does for a library. And it's easy to forget that not everyone in your community has this knowledge that new members or new or other community members may be the equivalent of that teen driver. Lost and confused and just trying their best. So you need to be able to make sure that your most veteran and newest members and in a best case scenario, also your non-friends community members can easily describe what your group does and easy to understand terms. So the next slide, you've got a quick little preview of it is one of the firehouses suggested an elevator pitch for working on a vision statement, mission statement, things like that. Essentially, it's just I put together this template where you replace the red text and you can make what you can have all of your members do and say they don't need to know it verbatim if they can just hit where the red text is. So group name, action purpose, impact community, date, inception, goals, specific examples and accomplishments. Then they will be able to hit the major points and describe to others what they do. So if you fill this one in, for example, it's kind of it'll give you a fancy version that you might be able to give to a municipal leader or possible sponsor donor. And I wrote out this extremely long example, which is friends of fake towns libraries. Fundamental role is to provide financial, political and cultural help to the library that will support an educated and safe community. Since 1981, we have helped the library afford new materials to create great experiences for the community. As a result, fake town has a reputation reputation for creative, accessible and cutting edge activities, including the state's largest community butterfly garden, steamcrafts kits available for checkout and braille enhanced story walks throughout fake town. In the future, we are looking to build outreach with the senior community through library hosted meals. So that's fancy. You might want to say that to, you know, a city councilman, things like that, maybe a possible donor get some more money. But then if you're just talking to friends, maybe a millennial, maybe a Gen Z that you're trying to recruit, you can give them, you can tone it down just by hitting the main points. So the friends group roles to help the library do all the cool things that can't do on its own. We've been around since the 80s and it's made fake town have one of the best libraries in the country, you know, the butterfly garden, those cool steamcraft kits, that story walk right over there, that was all from our help. Next, we're going to try and reduce loneliness in the senior community with regular meals at the library. People know what's going on. They know who you are, how long you've been around and what you want to do in the future. It also gives them an opportunity to position themselves and see how they could possibly fit into this situation, which is buy-in, which I think my favorite quote from all of the fire chiefs is from Tim Doran, and it's if the message is not about the listener, he is not listening what's in it for him. So that we have those mission statements, those elevator pitches that can give the listener what's in it for them. But you also want to have organizational statements in which your current volunteers can see themselves represented. They can see where they'll fit into the elevator pitch and you also allow for activities that allow for personal growth. So you need to make sure that everyone that you spread the word and that everyone understands how they connect to the work. So to maximize buy-in, there's this one thing. So people said, you know, there's one of the big worries when we were doing this research is the younger generations and the older generations don't get along. And we found out that that wasn't true as often as we thought it would be or maybe it was just personality clashing, but we did do research on how to maximize buy-in in general. And this isn't from a firehouse. It's from actually a bunch of, you know, psych studies and things like that. And they found that one way to sort of avoid having this diversity clash is when you build a new program or if you say we're trying to get younger generations in on our board and our friends group, things like that. What you need to do is you need to highlight the benefits for everyone. So as Tim Doran said, what's in it for me? They're not going to be listening otherwise. And then minimizing attrition. Now this is a list from Dan Miller, a fire chief. And he said, if possible, create training cohorts with a rock solid start date. The rock solid start date is incredibly important. It is essentially you build expectations and you work with them. You show that you value their time and that they should also value your time. Establish number two, establish who the lead instructor mentor trainer is for the cohort. You're going to want to do that. So that way people have a point person where they can ask questions to someone they feel comfortable with. You want to establish standard operating procedures and stick to them once again, show that both your time is valuable and their time is valuable. You want to make sure that it isn't that waste of time effect that we saw going on. Now this next one I put an asterisk next to it. He said 70% of meeting time should be hands on skills practice. And I didn't do that so much as saying that everyone here should, you know, drop whatever their board meeting agenda is and just start, you know, weaving baskets on the side. Now, I'm saying that if you can think of things that you can do that maybe are more hands on that can get them out there and doing things rather than just feeling like they're wasting time away from their families away from doing other things by just, you know, sitting in a meeting where they're maybe maybe not even get their voice hurt. Have everyone be able to do something and show how they're making the community better. I have a suggestion about a comment about that here in Nebraska. We have our our library boards are gets earned certifications like continuing education type things. And they do things like that could be something I think that a friends or foundation group too is we're going to have a speaker come in with I mean, would that be something like we're going to come in and talk to us about this particular library issue, or this type of thing, or we're going to watch a webinar potentially about this particular thing that another library is doing we might want to do ourselves. Yeah, anything like that it could be, you know, if you have a lot of, you know, books that you have to go through for the book sale and you have to sort out do that while you do the meeting things like that just make keep them going and keep them, you know, doing something demonstrable. For the next one is expect high performance but work with those who struggle. It seems that some of the one of the fire chief said, my best volunteers are the ones who struggled at the beginning and we gave extra, you know, time and sort of help an effort for it's you don't this doesn't mean allow sloppy work to slide or people who just show up and don't do anything, you know, they're just the bodies in the room. It you're allowed to let people go if they're not making an effort and they're not meeting standards. But if they are making an effort and it doesn't seem to be working out, don't be afraid to put in a little extra effort. And then finally throw a graduation party is what the fire chief suggests and it's just it doesn't necessarily have to be this but just a way some sort of recognition both old members, new members, everything in between. Just let the volunteers and the or the board members or anyone know that you appreciate all the hard work they have put in and will put in in the future. Now Dan Miller, the fire chief, he said this. He said that he lost 10 percent of his volunteer you know, class in the first two weeks of his training Academy. But then after that, he very rarely loses anyone else and across the fire industry as a whole. They tend to lose 30 to 35 percent of their initial recruits. So he has a really good retention standard compared to everyone else. And finally, it's having confidence at the end. So it's remember that terrifying teen driver. Hopefully by the time you're all done, this is what you get. You have that driver in a professional, you know, professional level kind of setting where they know what's going on. They're fully informed and ready to engage. I did not make that a cross stick, that little acronym that is a very excited fire chief who put that together. But it is extremely important. Your volunteers, your board members, they need to feel confident about what they're doing. They need to know that there's a culture that will support them. They need to know that their opinions are valued, that their ideas are valued as well. They need to know that if they want to explore and grow in other ways through their board work, through their friends group work, that they will have someone there who is completely behind them that they can do that. And essentially, they need to have the confidence to go into these meetings and know that their time isn't going to be wasted and that they are going to be doing good things for the community. And I just wanted to add that when I first started doing this information, Madeline Jarvis, you may remember her from one of the introductory slides. She was in the emerging leader group and she started reading this literature as well and decided to become a volunteer firefighter over in Marion, Iowa. So as you can see some of the things here, we have some hands on skills practice. We have the graduation party at the end. So she can attest that these actually do work really well and she can help you, you know, put out fires and stuff like that. So it may be this section will influence you more than you thought. Wow, Madeline, congratulations. OK, hi, this is Tess. So this is a slide that you have probably seen before. Equity, diversity and inclusion is a topic on the tip of our tongues these days. And for good reason, hopefully your ultimate goal, maybe one of the reasons you're here today is to address equity within your board, increase the diversity of your board and ensure your policies and practices are inclusive. But how can we best understand equity, diversity and inclusion as it applies to our boards? How can we work towards a more equitable environment within our groups? A quick note before I begin this portion of the presentation, I want to acknowledge that this is a topic much, much larger than these few slides and the short time we have together today. With that, I also want to focus on focus this particular conversation through the lens of our work with the engagement, recruitment and retention of younger generations. Of course, libraries aren't the first folks to think about issues of equity, diversity, inclusion and working these conversations into our workplace. A lot of other sectors and circles are also moving in this direction and they have been for a while. So since there's already a lot of great work being done around this topic and because we are all white women and we can only offer from our own experiences. A lot of this information in the next few slides has been gathered from some of the awesome resources that we found. And in addition for so much work for so much of our work in libraries, we stick within our discipline and we tend to work within our library world, which is wonderful, but it also risks us thinking that we need to reinvent the wheel. So by taking a peek at other conversations that are happening around EDI, we can gain some valuable insight and broaden our range of perspectives. All right. So first, I'll bring your attention to a 2011 article in the Iowa law review in which the author suggests best practices for hiring and retaining a diverse law faculty. Granted, this article tackles the issue of diversity and inclusion in a different setting with different motivations. However, the basis for this research shines a light on barriers that may plague library boards as well because as the author states what's most difficult about making progress and diversity is that the institution must work against the structural and systemic inequality that plagues every area of our society. As a result, the institution must apply even more sustained and aggressive pressure in order to overcome the significant and ubiquitous barriers to diversity and equality. So therefore, it becomes necessary to examine closely the demographic makeup of our board, perhaps using tools like the board assessment that United for Libraries developed and other tool kits that are available and to be deliberate when making change. So these conversations need to be started with purpose and with humility and pursued doggedly with intention. How can we strive for diversity and inclusion on our boards? In a 2017 webinar, examining the findings from board sources leading with intent report, which I highly recommend taking a look at several important points came up. And indeed, the title of their original presentation, the declining diversity of nonprofit boards and what to do about it really hits the nail on the head when it comes to our research and why this work is increasingly important. So the board source, the board source staff notes that if your board prioritizes diversity and inclusion, you should consider the following avoiding tokenism. In our research, we heard testimonials from millennial board members specifically that they felt as if they were recruited for reasons like, quote, they need help with social media. On the flip side of this particularly shallow brand of, quote, unquote inclusion, one respondent noted she was slapped in the face with her millennial status by other board members. As an echo to this point, Madeleine and I were in a session once that focused on creating a more empathetic teen services ecosystem. And in it, the presenters address the issue of tokenism when it comes to including a teen perspective on a library board. And they said, in effect, let's say you have one teen member on your board, how comfortable does that teen feel sharing their opinion when they're surrounded by adult professionals? When adulthood is equated with worth, are they how are they expected to feel empowered in that situation? They're there to fill a seat so that the board can say they have a youth perspective. And this is a theme that comes up again and again in our research, as you might have heard before. So if a voice is present, but not heard, is there any real progress being made? In our interviews, we spoke to someone on the Millennial Gen X cusp and he said he was brought on as president to offer fresh eyes and a new point of view. However, any change he wanted to make or suggestion that he proposed was met with simple negativity or almost worse, the it will never work response. So immediately he felt disheartened by the realization that his appointment was one based simply on demographics. And he therefore felt unsupported in making change and in questioning the status quo. Thinking outside the boardroom, how does you often how often does your board meet? Where do you meet? Our outsiders invited in who has access to board minutes. How often is your board involved in community events? How often are community members involved in board events? So I really like this quote. If you don't engage people around the critical issues of your organization in places other than your boardroom, you're missing an enormous number of opportunities, including the opportunity to engage people of color and different parts of the community in discussions that are intimate to the organization. You create natural pipelines of people who are already invested in the organization. And that's where we get into the secret club mentality. Next slide. So two other things to consider from this important webinar that I referenced earlier. Embracing intersectionality. People should be able to check multiple boxes for any one board member. An intersectionality is is a term that has popped up. You might have run into it. It's getting more and more popular and is entering more and more conversations. But it becomes really important when you're thinking about board makeup as well. People are multi dimensional and complicated. When we reduce folks to one box based on demographics, we make them into a persona, which is unfair to this complex individual, but also unfair to our board as we've just cheated ourselves out of engaging with this human as a whole and enriching our board on a lot of levels. And everyone should understand their individual role and contribution to the board. As the previous slide asked, why was this person specifically recruited? Why are they here and what is it that they, the individual and not the persona have to contribute to the conversation? Another thing to consider is asking the hard questions. These questions might be difficult to ask and to answer, but introspection is a necessary step in this process. So asking questions like how is our board perceived? Can our practices, traditions and cultures be perceived as biased? Who holds the power? What are the power dynamics in our room? How are people on board and who's being included in recruitment conversations? Are those narrowing the playing field at all? As the speaker said, if we're not paying attention to these things, then we're not going to be able to sustain any short term wins we've achieved. Therefore, there's always work to be done. Equity, diversity and inclusion is a conversation that ends with a comma and not a period. Next slide. And what are the effects of a more diverse and inclusive board? According to a 2013 study published in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, a board that values inclusive behaviors contributes to the creation of a positive organizational culture of inclusion. So what we gather from this is that the behavior and makeup of a board will likely trickle down and influence the organization as a whole. The work being done towards equity, diversity and inclusion should not be siloed. So if all the cogs of your organization should be spinning in this direction, then the machine can run more efficiently towards that progress. And we know from studies like this one, which examined diversity and advocacy in nonprofit arts organizations, that nonprofit boards that embrace diversity and prioritize inclusion tend to be more active participants in advocacy and go beyond simply serving the arts programs to serve as a civic mechanism. So this suggests that an increasingly diverse board will be more deeply involved in the community it serves and will advocate for a diverse body of users. The research has acknowledged a limitation of this study, however, that they cannot claim causal relationships because between makeup of leadership and levels of advocacy, that the quote intensity of involvement in advocacy is significantly associated with an arts nonprofit having a leader with a background in human services, political or community development organizations. And it's plausible that these leaders choose to join organizations already engaged in advocacy activities or the organizational attitudes towards advocacy changed under their leadership. So yes, this is a limitation of that study, but isn't that a great way to sum up our eventual intention that eventually our boards will be engaged in the type of advocacy that attracts new and diverse members and that we'll be doing that work so publicly and immersively that potential new diverse members will hear about it and be electrified and excited by it. And really quickly from the fire perspective, you're saying electrify metaphorically. OK, that was a joke, but everybody is on mute. That's funny. We need to add in addition to a hand raising thing, we need a little laughing. I think. So here's a topic that's not as funny. Fundraising with the debt generation, a theme that came up over and over in our research both from members of younger generations and more defined generations is the concept of disposable income and kind of that ethics of asking for fundraising when community members are in debt. If we want to take a look at the next slide, the current U.S. student loan balance is one point five trillion dollars. And I took the liberty of typing that out just because it is such a ridiculously large number that we do need to take a look at that to really contextualize what that looks like. And although millennial survey respondents were excited for opportunities to donate time, fundraising with the debt generation proves unique challenges for nonprofits and libraries. Households headed by millennials are more likely to be in poverty than households led by any other generation. Roughly 31 percent of all households living in poverty are headed by a millennial as of 2016. And additionally, 57 percent of millennials describe student debt as a major problem as the total outstanding student debt loan payment is over one point five trillion dollars. Three out of four millennials have some type of debt and the numbers are of course still out for Gen Z. And so for those who are essentially paying an extra mortgage payment on their student debt and especially for those who have a mortgage payment as well, an annual campaign or ticketed fundraiser event might not be a successful approach as it was for their parents and grandparents. The average donor age in the United States is sixty two overall. But the fundraising that works for baby boomers do not always translate to a millennial audience. Ultimately, fundraising is providing donors the opportunity to support their own goals and dreams. Donors want to know why they should give and especially why they should give now. And if you've chosen to give them a gift, you're almost like a dream weaver and you're going to answer those questions. So as local dream weavers, we recommend friends create events with their community's interests and values in mind or pair fundraising opportunities with common consumer consumption. And then I added a quote from the USA report on philanthropy that says, although we think about philanthropy from that large Bill and Melinda Gates lens, 80 percent of all giving is people like you and me and not necessarily big foundations or corporations. So let's take a look, Linda, if you want to advance at some of these fun events that we found in our research. So up on top, that gorgeous bonfire is up in Washburn, Wisconsin. I saw on the map, we have a few participants from Wisconsin. I did my undergrad up in Ashland, Wisconsin, and that's where I first learned about book across the Bay. Some folks might pay money to not be outside on a lake on a freezing cold February night, but that's not the case in northern Wisconsin, where an annual 10 kilometer ski and snowshoe race across Lake Superior, Schwamegan Bay, attracts thousands of racers and spectators every year. Book across the Bay started in 1996 as a joint fundraiser for the Washburn Public Library and the Tri-County Medical Society. The race begins in nearby Ashland and the courses lit by over a thousand luminaries. And we talked to a local resident about book and he explained the buzz starts well over a month before it happens. You can feel the pride and the community in the event that buzz, that excitement shifts to almost stress a few days ahead of it. Town's going to get busy. And these are small towns. Ashland's about 8,000 people and Washburn's about 2,000 people. So to have thousands come up for this winter celebration is huge. And here we have some drawings. This is Get Inked for the Library in Lawrence, Kansas. Would you like a permanent declaration for your library love? For National Library Week in 2018, the Lawrence Public Library Foundation partnered with Standard Electric Tattooing on a tattoo fundraiser. Tattoo artist Holly and Jared Hackney rotated eight flash tattoos for the events. And so the flash tattoos are what it's called if you go to a tattoo parlor and you pick out a picture from a book instead of coming up with a design on your own. To respect the artist's time, no alterations were allowed to designs and tattoos were only allowed on arms or legs. Participants were required to be 18 plus and present a valid ID. This one day fundraiser generated over $4,000. And I talked to the Lawrence Public Library Foundation assistant Logan Ishaman. She was thrilled with the event success and looks forward to repeating the event in the future. But on her list of things to keep in mind, make sure that participants are not going in on an empty stomach and that artists are tip fairly for their labor. So although this event technically raised $4,000, the event got so much more for the library, for publicity, for creating those spaces for those conversations, for those chill elevator pitches when somebody says, Oh, is that Max from Where the Wild Things? Where did you get that and why? And then this is my kind of an event. The Library Foundation of Los Angeles has a stay at home and read a book ball. So you are invited to just hang out at your couch, get your favorite adult beverage of choice and read your favorite book. You can follow along on social media. You can make it as social or as quiet as an event as possible. And then in turn, they asked that you donate funds that you would have spent on that night out to this event instead. So that's a lot of fun. So as we're thinking about those fun events and thinking outside the box, we need to really work on fostering that culture of philanthropy. So as Kathy Harkin too, with trying with being interested in joining the friends in Ann Arbor, make giving easy, those donations go beyond cash or handwritten checks. Does your website link to a PayPal or Venmo? We found that retention for online donors is 58% for future gifts and repeated gifts. And how can we make that gift meaningful? Which projects and initiatives will help my gift be brought to life? Be honest about your organization's needs so your volunteers can be advocates and help you to secure future funding. Remember that every penny matters. Even if you're younger donors, whether millennials, Gen Z or younger yet, don't have that capacity for a large gift, even a $5 annual gift will create that culture that when acknowledged and appreciate will continue to grow through time. So as we talk about fundraising and generating resources, it's not just giving money. It's also getting money and saving money. So think about your volunteer opportunities and fundraising potential in that way. If I'm having a chili cook off for my friends group, maybe for the folks who want to give money to think about ways that I can ask for specific funds for folks who are more comfortable getting resources or getting money. Maybe these are the people who ask the bakery to donate some sort of bread or yummy things to go with it. And for folks who want to save money, look for those opportunities where they can donate their time. In manageable chunks, we found that about two hours is the good volunteer time commitment. And think about what would happen if this is an intergenerational event? Is this a volunteer opportunity I could bring my children or my grandma to as well? And make giving social, what can you do to make this a fundraiser? Think about creatively collaborative events, whether you're sponsoring a 5k race, a Bob Ross paint alum or a murder mystery party. Go ahead and listen to your community and pay attention to successful fundraisers in other nonprofit fields. So at this point, we have some conversation starter questions, but we want to be respectful of the expertise that we have in on the call right now. On January 8th, as well, there's another Encompass Live webinar specifically about friends and foundations led by United for Libraries. And for those of you viewers who are in Nebraska, great news, you have that statewide membership. So you have a wealth of the United for Library resources as well. Yes, we do. Yeah, so Christopher, David, if you guys want to speak about what this looks like within Nebraska. As far as United membership, are you able to hear me, everybody? Yes. Yeah. Sorry. This is David Page and I'm President-elect with United and thanks as always to this fabulous quartet who do an amazing job. And yes, we're we're so thankful to to your state for being a statewide group member. And we provide all of our resources statewide for everyone, everyone across the state to provide training and resources to trustees, friends and foundations staff. And we are delighted to be able to support you in this way. We're proud of our work. And I think team Jay here is a great example of the kind of work we do to support you all. So thank you guys for being with us. Thanks so much, David. And I also want to mention that some of these targeted resources that we've mentioned, you can get right now from United for Libraries and coming in June 2020, there will be a book called All Ages Welcome written by the four of us published through ALA editions and partnership with United for Libraries where you'll be able to do things like take a board self assessment, take a quiz to find out if you're the give, get or save money donor and really take a chance to be intentional about how and why you're recruiting. I guess we're opening it up if any of our attendees have questions. All right. Yes, anybody, if you have any questions or comments or about anything that has been mentioned today, please do type into your question section and be good to have on our interface. Or if you have your own microphone, you want to just ask your question that way, each little hand raising icon and I can, excuse me, unmute your microphone and you can do it that way. While we're waiting, I'm glad I was able to get you guys to come on the show today. This was a session that I originally heard about being at, that was, you guys did this at ARSL, correct? Yes. Association for Rural and Small Libraries Conference that was in Vermont this fast fall. And I was there at a conference. I was unable to attend everything so I didn't get to yours, but I have all these things marked on my program so I was glad to get you guys all together. And as I'm, at the very beginning, you mentioned how millennial Gen Z, all of that really has nothing to do with age. It has to do with attitude and your experiences. And I'm a firm believer in that. I hate the labeling of any of us as any of those, whatever generation might fall into this. It doesn't really work out that way. My mom is, does things online at 70 something that millennials do as well, just as well. Sure. And she struggles with some things too. And it's, I mean, the session is about, bringing the younger generations, but I think it could, a lot of your, I like that a lot of your tips could, as I was watching, could work for anybody, really. Yeah, absolutely. I have trouble with the whole thing of signing, joining a friends group, having to mail in a check. I would be like, are you kidding me? And I'm not that, quote unquote, one millennial. I'm just like, I have the stamps, but I'm like, I just don't want to do that. I want to click a button and do it and be done and use my PayPal. Think about all the other people who feel the same way, who would, who are so interested in being on boards, but face that barrier. That's a huge missed opportunity. And Krista, I think, I think your, your observation points to what I think is, was one of the most important findings that this group had, which was really that, you know, we're, we're all the same. You know, the motivations of volunteers of different ages are the same. And it's really these equity issues that are used to service that need to be tackled. It's not really a custom approach based on, oh, there's, oh, they're really into social media. And I think, you know, I think one of the most important things that they saw in, in their research was this recurring theme among the millennials they interviewed that they had been recruited and added to the board as a box check. And and I think, you know, resources like the board assessment that United provides can really help a board to say it's not just we need a millennial, what are the talents and personal networks that we need to bring on to the board. And you know, that's what you're looking for when you're doing your, your recruitment for, and I think testing intersectionality, right? You're looking for, for not just any old millennial, but you're looking for someone who really fills, fills a gap on your board for various skills or networks that you need for success, right? I mean, I think that's the goal of the most important things they found. At least that's my take. Yeah, that was a recurring theme that we saw with our, I mean, we didn't get a ton of millennial respondents because there aren't a ton of them on boards and in friends groups. But yeah, we heard that they were, they felt like a prize poodle that they were the only money on their board and that, like I think it was Kathy who mentioned they were recruited for a certain skill that they might not necessarily had, but it was just assumed that, oh, you're a millennial or you're good at technology, you can do that. Yeah, you can, you can maintain our Facebook page or something. Digital natives is another phrase I hate. That's not, there's no such thing. Do we have any questions, comments? Have any questions or comments? Type them in. We can answer them here now or as you can see, you can, we will have the slides as, as they mentioned there. They will be added when we do, when you can go to the link right now, of course, but I will also link to it when I put up the recording of today's show, which hopefully as long as the internet and go to webinar and YouTube cooperate with me for the rest of the day, will be, should be by the end of the day today. And don't forget, Madeleine can also answer questions on fire safety. Yes, but any questions about that? You can make. Shut your bedroom doors. That's the one she made us promise. Apparently, it really helps prevent fire from spreading into a room. So shut your bedroom door. Before you doze. We get from just some comments very soft about the seminar. Thank you. So I think you might like you'd say you're interested in trying to expand in the topic. Expand their boards and be a little more creative with them. I think there's a lot of information a lot because you guys did so much research. That was the thing too. There's like so many cool things I was hearing. The, you know, of the, the actual, you know, this isn't just, here's some cool ideas. Like here's the actual research and then the the resources we've got the links for here. I think a lot of people are going to be able to dive into that now afterwards. I think too, we had a really great time finding, digging into disciplines outside of the library world. So that, that's something we really found exciting. And if people, there are other people in the nonprofit world and the arts world, the museum world, thinking about this question as well. So getting as many perspectives as you can, we found that really helpful and pretty enlightening too. I think a lot of libraries are realizing that in all sorts of areas that, that's a trend I've heard of librarians or library staff attending conferences and events that are not specifically for them. You know, go to other, you know, like a volunteer events, or conferences for just volunteers. This is a library volunteers, but it's something you need to be aware of and that you can use or go to a tech conference. Might say nothing about library in any of the topics, but there's going to be things there. I know of some librarians go to tech conferences in Las Vegas and things and bring back great resources and things for their libraries to do. Yeah, there's other industries and other organizations that are doing this while recruiting, retaining, you know, younger generations, which obviously we saw higher fighters do. There's no reason for, for us to reinvent the wheel and steal their ideas. It's fine. To Christ's point about it being a lot of information to absorb at once, I don't know if you guys have any comments for these to make that seem a little bit more manageable, sort of what you would recommend as a first step in making progress toward this goal of having a more age-diverse board, just so people can kind of latch on to a first foot forward. I mean, I think the biggest thing is talking to people. Kathy mentioned, invite people personally. So it's great to put things on social media, put things on your website, but people won't have the same connection unless you make that personal invite. I'm not sure if other people have thoughts on that. I definitely agree with you. We heard, go for it, Kathy. Oh, thank you. No, I definitely agree with what Lena said. That was honestly the biggest drop was that 20% difference in outreach between literally every other generation that came before millennials and the generations afterwards was the 20% drop in it. And I think that might also contribute to a lot of the other friction that you're getting on these boards is the ones because millennials aren't being asked to serve on these boards, the ones who do are more self selecting for it. They're maybe a little bit more ambitious and there might be butting heads with people who are just there for, you know, like this is what I do. This is the fun that I do. This is I'm like helping build the community while I'm doing, while I'm relaxing, whereas maybe the self starting millennial one that does find this board position and does apply for it is more I need to change the community now. Which might get some of the friction that you have going on there. And we heard a lot from folks who said, yes, we want to recruit younger people, but where are they? How can we find them? An easy tip we would suggest is go talk to your children's librarian. Say next time you have a board position open, make a plug at the beginning of story time. You'll have parents care about the library looking for ways to be engaged at the library. So just making plugs at story time would be an easy first step as well. And increasing how many people know about your group. Yeah. All right. It doesn't look like anybody has any desperate questions they want answered. Just lots of good. Thank you. Good information. I've got some things I need to now go back and read things like that, which is great. So we are a little left 11 o'clock. So I think we'll wrap it up officially today. Any last words of wisdom you guys want to share before I pull back control and wrap up for today? No. Again, if anybody does have questions later, feel free to reach out to us at that united millennial engagement at you know.com. Yes. It's nice you guys have that one email rather than pick one of these guys. Awesome. All right. Oh, also made you just say that they love the story time plug idea. Recruiting is just plain hard. I think in general. Yeah. All right. So I am going to change to my screen now. Again. There we are. All right. So that will wrap it up for today's show. And it will be posted to our website. This is the Encompass Live website right now at the moment. If you Google Encompass Live the name of our show, Google search whatever your search engine of choice is, we are the only thing that comes up that's called that. So nobody else can call themselves Encompass Live. Anyway, so you'll find our page here. The archives, these are upcoming shows, but our archives are right here and that's where they I've also brought up here so you can see the links, see the links that will also be included to the slides and to the resources will be available on the page that I put together for the archive for today's show with that will have the recording that we'll get put up onto YouTube. This is where our archives are. The most recent ones are at the top of the list. This is the one from last week, Librarian Training for Kids. And so we'll have a link to the recording, a link to the slides and the resources and it'll be up here at the top of the list. The most recent ones at the top there. By the end of the day today, as I said earlier, I should have it done. Everyone who attended today and registered for today's show will get an email from me letting you know when it's ready. We also push it out on our Facebook and Twitter and mailing list as well when it's ready. While we're here, I'll also show you we do have a search feature for our archives where you can search the entire archives or just the most recent 12 months. That is because Encompass Live premiered in January 2009 and we have all of our archives on this one long page, which is great, except for if you're looking for something that's very current information if you do a search on here. So do pay attention when you are doing a search to what is the date of the original date that something was broadcast. Some of our topics will be eternal and will always be accurate and always be useful to you over time, but some of them may become outdated. Information would be wrong, have changed, websites might not exist anymore, services may have changed your close down or whatever. But we are librarians and so we do archive things and keep track of them. So as long as we have the ability, they will all always be here on our archives page. But you can search for any of the topics you want to or you can limit your search just the most recent 12 months if you want something very current. All right, so that will wrap up for today's show. Hope you join us next week, which we have just this morning changed a little bit. I mentioned earlier next week, of course, as far as Wednesday is concerned, Wednesday is the Christmas Day holiday where we as a state agency are closed. But we just received notifications this morning that we will also be closed on Tuesday as an additional state holiday. We are, the Encompass Live is done by the Nebraska Library Commission, which is a state agency for libraries where state office, the federal employees have just been notified that there have been there's been a presidential executive order to give them the day before Christmas off as a holiday. So now we will be shut closed on Tuesday. We had originally bumped our Wednesday Encompass Live next week to Tuesday but now we've bumped it to Monday. Same time, 10 a.m. on Monday. So next Monday our topic will be our monthly pretty sweet tech Manta Suite as our technology innovation librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. She is a monthly tech related topic and she is going to build a virtual world using A-frame. I have no idea what that means but I will learn along with all of you guys next Monday. If Monday doesn't work for you, it is a holiday week and everything we will be recorded. You'll be able to go watch it later as well. So please do register for that show. Any of our other future ones. Our next show after that has also been bumped a little bit. Same thing the next week Wednesday is a holiday because of what the dates are falling on. This one I don't think will be changed from Tuesday our show for Summer Reading Program 2020. Imagine your story is actually going to be on Tuesday December 31st. We also do have a Facebook page if you are a big Facebook user give us a like over there. We put notices up here. I just posted about the date change. Reminders of logging into current shows when our recordings are available. So two or three times a week if you do like to use Facebook to keep up on things give us a like over there. So that wraps it up for today's show. Thank you very much for attending and hope we'll see you on another episode of Encompass Live. Bye bye. Thank you Krista. Thanks everyone. Thanks Krista. Thanks everyone for being here. All of you. It was a great show I think. I think we got a lot of good information out there. And I'm thinking you're going to have a lot of hits on those two pages of your slides and your resources.