 Here we go. My name's Kathy. I do a lot of outreach. It's one of those skills that I never wanted to take pride in. And now I've become this sort of skilled outreach person. My husband and I owned a business and we did a lot of fairs and festivals and things. And so when I came into libraries eight years ago, all of a sudden I found myself ordering all the swag. I was in charge of t-shirts. I'm out at a table, you know, hawking the wares. And I thought, I thought I gave this up. So anyways, this is how we as public libraries can go out and be awesome. And one of the key factors, of course, is building that truly effective outreach team. So what we're going to go over today, I'm just a wreck. I usually walk around and I'm flailing my arms. So I'm just going to take this microphone with me as I go. So what we're going to cover, why outreach is important to a lot of people. That seems a pretty basic idea, but I know a lot of libraries that are still a little resident to really commit to the process. The evolution of library outreach disclaimer. This is all about Sacramento. So sorry about that. The tools needed for effective outreach. If you don't have the right tools with just about anything you do, it makes it that much harder. And we want outreach to be as easy and simple as possible so that even the most reluctant of us will feel okay going out and being at these events and talking to the public outside of our hallowed halls. Training the staff, of course. That is a big one. And that is something that I really took on after I got my previous position over a year ago. I decided, okay, this is what needs to happen in order for us to really make our voice heard out in the community. Changing the culture. It really has been when I was putting this together, I had to reflect and go, yeah, I guess that this really has helped change the culture at the Sacramento Public Library where it's now an expectation as opposed to, you know, oh, I have to do this or I really should do this. It really is an expectation for all staff now or all qualified, perfectly selective staff to go out and do outreach. So what I hope that you will come away with is a greater understanding of the importance and the impact of outreach and hopefully some guidelines on how to train that staff. So this is, we actually have a mascot. This is our Sacramento River Otter, first name Otterby, last name Reading, figured out. So our priority has always been based on our strategic plan. And in our strategic plan, we needed to increase the awareness in the community. And we wanted to empower our staff to consistently and constantly create positive customer experiences. So with that in mind, outreach really fit the bill. So one of the things that outreach does which seems, you know, pretty basic is that you are reaching non-users. And guess what, when you're in the library, you are not reaching non-users. Again, kind of basic, but sometimes you have to point these things out. The other thing is that the library users that do come up to your table when you are an outreach event. And you know, there are lots of fun and they love to talk to you. They love to talk to you some more. And they want to tell you all about it. They want to tell you about everything. Well, that's wonderful. But let's introduce them to a different part of the library that they might not be as familiar with. So you got the non-users, you got the users. And guess what? It's true. We are still relevant. How many here still get asked that question? Okay, do you stop yourself from laughing first? Yeah, I have to lock it down. My brother-in-law, do you really think public libraries are relevant, Kathy? No, no, Mark, I don't. That's why my whole career is around public libraries. You know, and that's when you have to go into the explanation that, you know, for some people it might not be so relevant. So just get your checkbook out, write the check, and now it's relevant for everyone else. So, anyways. So that is why, one of the reasons why it is a priority, because we do, we have to constantly tell people why we're here, which is just mind-boggling. But, you know, preach into the choir. We love it. We're all about it. But, you know, you walk outside a few paces and people don't get it. So, I am going to show you some statistics, because, you know, as librarians we love statistics. It's not all about outputs. We know that, but these outputs are pretty good. So what I did was, our outreach season is basically February, I mean the very beginning of February, until the end of October. But since we're in the middle of October now, and I hadn't gotten the September numbers, I decided to be consistent. So for today, outreach season is February through August. So, I'll call these the peak months. So we, in the last three years, so 2015, if you can see those numbers, 829, 2016, we did a 901 events, and then this year we've done 1032. So on average, we're looking at about 900 events per year that we are going out to. So that's a lot of people that we are getting to see out in our community outside of those library walls. Now, here are the interactions. So in 2015, we saw a little over 73,000, 2016, 95,000, and then 2017, 90,000, and I'll explain that difference there in a second. So when you average this out, you're looking at about 86,000 people per year. Now, this is only during, what, seven months? So you divide it by 12, that's 86,000, so that's about 7,200 people we are interacting with each month that are not coming, you know, that we did not interact with when they came into our library. So this is a significant number to grasp and to realize why it is so important for us to make the effort and commit to doing outreach. So the reason that 2016 was a little bit higher than 2017, there's this wonderful activity called the State Fair, and it takes place in July in Sacramento. So we have committed to be at the State Fair. Well, in 2016, our assistant director is, we'll call it rabid about the State Fair. He takes pride in having, you know, Carney run through his blood and whatever else he likes to tell us. So we were out there for 17 days in July. I did not return many emails that month. But this year, I had a little bit more say in it, and so we were only out there for eight days. And it was more, much more manageable. But, you know, we see, I mean, on average about 14 to 1,500 people per day. So that's where that was cut down. I know. Absolutely fantastic and exciting. Okay, so I'm going to go through our evolution of library outreach. So we started out with, does this little light work? Yay, the basics. So the basics are going to be, before I started, there, every library branch. So there's 28 library branches in Sacramento, and we have a bookmobile. So every branch was given an outreach suitcase. So a suitcase, a branded tablecloth, and maybe some, you know, plastic plexiglass display displays to hold some flyers. So that was the outreach suitcase. But that was a great start because then people had at least some bare essentials to go out and do the outreach. So then we started thinking about this and realized this is something we really needed to do. So our communications team, and we are very lucky we have an exceptional communications team, but they were also growing in their expertise during this process. But they really decided that, you know, this is something that we need to do. It's part of our branding. It's part of our marketing. So we want to help with this. So we really started looking to that department to help us create a few more things that we could take out to outreach so that we really displayed that we were with the Sacramento Public Library. And for those of you that come from systems where you have multiple branches, sometimes it's really hard for people to distinguish between their own community branch and that it's part of that larger system. So that was the beginning of that process for us. So that when people came, they'd be like, oh no, no, that's not my library. My library is the Rancho Cordova Library. It's like, well, we're all kind of the same. So we really made an effort to brand ourselves so that whenever we were at an outreach event, we really did look the same to a certain extent. I mean, we are librarians. Okay, then the training of the staff. So when I started this in 2015, and I was just kind of getting my toes wet with what we were doing in the way of outreach, I decided at the end of 2015, okay, we need to have some quality people out there because there is a whole lot of bad outreach that goes on. And I have witnessed it. And it is sad. I mean, I had someone tell me that, oh no, they did a great job and they saw a lot of people. I go, great, what did you talk about? They're like, no, I gave them a pencil. This is serious. I'm not making this up. And I go, you gave them a pencil. That's great. So did you talk to them? What was going on? No. No, you gave them a pencil. Okay? It's only 15 cents for that pencil. But guess what? You just lost that opportunity. I didn't say I was thinking that because I'm not that mean. But, you know, so that was what was happening. People were just like handing things. Like, oh, thanks for coming to visit. No, they did not visit. They just came and got something, which, you know, we want them to do, but in our library. So there were training opportunities here. So I spent most of 2016 conducting staff trainings. So I did about 14 and I started in April. I did about 14 in-person trainings. And then when I, I basically went crazy. No, I just got really tired. I, so I decided to go into the webinar form because it was too difficult to get everyone to come to one location. Even when I was going, I was going out into the branches and doing it, but it was still, you know, it's difficult to get that much time for everyone to coordinate that much time away from the desk. So I did a webinar and we started training people on what really needed to happen when you go to outreach. How do you prepare yourself? What do you need to be thinking about? How do you literally operate the prize wheel and different things like that? Yeah, internally it is. I believe I can make that available. It's just, it's very SPL specific. So let me, let me, let me think about that. Maybe I'll just, you know, spend 30 minutes and have me blathering for a while that everyone would love to watch. But yeah, thank you. Talk to me afterwards. Maybe we can do that. So anyway, so train staff, but then the next one was going to be now that I've got trained staff. I have some branded things, you know, we're really, we're getting ready. We're getting ready to go out there. But now I have to be more strategic about it. So this is what I mean by strategic outreach. It's, it has to do with selection and also being, being willing and able to say no for all the right reasons. So before we started doing this more concentrated effort with outreach, we actually had an instance where we were at the Crocker Art Museum. And it was like Family Friday. And our, you know, we had a table set up with our youth librarians. There was an interactive activity. They were all over it. And then five minutes before the event started, they told me they saw our, our bookmobile drive across and park way over on the other side of this same event. They didn't know. And we weren't together. Just a minor disconnect on communication. So someone was communicating with the bookmobile. Someone was communicating with the youth librarians and they both showed up at the same event, not knowing that they were going to be there. And no one connected that the bookmobile was part of the Sacramento Public Library. Ah, that's so not good. So we had some work to do. So I went ahead. So strategically, I thought, okay, so I need to be more involved in making the decision of where the bookmobile should be because they're definitely effective outreach events for a bookmobile. And very ineffective outreach events for a bookmobile. I wanted to make sure that we were all properly branded so that we did represent Sacramento Public Library and people didn't think that we weren't all one in the same organization doing all of the great things. Because if you can get on a database at Rancho Cordova, guess what? You can do it in Eilton too. So we needed to get that message out. So the last thing on this evolution was the true culture change that was happening. Because as the trainings got going and as we were taking, you know, more thought and spending a little bit more on really making sure our image was out there and it was clean, people realized that there was now a new expectation. And so, and it had, you know, the management knew that in order for us to reach this many people, we needed to allow staff to go out and do these events. So it was no longer going to be this major, you know, push and pull with the supervisor to get that time off to go out and do that event. It was like, oh, yes, I really, it almost was a goal for that individual. It's like, okay, you, I think that you'd be really good at this. So I want you to do two major events this year and make sure that they signed up for it. So part of that culture change is how closely we really did work with our communications team. This is a slide that our marketing team put together for one of our management meetings and I just loved it. Because if you haven't noticed, the public library is Kat Nahat and the public is, you know, Wild Thing. I think his name's Carol. Is that correct? We don't know Wild Thing name? Yeah, I think it's Carol. I'm not sure. Check your YouTube. Anyways, so Kat Nahat is marketing to the public, right? It's like, hey, I'm great. I have great character. So the whole goal of marketing is to ultimately get to this branding part down here. So when we're doing outreach, we are marketing. We're going out and telling people we are wonderful and we have all these great things. So when you do a lot of outreach, you're advertising because you're constantly giving that message out. And we'll talk about messaging in a second. So, but really the public relations, this is what we want to see. We want to tell Mr. Public so that really he's going to go tell Ms. Public how great the library is. And then ultimately it's going to be full circle and we will know that our branding has worked because then Ms. Public is going to come in and tell us that, hey, we came by because you're great. You're terrific. So we do work with our marketing team closely so that we can achieve this type of thing because yes, we're out there reaching out to the community to tell them about our services because ultimately we want them to use our services and perhaps even let us know that they're using them and enjoying them. So I hope that that visual was helpful for me. I hope it was helpful to you. All right. So outreach and it's many forms. So here's Otterby and this year's one of this year's State Fair team. And so outreach is we define as school visits, festivals and fairs, community events and presentations. And I will tell you right now, I am not involved in school visits. It's probably a good thing, but yeah, I don't go out to schools and do story times and what else, database presentations. But that is a big part of outreach and our youth services librarians do a lot of that, which is very important, but it's a little bit different than the things that I'm involved with. So we do a lot of the festivals and fairs and community events. You know, festivals and fairs are your basic. You know, it's how many harvest festivals are going on this month. And we were at the giant pumpkin festival last weekend because who doesn't want to weigh a giant pumpkin? That's what I want to know. Thank you. And community events, we do a lot of community events. We have one Assemblyman who is very involved, well, hopefully more than one, but one in particular. He does backpack giveaways. He does turkey giveaways. And so we are always there at 7.30 in the morning on those days and just telling people about the library while they're picking up their free stuff and just really being part of that health and safety fair presentations. I'm going to go into that right now because what we have done is prepare a deck of slides so that anyone, pretty much in our organization, can go out and do a presentation with quality information and a quality presentation, and it's already done for them. There we go. So tools for outreach. So you need to have that trained staff. It's sort of what you have to have. The coordinated branded setup, the plan on the trained staff, that's one of the things I'm working on is the ongoing training, is how to stay three steps ahead of what's going on out there. One thing that is extremely important in outreach is that event-specific messaging. And again, I'll go into more detail on that, but we do have a tendency to data dump, and that is not an attractive thing to do at an outreach event. I'll tell you that right now. I'm the first person to walk away from the data dumper. Does everyone understand the term data dump? Okay, I actually had someone say they didn't know what that was, which stumped me, but I was there. So interactive element. We are really working to increase our interactive elements at our outreach tables because that is what brings them in. So you want that passive attraction so that they don't have to fully commit to come talk to someone. They can kind of do it on their own time, in their own way, and then you snatch them in and you tell them how awesome the library is. Vertical display. How many of you have been to an outreach table where everything is flat on the table? And it's like, really? I'm just going to pass right by because I don't want to talk to you. I am the introvert. I really am. So it's true. You just want the right amount of information. When I first started this, it was, I was taking out, you know, you get your flyers, they're like a pack of thousands. Yeah, I was just hucking them into that suitcase. I'm going out there. I'm like slugging around 500 pounds of stuff. And it's like, you know what? I'm hoping for 300 people at this thing. I'm not passing out 5,000 flyers. So limit the information that you have and, again, be very specific according to the event you're at and the audience that you plan on talking to. And then swag. I can go on about swag a long time and that is later on. So, and then again, that trained staff is a very important element. All right. Staff training the players. So in this picture, Rivka Sass, our wonderful director. And that's one of our first t-shirts that we did. The back of it, the front of it just says Sacramento Public Library. And the back of it says, did you know the library with a blank space? Because we do so much. And so we have a lot of different things. Mine says, did you know the library has free tutoring? And another one says, did you know the library offers high school diplomas? And it's true. I will go out and drink a beer occasionally and I will have that t-shirt on. And I have had people tap me on the back and say, what do you mean they offer high school diplomas? And so it really can spark up a conversation. I had it with the has free tutoring on the back. A gentleman approached me in a grocery store because he was having trouble. His 10-year-old was having trouble in school because his reading wasn't really well established. And so he wanted to know about the free tutoring. So I was able to guide him to the local library. So the t-shirt really does work. Rivka of course says, did you know the library kicks a star, star. So yeah, we went to the River Cats game. That was a fun outreach event. So she threw out the first pitch and she throws not as well as girls. So we had to put her into training. Anyways, so the players, you have to have management support. Again, if you don't have support from the top, it's going to be difficult to get the OK to go out and do all these different events. You really, what's the next one? The in-person trainings really help. I would suggest that if you don't have a robust outreach program right now, that you definitely take the time to do the in-person trainings. You can have some interactive activities going on, but it really gets the group dynamic going and makes it OK. And then they can practice different things. They can practice setting the table. They can practice the messaging. I just couldn't do it by myself anymore. So now we go to webinars. So it has been that evolution in training as well. But the webinars seem to work really well now because of course we now have this different culture of expectation that this is what you're going to do. This is what you're supposed to do and it is a privilege to do it. So the most important part to me is the shadowing at the table. So I will not send out to newbies who haven't done outreach with the Sacramento Public Library. I won't send them out to an event by themselves. I'll make sure that there's someone else that has done the outreach before so that they can shadow that. But really the whole process starts with the right information and the buy-in from the top. All right, the equipment. See that's the little outreach bag, nothing fancy. I think they're like maybe 45 bucks on Amazon and you get a cute little separate bag with it. We've got the price wheel that doesn't have the inserts in it and then various swag. So I'm going to talk about the presentations but then we'll get there again. I already mentioned the slide deck and then I'll talk about that a little bit more but that is so important because when you go out to places like Kiwanis, when you do, you know, I was called in to do, it was like California jail programming I had to present on partnerships. And I just pulled out this deck and said, yeah, sure, I can go do that. So it was, it's just a great tool. So festivals and fairs, one thing we did is we centralized all of our outreach supplies so that again people don't have to look for it. So if you're doing an outreach event, you simply fill out an outreach request form and then from the central location, which is the department I oversee, you're going to get your price wheel. You're going to get all your swag if you need a canopy, et cetera, et cetera. So whatever supplies you have, so what makes it very easy for people to go out, be prepared and do these things. Again, there's guidelines, there's readers advisory display, swag management, I've mentioned that's a big one for me. And then of course the messaging and the table setup. So this is, I only have six slides in here from that presentation. And this is something that our marketing team put together. So we have 50 slides that are just nice quality, no writing on them for the most part. So you can just kind of go out and say, you know, meet your library. This is what we're doing right now. So basically the whole presentation is about what you can do with your library card and you ask people, so what can you do with your library card? Oh, I can check out books, you're all about books. Yeah, that's true, but, well, why don't you change the slide, Kathy? Ah, so have you heard of our library things? You know, with that same library card you can check out a drum, thrill your neighbors with that, maybe a guitar. You know, come check out a sewing machine. How about a board game? Finally get that family game night going you've wanted to have. How about a GoPro for your next vacation? Check that out with your library card. And then they go like, ooh, ah, wow, no. You're like, just hold on, I got more. You know, seed libraries. Why don't you, you know, after you've been playing the drums, you want to plan a little garden, well, why don't you come down to one of our three seed libraries, check out some seeds. It's really take the seeds, we don't want them back. But they're all heirloom seeds, so we want you to take advantage of it. And then, of course, we do have the traditional books, but we also have all the e-books and e-audio books. And we have magazines, e-magazines. We don't even want to know what you're reading. And we have streaming videos. Yes, you can, or streaming movies. You can get all this with that library card. And then we have a lot of great programs for people. And we like to talk about the really good stuff. So this is the meetup for your mind. So we like to, you know, kind of push the limit a little bit. So our first program was on racism. Then we had a great one on death. And actually, for real, we're having one November 19th to talk about fake news. And yes, that term is obnoxious, but it's a term that everyone under, well, they think they understand it. But, you know, it resonates. So that was just six of the 50 slides that you can have ready to go for a presentation. Easy peasy. That's an easy one. So now on to fairs, festivals, and community events. So that is a true picture of the state fair. Oh my God. I mean, it's awesome that it is a lot of work. And, you know, I feel like we're doing our absolute community good deed because it's the state fair. So we are out there representing all of you. Say, go library. You can thank me later. All right. So basics for success, success. And this is something that this is part of the training I do. And Otterby here is out at a Sac Republic game. So talk about surprising people. We pull up in the bookmobile, we set up, we're next to the beer tent where they sell t-shirts, all the food trucks. I had one lady actually cry. I'm like, really? And she goes, oh, I'm a teacher. I just can't believe you're here. This is so incredible. Like, oh, great. You want to spin the price wheel? That'd be nice. But no, it was really cool. We met a school librarian who hadn't gotten any support. And I hooked her up with our early literacy specialist and our K through 12 specialist. She came to the Central Library. We got her all set up with a teacher card. We got her all set up with resources. And I met her at the Sac Republic game. So, you know, you never, you just kind of got to jump out there and take some, you know, take some chances. Anyways, come prepared both mentally and physically. This is not a day off. You don't go out and party all night long unless that's your norm. But you need to come. You need to have energy. Set up your table. Do it correctly. And then know your audience and don't data dump. So have those three messages prepared. So when we're at the Sac Republic game in the summer, our messages, summer reading, kid stuff coming up if you're close to the fall, and basically summer programs. When you're in the summer, there is only one message. It's summer reading, unless you have like a really cool adult program coming up. All right. So lots of stuff. We went through this. You can fit so much into that suitcase and it's really easy to haul around. Again, making it as easy as possible for people to go out and do this. So bring what you need. This was part of my learning curve. Yes, I really did have to add sunscreen. Someone called me and said, Kathy, you didn't tell me I should bring sunscreen to the event. And I go, well, it was outside. And it's summer in Sacramento. So I'm going to add that to my list of reminders. So that's why you see hat and water and you see food and cash. It's always stunned, but not surprised. And then you have to be mentally prepared. Know your audience. Don't just show up and go, hey, man, where am I? It's like, no, if you are at a museum, know that, you know, what museum, are you at the California Railroad Museum? Guess what? Lots of little kids excited about trains. React to that. Come prepared for that. This is not a senior center. This is not, you know, quiet. It's going to be crazy. If you're at the county fair and it's school visit day, holy heck, bring your energy. This is not a casual day out of the library. Be ready to engage and, you know, again, having to go back to the basics. Hey, be nice. Be friendly. Don't stare at your mobile phone. Hello. Yeah. So I'm usually not this sarcastic when I'm doing a training, but then again, maybe I am. I have no time. All right. Does that work? Yes. Okay. And remember it's a team effort. And again, you know, they always have things because we learn from what has happened in the past. And my favorite example of that was in the 1980s. I actually saw a coffee pot that said, do not put your hand in the carafe while operating. What? Because you know what had to happen in order for them to get that message on there. Kill me. Okay. So it is a team effort. So if you're out there and it's really busy, this is at the mini maker fair. So we've got the price wheel. We got a button maker and we got the 3D printer down at the end. And we've got three people here. Well, if someone wants to take a break, guess what? Not now. We've got a fourth person on their break. So you need to coordinate that. And you need to know that you can't be a slacker that day if things are going crazy. So this is where, you know, you need to be aware of your team and you need to make sure that the team can get a hold of each other. We've had people get lost at the state fair. Okay. So, well, no, I won't make fun of that. I'm sorry. I'm going to park out and God knows where. So we're okay. We're okay. Oh, that's right. It doesn't work. All right. So capturing the data is very important. So you've got your outputs. You've got your numbers. You've got, we have clickers. We have two clickers in every outreach bag. We've got a youth. We've got an adult. And give that to someone who's going to remember to click. I am not that person. I am out there and I am just selling it. Now I'm having a great time with the kids. And I, you know, 2,500 people walk by and I'm like, whoa, what just happened? And so someone has to be clicking away and doing their thing. Outcomes. This is, and this is the interesting one. And I think it's, you know, it's qualitative. So how do we capture that? And we're still working on that piece. We've got a couple of ideas that we wanted to take into 2018. But most of it is just stories. You know, stories that we have captured. And one of my favorite, it does come from the state fair. But I was working the prize wheel with them. And it was this whole family and they hit the question mark. And the question mark on the prize wheel is the absolute best insert. You could fill your whole prize wheel with question marks and they would love it. So one of my questions at the state fair, I have a couple of favorites. I know I'm out of time. I can't help it. Is when you become a superhero, what is your power? And of course the literal people say, I can't be a superhero. And you're like, okay, work with me here. And then the second one is what is or what is soon to be your favorite fair food? Because the whole family gets involved in that. Anyways. So outcomes are good. Anyway, so this family said it was the best time they had at the fair. I know I've got to hurry up. So here's your prize wheel. I didn't get it finished. I'm sorry. We're done. Oh my gosh, prize wheel, swag, personalized reading. There she is. What's your message? And best practices, lessons learned, looking ahead. Questions. There we go. Thank you guys.