 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. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing this morning every week and the archive will be available on our website for you to watch at your convenience, and I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can find all those archived shows. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on Encompass Live. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries in Nebraska, similar to your state library, and so we provide services to all types of libraries in Nebraska, so you will find topics on our shows that would be for any type of library, potentially public, academic, K-12, corrections, museums, archives, anything and everything. Really, our only criteria is that it's something to do with libraries, something cool libraries are doing. We're bringing guest speakers to talk about that, programs and services that might be of use to libraries. Sometimes we have Nebraska Library Commission staff do presentations on services and resources we offer here through our agency, but as I said we do bring in guest speakers from across Nebraska and across the country, and that's what we have with us today. With us this morning is Patrick Bodley. Good morning, Patrick. Morning everyone. Morning, and he is library director in the Independence Public Library in Independence, Oregon, and he's up early this morning to join us. Thank you so much for getting up early to be here. Just happy to be here, yeah. And he's going to talk to us today about strategic planning. Very important thing for libraries to be doing. Potentially also a very stressful and scary thing for some of us who have either never had to do this before or have had a traumatic experience with it in the past. That can happen, but it can be as easy if you just know what you get some nice good tips and tricks. So I will just hand it over to you, Patrick, to take it away. Perfect. Thank you. So yeah, welcome everyone to our session today on a simple, what I hope is a simple approach to strategic planning. I'm going to do my absolute best to keep up with chat and the Q&A during presentation, but I'm going to lean heavily on you, Krista, to keep me up to speed. So please, please, if you have a question, you're not the only one. So please ask that question. I'd love for this to be a more interactive session, especially because strategic planning can be dry. It doesn't need to be, but let's try and keep the conversation going. So yeah, and type any questions, any time you think of them, there's no need to wait. We're not doing like a wait till the end type thing, just as you think of something that you're confused about, or you want more information about, or you wanted to pop back to another slide, just type it right in there and we'll grab it. Absolutely. Thank you. So a little introduction and why I'm the one that is presenting today. I am what I like to call a proud accidental librarian. I've been a library director in Utah. I worked as the state data coordinator and as a library consultant with the Idaho Commission for Libraries, so Idaho State Library. And then last June, because 2020 wasn't quite crazy enough, I decided to level up my difficulty and my family and I packed up and moved across two states during the middle of a pandemic so that I could take this current position as the library manager here in the Independence Library in Independence, Oregon. We serve currently about populations hovering between 9,500, 10,000 people, but that is a little bit about where I'm at now. I am going to be the very first person to tell you that I am not some sort of strategic planning guru. I have helped write a few, I've written a few on my own, but I haven't written dozens and dozens of plans and so over the years, though in all my help and in writing them, I have found some things that make it a little bit easier to understand and digest and so that is what I'm wanting to share today. I strongly believe that having a current strategic plan is what's going to help you succeed as a library and as librarians so much that that is something that we are working on here at the Independence Public Library right now. So this was good timing. It helped me to track what progress we've made so far in rewriting our strategic plan and check off the boxes to make sure that I'm doing not only what I preach, but I'm practicing as well. One of the things that I was able to help people do in past positions is help them write their strategic plans. That being said, if you're here today because you are looking for wanting to find the perfect way to plan, you are probably going to leave here disappointed because if there's nothing else that you can get from today, it's that there isn't any one way to write a plan. I understand that every library, every community is different. Before we started up on the slides, there was the where people are from and we are, you know, nation, obviously a chunk of Nebraska, but even within Nebraska, just like everywhere else, each library and each community is different. And so because of that, I understand that what's working for me here in Oregon may not work for you where you're at. Having said that though, there are some keys that I hope you can take away to create and implement a strategic plan and help your library move into the future, since that's what we're doing is we're moving into the future. So let's take a little bit of time and answer these questions on this slide and the next one, so these next two slides to yourself. Basically, these are either yes or no questions, but I guess you could have a couple, I don't know, peppered in there for a bit of flavor. So first, is your library using a coherent strategy? Are you on a path to fulfilling your mission? Are you utilizing your limited resources effectively? Are your resources allocated correctly? Is your library's mission as visionary as it could be? Is your library's vision what you want to become? Do I want to be more relevant next year than this? And are you as relevant to your community as you could be? Now, if you're unable to answer yes to all of these basic questions, then your library, honestly, we're not achieving our full potential. And like many, we're wasting resources just as surely as we're failing to accomplish our mission as successfully as we would like to. So today, what we're going to do is we're going to get to a place where we feel like we can answer yes to each of these questions, right? So on our agenda, we're going to start with helping in to define what a strategic plan is just so that we're all on the same page. We'll then discuss why you should use a strategic plan and then how you can better plan for the future. Now, remember, this isn't a one size fits all document that you'll be creating. You are going to have to have a plan that works for your community, for your library, and for your situation. So always keep in mind with everything that we go through today is that this is happening at a local level. There's not one size fits all. So what is a strategic plan? A plan is a, well, a useful strategic plan anyway, because that's what we're going for, is something that covers a specific time period anywhere from three to five years. And it contains several specific parts that detail what the library wants to accomplish and how it's going to go about it. And it describes specific activities as well as how those activities are going to be measured for success. It's basically you're writing down what it is you want to accomplish and the steps that you're going to take to make sure that that happens. A strategic plan is a comprehensive guide to get you from where the library is today to where it wants to be in the future. And so if that's what a strategic plan is, strategic planning is the process of determining, first of all, what your organization intends to accomplish, and then how you will direct the organization and its resources limited or otherwise towards accomplishing those goals over the coming months and years. Now, just a quick note on terminology, I use strategic plan, the term strategic plan, it's also known as a long range plan, a future plan, community focus plan. I what was the Nebraska term? We call ours a community needs response plan. Community needs response plan. So same thing, different. It's exactly what this is, but it's just a different title. We have in here in Nebraska, for those of you not in Nebraska, we do an accreditation process for our public libraries and they have to have one of these plans. And here are libraries, and as you mentioned, different types of libraries, we have lots of small rural, small staff libraries, we're getting confused by the word strategic plan, their city or their county had one, and they thought, oh, there we go. And like, no, no, no, no, no, that's not the same thing. It's something totally different for what libraries do. And one of our regional library systems directors, Scott Childers came up with the phrase, well, this is what we're really doing. It's about responding to the community needs, which is actually one of your questions there. I think the final one on your to think about is, are you actually doing what your community needs? And it's just a light bulb went off. Let's just change the name of it. And maybe that'll be less scary. And it was, I hope. But so community needs response plan is what we call it. But everything you're talking about is exactly what we talked about in ours as well. Yep. Okay, so perfect. That's just I just the point right there is made is that it doesn't matter what you call it, you can call it whatever you want. But today, every time I talk about strategic plan, that is what we're going for right there. That's what we're talking about right there. So now that we're all on the same page, let's talk a little bit about the difference between plan and strategy. Again, just for today, I want to clarify some terms, at least for how we're going to be using them today. A plan says here are the best are the steps to take forward. And the strategy says that these are the best steps to take. So I am a big sports fan. And so I like to think of plans in terms of sports. An individual play, based on a certain scenario would be the plan. So different plays exist for when teams are trying to get a specific result, right? And football, when you're trying to run, you're trying to run out the clock, you'll design a run play so that you can keep the clock moving. In basketball, you'll have different plays drawn up if you're behind, if you need a quick three, in hockey, you'll draw up the play to work in the puck when you're behind with less than a minute left, and you've pulled the goalie, things like that, right? So in other words, a plan is a specific play for achieving a specific purpose. And if plan A fails, you don't keep going back to plan A, right? If the defense keeps stuffing your run, you don't keep trying to run, you try a different play, right? And you move on to plan B. So a strategy on the other hand is the blueprint or the layout. It's a design or an idea that you use to accomplish a specific goal. You can think of it like sheet music for an entire orchestral arrangement. So not just the violin piece, but the entire orchestra has a strategy of how they're going to go through it. Everyone knows their part. Everyone knows how it goes together to play the entire piece of music, not just the one note at a time or just the one section at a time, but the entire orchestra. Or if we're going back into sports, strategy would be your game plan for the entire game, not just for one period or quarter or even one play. So a strategic plan then is an overarching long-range document for your library that's made up of smaller plays to help you achieve certain goals that the library has. Are there any questions at this point? Not seeing chat, but please unmute if there's something that we're needing to cover more in depth. Yes, definitely. Type in your questions. You've got more of an explanation. Or even if you have any tips and tricks from your side that you think might be helpful to other libraries to share. All right, seeing nothing. Please interrupt, but we will continue on the question that we wanted to hit today. Why should you plan? Because everything is changing. That's the main reason why. Our technology is constantly changing. Our customers are changing. Our employees change. Our communities are changing. Everything is changing. So a strategic plan requires us to consider those changes in our environment and to establish and prioritize goals and objectives which will achieve our mission and vision in the face of these challenges. So a good strategic plan is going to be proactive so that you're not reactive. It's going to communicate a common vision for all of your library stakeholders, whether they're your funders, whether they're your advisory or governing boards, whether they're your staff, whether they're your users. Everyone wants to get that common vision. A good strategic plan is also going to create the right balance between what the organization is capable of doing versus what it desires to do. And you're also going to address major issues that are coming up where that have happened, internal and external factors at the macro level there. A good strategic plan will also manage change within the library. Another reason that you have a plan is because it's going to prevent excessive inward focus. So you're not just focusing on one thing, not just on the short term. I know that saying that at this time of year when everyone in a public library is focused on what we're doing for summer reading, whether it's virtual, whether we're having people in person again. But we need to keep the long range in mind as well. A good strategic plan will help us establish priorities that accomplish our library's mission and it helps us focus our activities better, better focus, I guess, our activities and resources on that mission. And it helps guide decision making at all levels, the strategic level, the action level and then at each individual level. So we have the strategic plan so that we're able to better utilize our limited resources from top to bottom and focus not just to dive it into the future. So just like anything else in our libraries, I'll admit that there can be both benefits and limitations to strategic planning. So it's not always 100%. This is what you need to do. There can be limitations, but there are some benefits as well. So potential benefits and strategic plans, you'll get improved results. I promise you that. You will be able to have momentum, you'll be able to focus on what you're doing. You'll also be able to work better with problem solving, teamwork, learning and communication marketing. These are all benefits. You'll have a greater influence on yourself, on your community, on your staff. And it's a natural way to do business. As much as we don't like to say that we are a business, we are competing with commercial endeavors so that we can bring our customers in, bring our patrons in. And so it's just a natural way. Now there's also some limitations, potential limitations anyway. Sometimes the cost of coming up with a strategic plan can outweigh the benefits. If you do it poorly, poor planning can be a pitfall because then you're stuck staring at this document because you're not focusing on the right thing. Garbage in, garbage out. Exactly. Also if you know yourself, if you know your library, if you are a single person library who's just struggling to tread water, especially now during coming pandemic, coming out of the pandemic, figuring out where you're going to go. If you know that you're going to work so hard on this strategic plan and then not implement it, like that's a pitfall right there. Why would you waste your time coming up with something that you're not doing, not going to do? And also when critical problems should be addressed first, right? I took over for example, I moved here in June, I started end of the month there. Our strategic plan had been expired for a year or two before I started, but we're not getting going on redrafting or rewriting our strategic plan until we started beginning of March, which means that we were six months, seven months technically rudderless strategic plan lists. We were trying to deal with matters at hand with pandemic. I stepped in, they were replacing the carpet, they had a giant weeding project going on as you can see boxes behind me. We had all these different things that were going on that a strategic plan wasn't going to help because we had to hit the critical problems they needed to be addressed first. The day-to-day things, yeah, and especially if you're coming in new and we have a lot of that here too, staff turnover and new directors. It's not the thing you jump into day one, week one, because you need to, as you said earlier, learn what your environment is like because each of these plans is going to be specific to your library. And that's the thing about too when you're talking about how you don't want a plan that you're just never going to use. That's why you can't just copy somebody else's plan, some other library's plan. You're going to have to evaluate your own library, your own community, your own situation, and make it personal. Exactly. Yeah. And sometimes paying the bills is more important than creating another document. It's okay at the moment to do that. Yes, and put it off until you're ready to be able to do it. Yep. Absolutely. So I really, really like this quote from the book Crash Course in Strategic Planning. It was written by Dr. Steven and Kimberly Matthews. At best, old methods are going to lead to stagnation, which will leave the library further behind. And at worst, it's going to lead to the library becoming irrelevant to our community. Personally, one of my greatest fears is that people in the community, especially as a new library director, this is a fear, believe that the library is irrelevant and that we have no purpose. I've been at library conferences and training sessions on marketing your library, advocating for your library, and showing your value. And having a current strategic plan is just another way that we can show how vital we are to community success and that we're trying to respond to what the community needs at the time so that we can remain relevant. Right. Again, any questions at this point? Feel free to jump in. Not seeing anything. We're scrolling through here to see if there is. Nope. Perfect. Okay. So let's talk about it. We know that planning is important and we've decided to go forward with it. So how exactly do we plan? Again, we have chocolate on hand, obviously. Always. Always chocolate and the beverage of your choice. But just like there isn't any one type of library, there's no correct way to plan, as we talked about. So however, I'm guessing that some of you came to this webinar, you're looking for something easy, something simple, something that's going to work for you. And just because there's not a quote unquote right way, doesn't mean that there isn't an easy versus a hard way. And so in designing this, I wanted to share with you some of the things that I found to make this an easy process for libraries of all sizes. So let's do it. When you plan strategic planning, it is a continuous cycle, but it consists of more four main phases. There's preparing, writing, implementing, and evaluating. And we will discuss each of those four stages on their own. So first, we have to prepare to plan. We can't just jump in and expect things to go smooth as can be. You have to actually have a preparation before you actually plan. And so what do we need to do to prepare? Well, first, you have to gather the necessary information that you already have. Do you have a current plan? Do you even know where it is? And if so, bring it along, read it, and know what was in it. Now, for example, me, I told you that ours here was quote unquote expired. It had been written last or last updated in 2013, which means that it had fallen to the wayside. I understand the previous library director was retiring and she was also trying to run the city, had her running the museum here in town as well as library. So she was juggling and I absolutely get it. But I still found our most recent current, our most recent plan because I needed to know what was in it so that I could see what they had accomplished, what we needed to go forward. Same thing. Do you have a current plan and do you even know where it is? Second, you have a current mission or vision statement and do those need to be updated. Do you have a, for example, a library looking forward to 2020 vision, which now that we're in 2021, that isn't going to make much sense for you anymore. So now is the time to update it. Or is your mission and vision current and you're good to go. You could establish a strategic planning working group. Some libraries, some groups want to establish a working group for strategic planning. I will talk a little bit more about what that is in a few more slides. So I'll hit that, I promise. And then you'll want to set goals that align with the library's mission as well as objectives and activities that contribute to achieving those goals that you set. So as you can see, the strategic plan will all flow top down from your library's mission and vision. Goals relate to your mission. Objectives help you to achieve your goals. Activities lead to accomplishing those objectives and you tie a big bowl around it all by measuring the outcomes of those activities, objectives and goals that you had as a part of the plan. So a quick note about language, mission versus vision, goals versus objectives, strategic plan versus future focus plan. Just like we talked about with that, you can call these whatever you want, mission, vision, goals, objectives. This is just how I learned it. So that's how I'm going to refer to it. You can call it strategic plans, strategic priorities, like we talked about. If you like to think of objectives as being the long-range things that you're going to achieve by having smaller goals, that's totally fine. Again, just so everyone's on the same page though, this is what I've got in mind here. So first, you'll want to check to see if you need to update your mission and vision statements. Your mission and vision statement should be aspirational. Another way to look at it is answering why do you exist is your mission. And the vision is how is the world better off because of what you do. So to create a useful mission statement, it has to be realistic and achievable. What is the library's mission today? Also, keep in mind, is it different now or the same as it's always been since you were founded in 1700s, 1800s? It's up to you to decide whether your library has a core mission as many librarians think and whether this mission describes who your library is. Now, a vision statement does not include any assumption that you have a total understanding of the future. After all, we don't because regardless of what the future looks like tomorrow or next fall or this next year, your vision is what you want your library to become. So working to overcome or capitalize on the reality of those future conditions is going to be a part of your strategy, right? What you want your library's future to be is also an important decision, but the questions and uncertainties of the future shouldn't limit your vision to the point that it's not visionary or aspiring. So this is when you're going to use those descriptive words. All those adjectives that we learned in English class, they have their use in your vision statement. And keep in mind, there's nothing wrong with being visionary. It's a vision statement, right? So help the public know your mission and vision statement. You can stencil it on the wall, you can make a poster, you can do whatever it is, but own your mission and vision statement. It is not exactly rocket science to come up with a mission and vision statement, but we're going to utilize something from NASA here. So NASA's mission statement is that they drive advances in science, technology, aeronautics, and space exploration to enhance knowledge, education, innovation, economic vitality, and stewardship of Earth. That is NASA. That is why they are there. And that helps us know whether they're, if you didn't already know, if someone said, hey, did you know what NASA is, and you had no idea, this would let you know what they're trying to do. But their vision statement is simple and concise, and I love it. NASA's vision is that they reach for new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of mankind. And that is something they continue to do. Now, NASA is a great example, but there are other organizations like we talked about, others that have good missions and visions that I came across that I wanted to share today as well. Hopefully everyone is familiar with TED Talks, but no, this is not their vision statement. This is their mission statement. According to TED, their mission and your mission statement doesn't have to be overly wordy. You can let people know the reason you exist with minimal words. This would be perfect for those pens that we all get and hand out to people or put it on your bookmark or whatever. This is your inspiring, let people know way. And also from the library world, I was browsing strategic plans for myself and came across this from the New York Public Library. Now, as independents anywhere near the size of New York say, no, but they have a good mission statement anyway. Mission of the New York Public Library is to inspire lifelong learning, advance knowledge, and strengthen our communities. Just a reminder, your mission statement is going to say what's wrong with the world and how you're going to fix it. Your vision statement is what the world is going to look like once you have fixed it. So what's wrong with the world? That's your mission statement and how it's going to look when you're done. That's the vision. Like what is your dream world and put it into one sentence? Exactly. Exactly. Now, we talked earlier about using a strategic planning working group. Once you've rehashed your mission and your vision statement, what your next step is going to be is to determine if you would like to work with a working group. You don't have to or if you want to work it all out on your own. Now, keep in mind that buy-in and weigh-in are two totally different things. You want everybody, all of your stakeholders, to buy in to this strategic plan that you've just come up with, but you don't necessarily need everybody to weigh in. So the way that I've worked with strategic planning working groups has varied across different ways. Currently, what I did is I asked my board chair and myself and one more board volunteer. We have in Oregon, we have library boards, have to be seven members. So I had two of them. So we weren't a quorum or anything like that. We didn't worry about public meetings and myself and we just looked over mission and vision statement. Did we want to rehash it and kind of worked on some goals there with just us. Other places, what I've done and you may want to do too is I knew better there and I was not in the middle of a pandemic who my community leaders were. And so we reached out to a member of the local university faculty there. We reached out to school board and PTA. We reached out to a member of the Lions club and the Elks club and the rotary club and school board asked them to send people and had them all send one rep to come to this meeting that we were holding. Where we went over, the librarian had already gone over the strategic plan and mission and vision said, this is our mission. This is our vision. But what we want to do is say we want to set some community goals. And so the most recent time I did this, I was in my, with a group that size, I was in my role as the commission for libraries in Idaho where I was a consultant. So I had the opportunity to step back and I got to just write down all the goals that everyone came back with and kind of moderate that discussion that way. And so it was really, really good to see that they were able to get the feedback on where the library needs to head from all of the community groups that needed to, that they felt needed to have some say in where the library was heading. So that's really all that comes from is if you want to use this strategic planning working group, you figure out who you want some buy-in from and how much of that you want them to, how much of a say you want them to have. So what works for me is saying, okay, here's our mission and vision. We would like you to come and help us set four main goals that we can work towards for the next four years. And then, of course, the librarian, the staff, and then the board potentially has more of the saying that what they're going to do, the activities, the objectives to achieve those four main goals that the library strategic planning working group has come up with. Does that make sense? It does to me, of course, but yeah. We're going to go with that. I think this is important with, it's all about networking with your community and you might, and developing partnerships with some of those. I mean, you listed a whole bunch of other departments that are in your community and who you may have worked with before or you may never have and you might suddenly develop some sort of partnership. They might realize, oh, we could do something with the library and you'll kind of organically grow some of these things. And that's really what it is, is knowing who is in your community, who's using your library, who's not, right, because you want to be a library for the community, I'm assuming, and then, you know, see what you can do to keep people coming, to get people who aren't coming, not going to stop. And that's an important thing to be said, who's not using the library, that the non-users are ones you want to reach out to as well, not just who's already using it, but why are they not? What groups should we be talking to to help get more people to realize what all the different resources that are available through the library? Absolutely. So now you've had your mission and vision redone, you've worked with, you've got all the feedback that you want or need, now it's time to put pen to paper or fingers to keys or a quilt to ink and write your plan down. Now, like I mentioned, there isn't a forum to write a proof plan, it's all about how it makes sense for you. You could technically, and I have seen and I am jealous of, have a single-page document for everyone to know, feel free when we're done here, or even now Google one-page strategic plan for some examples, or if you write and understand with a binder full of step-by-steps, like how you would diagram your notes or sentences back in middle and high school, then do it that way. But really what you're doing is you are, you need to have something written down that you can refer to, so that you as a librarian know what you are doing and where you're headed as a library, as well as having a way to view your progress moving forward. There needs to be something written down, right? And the one that does not matter, like you said, one page, we have, for our libraries, I have examples from other libraries on our site of all sorts of links, like a single-page one up to like a, I did have one library set, be a binder. I'm like, okay, I can look, but anything and everything in between, it just matters how much you need to get on paper. Yeah, there isn't a wrong. There's what works for you and what doesn't work for you. So don't do what doesn't work for you. How's that for two negatives? Don't do what doesn't work for you. Write that down. Yeah, don't quote that one. That's good. No. So we have our mission and our vision statement taken care of, right? Now we need to outline what our goals, objectives, and those activities are going to be. So the process, again for me, is easy, change labels, however you want to change them. But for today, our goals should tie directly to the mission statement, right? So for example, if you have a threefold mission of early literacy, lifelong learning, and entertainment, then you could technically structure your plan to have three main goals for the next few years, right? You want one goal for each area of your mission. You're then writing your objectives to meet those goals and your activities, then meet those objectives. You'll plan weekly or monthly activities that are going to help you meet those objectives yearly and reaching each yearly objective is going to help you see success in your goals every three to five years. So goals lead to your objectives, which lead to your activities. Now keep in mind, you're going to, you will need to know how to evaluate your activities or objectives along the way. You'll want to remember the diagram on our last slide where the goals tied directly to the mission statement. When writing your goals and objectives down, you do need to remember the difference between the two. So again, labels don't matter as long as you're consistent with how you label them. So goals describe the desired outcome that support your mission and vision statement. Goals are the more long term. You're going to want to limit your goals to a critical few that directly contribute to the mission and you understand why your goals are important, right? So in this instance, this is where you would want to have what's been referred to for your objectives as smart objectives. So if you have smart objectives or smart goals, that's a term that's been thrown out for years, but just so everyone's on the same page, smart is an acronym. It stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely. So specific objectives means it's limited to one aspect of it. Measurable means that you're going to be able to know when it's achieved, right? It's achievable. First of all, I guess right there, it's relevant, meaning that it's essential to achieving that goal and that it is timely, meaning that it has a time frame that it needs to be accomplished in. So goals again, longer, broader in scope, objectives are those narrower that support the goals that covers less of a time frame there. Any questions up to this point before we keep going? No, go ahead and take it. I have noticed a few people have joined us after we started this morning. If you do have any questions, comments, anything you want to know more about, go ahead and type it into the question section. You may have missed something in the beginning. We're happy to repeat some things if you weren't sure, if you're wondering about anything and you're doing this, but yeah, use your question section. If you have a microphone, just say, I have a microphone. Unmute me and you can ask your question that way as well, whichever works for you. Thank you, Krista. We'll just keep going then. I'm happy to keep going. So let's talk about implementing the plan. That plan, a plan document that's sitting on your computer or in a binder on your shelf is going to do nothing. So it's time to actually implement your plan and put it into action. And the way that we can do that to implement it, there are three As that you can remember. Allocate, advertise, and act. First of all, you need to allocate or reallocate your resources required to implement the plan. We all know the libraries run on stuff. We run on staff, we run on time, we run on money, all that stuff. If you've got a nice shiny budget increase, first of all, congratulations. Or if you got that awesome five-year grant, that's amazing. You should allocate those new funds directly into this plan. And if not, you'll need to reallocate the funds. Let's say you're going to focus more on early literacy, then you need to reallocate some funds from elsewhere towards that effort that you're going for. So that you can start all those new shiny activities that you came up with in your strategic plan. So allocate or reallocate whatever stuff you've got, staff, money, time, so that you can make that happen. Second thing, you want to advertise to everyone, but especially to the planning group if you did have one. And especially, nobody's more important than letting the staff and other stakeholders know. So if you have come up with this plan, you should let your staff know if you are lucky enough to have staff that you're working with that weren't a part of the plan, then let them know where the library is headed. Let the board know where the library is headed. Let what other stakeholders that you have know this is what we are going to do. And that is where that's where you can take those advertising dollars or take your one-page plan that you're passing out to people, or take the bookmark, or take whatever it is that you're doing to advertise this plan. And of course, last of all, we have to act. You have a plan. You have goals and objectives and activities. So go and do those activities, right? Having a plan that just sits there is no good if you're not going to do anything about it. Real quickly, some dos and don'ts. Please encourage your staff to think of the library plan as a blueprint that they're using to better build better library services. Do remember that the key to effective resource allocation is to estimate, implement, check, and adjust what it is that you're doing with those resources. And please, please, please do monitor the progress that's being made toward achieving those goals and objectives in the plan at least once a month. Now, you may not be measuring once a month, and that's totally fine, but you do need to check the progress and see where you're going once a month. Now, don't obviously assume that staff is going to automatically integrate the activities in the new plan into their daily routines. We all know the pitfall. We all know the feeling of, well, this is just how we've always done it. This is what we're going with. And so don't assume that if you're changing something, people are going to automatically change. We need to take the time and help them understand why it is this came into the plan, whether that was, you know, the Rotary Club really thinks we need to focus on business and we agree on where it could be a resource for the community. So that's why we're making this change or whatever the change is or whatever the goal is that you're trying to achieve, let them know and let them come on board. That being said, don't hesitate to make changes to the plan when circumstances change, right? Let's say you have a plan going on and you're focused on one specific thing. Let's say you're trying to focus on a campaign so that you can expand your library. That's great. But if the roof leaks and you flood and you have to rebuild your entire collection and repair damage, then feel free to make changes to the plan when the circumstances change. Let's say your staffing changes, right? You need to be able to make a change to your plan as it happens. These plans are not in stone. You do not write them this year and then do nothing different with them for like three years or however long it's in. They are living documents that will be changed throughout their use, the time that you're using them. Yeah, ink is comparatively cheap. You can print another one and change, scribble out what you really want to do. That's perfectly fine. Many of us may have had plans that went right out the window as soon as COVID hit. Exactly. That's exactly what we're talking about. It's okay. That's what you do. You're able to switch gears. And with that in mind, don't wait more than three years to begin again. Now you don't have to write a plan every three years, but you can always be in that planning phase for, okay, we've crossed this part off. What can we do next as you just be future focused? So don't wait more than three years to begin that planning process again. Unless we need to evaluate what fun is the presentation without thinking about all the statistics that are related to the topic. The statistics are the greatest. We are going to talk about them, of course. So measures are a key part of the strategic plan. That's that whole base that we're looking for there. After all, how will you be able to tell if you've achieved one of your goals if you don't lay out exactly how you're going to measure what success looks like for you? So if you have that measured down, even when you're writing your goal or writing that objective, then you're going to be able to say, hey, I checked, did that, I'm good to go right there. And I can move on to the next step right there. So Einstein said everything that can be counted does not necessarily count. Everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted. Now, I'm not wanting to tell you that Einstein was wrong. But some of these things that we've got in mind about fixing all that's wrong in the world will be hard to determine whether we've done it or not. Measuring program attendance, for example, is easy compared to telling whether anyone was changed because of what they've learned there. Luckily for all of us, we don't. You didn't come here to learn about measuring outcomes. But that's a different webinar we'll have. Say that again. That'll be a whole different webinar. So go to that one and it will help you. But the purpose for our purpose day of evaluating the success of our strategic plan. This is the best way I've ever heard to measure our success. The former Seattle Public Library Executive Director, and I believe beginning of April, he's now the CEO at Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, Marcellus Turner, he came when I was in Idaho. We had an Idaho Library's future camp, and he came and asked these three questions about evaluating our success. What did you do? How well did you do it? And is anyone better off because of what you did? That is it in a nutshell. That, if you get nothing else about evaluation, walk away with that. So please, please, if you need help evaluating outcomes, it sounds like there's a session coming on a different day. Feel free to reach out to me. I've still got some of that state data coordinator mind left. I've only been here a short time, so that's there. Check with PLA's project outcomes. Talk to your own state data coordinator. Everyone who's in the states has a state data coordinator. It's a role that is there. So if you don't know them, reach out to them and they will help you. Reach out to me. PLA's project outcome is an amazing thing if you're not familiar with it, but the Public Library Association's project outcome will help you get started measuring outcomes. We've done a couple of different sessions about project outcome, actually. One for Publix and for academics. Yes, yes. Perfect. On Encompass Live, I mean, we've done sessions in that. Oh, have you? Oh, good, good, good. That we have in our archives, yeah. I'll say, view the archives then, but we'll get you going so that you can measure what you did, how well did you do it, and is anyone better off because of what you did. That's really what you're trying to do when you evaluate your strategic plan. So that is the cycle. That's it for strategic planning. You prepare your plan, you write the plan, you implement, and as you implement, you evaluate how you're doing. And it's a cycle, so you keep going all over, all over again. Now, I mentioned that there's not a right way to plan, no single document or template that you can use, but much of what I've shared today and what I've learned has come from portions of these three books, Strategic Planning Workbook for Nonprofit Organizations by Brian Berry, New Planning for Results by PLA, Sandra Nelson for PLA, and then we read that quote by Stephen and Kimberly Mathews in Crash Course for Strategic Planning. Please feel free to check them out or ask your library to buy them so that you can quote and quote, check them out. But check them out somehow. If you have any other questions, I'm also happy to help with that right there. And with that, what questions do we have that we haven't answered? Yeah, all right, awesome. Thank you, Patrick. That was awesome. And there's where you can reach out to him if you do have questions after this as well. Let's see. Celine, do you have a question? I see you have your hand up. I didn't see that there. Yes, I do. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Hi. I was just wondering, I'm a new library director. I noticed our strategic plan that we've had in the past, we had a lot of really lofty goals. So, is it better? How do you set your goals? Like, do you go for the Cadillac or do you just try to stay with the Volkswagen? You know what I mean? Yeah. So, it sounds to me like getting started, that's where those smart goals would come in handy, right? You're looking for that measurable, specific, has a time frame and achievable, definitely, right? So, your vision statement for sure is where you can be as lofty as you want to be. But if you're just getting into it, it sounds like maybe coming up with something more smart, acronym smart, not intelligence smart, would be the way to go with that. Okay, yeah. So, I really want, you know, I want to do things that are, that we can actually complete. So, yeah, I'll remember that. Thank you. Of course. Yeah, I'm going to, here's my, show my screen here now and I'm just going to show, we did have another question earlier that I will address right now too. Yes, you will be getting the slides, Patrick's slides. He will be sending them to me. Well, however, whatever way works for you, Patrick, actually links link to them somewhere, just send me the document and we will put that on our archives. This is the page we have here in Nebraska, which anyone's able to use if you want to use these resources to about the community needs response plan that we do. And we do have information here about smart plan, all the different writing smart goals. There's the one that I was looking for. So, that is something, these are all worksheets we have and documents that you can use that can help you do some of these things. And we do have one that specifically for those specific measurable attainable relevant timeframe. Perfect. Would you do me a favor, go back to that last page? This. Yep, and then scroll up. Right there, your examples. Check out other library's strategic plans. These are the ones I was talking about earlier. I'm assuming those were put up there because they're good examples and not things to avoid. These are libraries. We, every year when we have new libraries going through the accreditation process and they submit new plans, I try and update these with newer ones that have been done. So, these are from our most recent go around, which unfortunately was right before COVID. If you notice this big red box up here, we actually had suspended our making people go through this process for the last year and this year. So, nothing new has been done. There's also many other things as you were saying for libraries to worry about. We decided they did not need to worry about this process right now. We're happy with where everybody's at, but you do have these examples that we have. And these are all, they're very, they're from different sized libraries, different sized communities, big, little, and different likes. Some of them are, like I was saying, the one or two pages and some are the huge binder full of resources. Yeah. So, that was all I was wanting to say was look at, you don't have to go in blind. You are not the first library to ever come up with the idea of doing a strategic plan. Please reach out and people are happy to share theirs. Even if it's someone that you know that isn't on there, they will share their plan. Oh yeah. Reach out to another library that you know is similar in size or type or their community is similar to your similar to yours and ask for what they've done one. Absolutely. Any other questions? Type them into the questions section. I was also just going to show you here while we're waiting to see if anybody does have anything else you want to be expanded on or anything. Let me know. Type it in or raise your hand in the attendees list and I can unmute you. Our archives are here, which I was talking about before. They're on the bottom of our page of our upcoming shows and I was going to show you. I did do a search on outcomes and came up with the two project outcome sessions we have done previously here on Encubus Live. One about public libraries and that was the when the PLA first came out with that program and then it was ACRL, used that and modified it to be useful for academic libraries. And this other outcomes is about something completely different, but this is what comes up when you search your archives. No, and they definitely are the trick here thing to measure, right? So if you don't have experience with that, reach out to someone who does to get your feet a little bit underneath you so that you can go forward, right? Yep. We do have a comment says thank you so much. This was timely and awesome. Have a great week. It's one of our library or another library staff here who is an interim director at the moment at their library. So I know she is struggling with keeping things going. But while we're here, I'll show you too since I'm going to talk about this is where our archives are where you can search for as you can say. I just did any topic you want to see what we might have done here. You can search the full show archives or just the most recent 12 months. If you notice when I did that search, we had sessions from 2015, 2016. That is because this is the full archive of Encompass Live. I'm not going to scroll away the bottom because that would be way too long. Encompass Live premiered in January 2009. So we do have over 10 years worth of archives here on this one long page. So just pay attention if you are searching the full archives to the original broadcast date. Things may have changed since then. So do keep that in mind when you're watching a recording. Many things may stay on the test of time. Book reading lists and things like that. But some things will become outdated. Resources may have changed. Services may have no longer exists. Links may be broken. You never know. But just pay attention to what you're watching by date. There. Today's show will be here too, right at the top of the list. Most reasons go at the top. We'll have the link to the recording and then the link to Patrick's slides. So you have all of that afterwards. Should be up here by the latest and the day tomorrow. Everyone, all of you who attended today and everybody who registered today will get an email from me letting you know when the archive is ready and it's up here on the page for you to watch. All right. We're a little after 11 o'clock. That's perfect timing. We started a little after 10 a.m. Anybody have any other last minute desperate questions, comments, thoughts they need to share or ask of Patrick? Get them in now or reach out to him later, of course. Oh, and Celine who asked the question earlier said thanks so much. Oh, good. He is our new library directors here in Nebraska. I can't see when you get, this isn't like some of those instant messaging things where you can see someone's typing anyway. I don't see it until it pops up. I'm not sure if anyone is trying to type something at the time. You have to wait until the whole message pops up. But it doesn't look like anybody has gotten anything in right now. So I think we can wrap it up for today. Awesome. Yeah. Any last words, Patrick? No, go forth and do, right? It's good to talk about it. But I'm right in the thick of it with you. I'm rewriting our strategic plan. So reach out and we can commiserate together. It'll be great. So thank you again for having me this one. Yeah. I wasn't aware when I reached out to you to be on the show about that you were actually having to do one now. I know you just moved to a new position, but I'm glad to be able to help. Yeah, it is good. So yeah, perfect timing. Yeah, awesome. All right. So thank you everyone for attending. Thank you, Patrick, for being with us this morning, getting up early to be with us. That'll wrap it up for today's show. I'll let you guys all know when the recording is available. Encompass Live does also have a Facebook page. Excuse me. Which I've got linked here, but I also have both been over here. If you like to use Facebook, give us a like over there. We do reminders. Just a reminder to log into today's show. When our recordings are available, we post about those. So keep an eye on us there. If you don't use Facebook, don't want to. We do have a hashtag Encompass Live, a little abbreviation there. For everywhere else, we post on Twitter, Instagram, anywhere else where people might share things. And we'll see notifications there as well. You can also just keep an eye on our website. Check in on it to see what we have as our upcoming shows. There's our April and May dates are filling in. Next week, we'll be talking about the Nebraska Book Awards competition. This is our Nebraska Center for the Book does this every year, and we're going to have some of the people in charge of the program and some of our judges to talk about it, how they judge the books, how you can get involved, how you can nominate a book to be a Nebraska Book Award winner. So if you're interested in that, do sign up for next week's show and any of our other shows coming up in the next couple of months. We're here every Wednesday morning. And in that, thank you so much, and hopefully we'll see you all on a future Encompass Live. Bye-bye. Thank you, everyone.