 Okay, 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 live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. You can always watch our archives at your convenience. The show is recorded every week and I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can find all of our archives. 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 who you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. The Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries in Nebraska and that is for all types of libraries. So we provide training and support and grants to all types of libraries across the state. So you will find things on our show that are for public libraries, K-12s, academics, museums, correction facilities, anything that has a library. So really the only criteria for the kind of things we have in the show is that it's something to do with libraries. Something libraries are doing, some things we think they could be doing. We have libraries themselves come on and share some cool fun things they're doing, innovative things and we sometimes share resources that we would like them to know about from the Nebraska Library Commission. So we have a mixture of things, book reviews, interviews, mini-training sessions, small demos of products and services, it's really all over the place. But that's good. We sometimes have sessions that done by Nebraska Library Commission staff, particularly for things that we're offering here through the state. We bring in libraries, but we also bring in guest speakers from all across the country. And that's what we have this morning with us online here is John. Good morning, John. Hey, Krista, how are you today? Hi. And you're up in Chicago, I'm off the road for a change. I'm in my sparkling home office right now. Surprise. Enjoy it. And he is from every library and you can see the slides there and he's going to talk to us about what we can do to support libraries in 2020. So I'm going to hand it over to you, John, to take it away and introduce yourself in every library and what you have for us today. Absolutely, Krista. Thank you so much. It's nice to be out in Compass Live. I check in not every single Wednesday, but when I do, it's really very valuable. One of the things that we like to be able to do here at every library and the EverLibrary Institute is give folks a bit of a master's class on the data around voter attitudes that drives a lot of decision making. Whether it's in Nebraska, where you have a unicameral legislator and you don't necessarily go out for the vote, all the way to Illinois and my home state where about half the libraries have voter-facing initiatives, meaning that they have to actually talk to the voters directly to get their budgets approved or their buildings built to a place like California where you pretty much have to super-majority to get that to happen as well. Whether it's a negotiation with the city council, a county government, a town board, whether it's a parcel tax, a millage, a warrant article, there's a lot of different names for it, but what we work on here at every library is the funding for the library and the staffing, whether it's public or school libraries as well. I'm going to take you through a little bit about who we are in case this is a bit of a one-on-one for you about what's up. We've got two parts to the every library family of organizations. One is there are for the last seven years we've been working as a political action committee through every library. It's a 5-1 C4 and C4s are different than C3s in a very substantial way. C4s are technically super PACs. We are the only national super PAC for libraries. As a super PAC, we can raise and extend unlimited funds to advance our nefarious special interests. Your are nefarious special interests. Congratulations. I don't know if you've ever been one before, but it's kind of satisfying to feel that way. We've done a lot of work over the years with those local, state, and also nationally on engaging voters, engaging the public, engaging constituents of elected officials in the discussion around what it takes to fund library services, what it takes to make sure that librarians are staffing either the community's library or the campus library and K-12. That C4 structure is appropriate to election day. It's appropriate to a budget negotiation day with our Calcitrant City Council or a town board that hasn't really understood what libraries are doing. Our city council is really disconnected from what we're up to. We also have the Everlibrary Institute, which is our new 501 C3. We started at the beginning of 2019 in order to well do one or two really big things. One of those big things is to do research around the voter attitudes and around the public attitudes and not just in that snapshot kind of way, but also to figure out what the messaging is. I know more about what's happening in some small towns around the country than we do nationally as an organization or as a profession or as an industry about what's in the hearts, heads, or guts of the voters or the constituents of elected officials. The Institute is designed to build up a corpus of information research as a charitable, as a non-profit organization. The other component of what we do is we talk about political literacy and train folks on how to be politically literate. Political literacy is, well, you boil it all down to sugar. It's where do you, where's my money come from and how do I get more of it? I need more positions in the school district. How do I do that? The work that we do on the C3 side is donor supported and grant supported in a similar way, but different than how it is donor supported on the C4 side. Back to the C4, every library, the Super PAC, all of our work here on all of those campaigns is pro bono and is donor supported, meaning that we do it for free for the library and for the political campaign. On the C3 side, we are a peer in the ecosystem of advocacy and of research work. Let me get into the master's class for you a little bit about what we know about about voters these days. And a lot of everything that we do around a engagement with the voters or constituents of elected officials has to be driven by data. And our data profile, as I said before, is a little bit poor. It also, the data that we have largely comes from Pew, the Pew Charitable Trust and OCLC, and they're two different from awareness to funding surveys. Like I said, I know a lot more about particular towns because we've done the polling work in those towns to ask people what they believe, what they value, what their value system is, and how it relates to the library and the librarians. But let me start with what we already know nationally because it's a little troubling. Well, there's some civic attitudes. This is from Pew 2016, their libraries survey. It was a comprehensive conversation with the American public at large. Pew does amazing work. In fact, I would highly recommend you Googling up the words Pew 2016 and libraries and reading the entire corpus that they've developed around civic and social and public attitudes about libraries. It's three years old now, but it's, hopefully, still holding. Yes, it's good to know that there's millennials that like libraries and use them, parents are more likely to use libraries. This is kind of like the background radiation, folks. This is not a deep dive. What we have, though, from Pew is a very interesting conversation about what people believe about libraries and not about their use. What they believe about libraries and librarians and not about their use of the library. When asked, well, what do you believe about what libraries do and who librarians are? What do you guys do all day for a living? Folks around the country told the Pew Charitable Trusts that, well, number one, what libraries do is provide a safe space for people to spend their time. And that's really fantastic. And I got to tell you, me personally, John Kraske, hi, nice to see you. I'm presenting today. I don't need the safe space. I mean, I'm talking from my home office right now. I have a certain amount of privilege, and I don't need that personally. I'm glad that it's being provided, though. Creating educational opportunities for people of all ages, lovely. Helping spark creativity among young people. That's probably a good thing. Providing a trusted place for people to learn about new technologies, folks. I don't need it. I'm glad that the library is doing it, but I can build a bridge over the digital divide on the devices that my own children have either lost or broken. And I'm not being flipped. Like, I don't need this service from you. But what about those other kids? Or what about those other people? There's a lot in here promoting a sense of community, helping people decide what information they can trust. Fake news. Helping people seek health information, folks. I have insurance. I'm fine. So this is not about me. In a lot of the main here, it's not about me by the respondents either. It's what do you see the library doing for other people? And that other people part here means that if we're telling them that you will get on election day, if you will get, when City Councilor County Government funded us their job, that you will get, when you make a donation, we're disconnected from what people's hearts, heads, and guts are. What you see here is a laundry list of values that people have. Value system deeply held beliefs that we should be taking care of each other in some way, shape, or form. This is not a set of features that they utilize. In fact, when Pew's survey came out, this was a very interesting set of responses here. People were asked around the country, statistically significant survey of the American public, would closing the public library hurt you or your community? Now, 33% of Americans said it would hurt, it would be a major negative impact on me or the people I love the most, my family. 33%. And the industry kind of freaked out when that came out. I don't know if you remember this or not, but people said, oh my god, only 33% of Americans would suffer if the local library closed personally or their family would suffer. We have to get that number up to 50%. We got to work on getting more people in the door. And yet, 66% of Americans believe, believe in their hearts, their heads, their guts. They have a value system. They have a personal belief system that says there'd be a major negative impact on the community. I don't see this as a problem that, well, people like me, people like other voters or donors or volunteers, people who are, there's a well of compassion here. 33% of Americans having a personal major negative impact, that's fine. 66% saying there, but for the grace of God, go I. 33% of people saying, oh, you know, it would be a problem for me. The other 33% saying it kind of would be the other one saying, I don't even need it. I don't even use it. And yet 66, well, 66 plus 25%. I don't know who the 6% are who think there's no impact on their community, who callous individuals those are, but the rest of the American public, there's a depth of compassion. And it's a depth of interest. And there's a lot of nostalgia about what you're doing, especially for those folks who haven't been in in a long time. Okay, this is really fascinating because the folks who've been in a long time, library users in the past year, of course, there's more negative impact on them. 48% say that there would be a major negative impact on the users of users. And only 19% or sorry, 19%, so it would be a minor of the, never been to the library. They look at it as an impact on the community as a whole. It's fascinating to me. It covers both users and non-users in the majority. It means that when they drive by, they see the parking lots full and think everything's fine. They actually think everything's fine. They think that you're doing something right now as a non-user, they think you're doing something right now that matters. And we should be working on ways to support that. All right, let me switch gears. That was Pew, again, Pew 2016, Google it up, libraries, don't read it before bed. So this is from 2018's OCLC's From Orinus to Funding Survey. Now, the difference between what OCLC did and what Pew did is that OCLC asked questions of voters. So the first question on the survey essentially was, are you registered voter? If you said yes and you could take the survey, said no, they'd kick you out because we don't care what you're thinking about, because we're talking about taxes. So From Orinus to Funding, again, this is the background radiation. 55% look at libraries as an essential institution. They think you advance education, a source of community pride, you enhance quality of life. And folks, the background radiation is kind of soft. We're within the margin of error on 50%. And we have places like California that need 66.7% to pass a measure. The softness of the background radiation, things have slid over the last 10 years. Let me show you something here. This is interesting, troubling. Back in 2008, remember the Deirdre days of long ago? 2008 was pre Obama, pre recession, pre Occupy Wall Street, pre Tea Party, pre Trump for sure. Ancient history. I'm sorry. Ancient history. Back in 2008, 37% of voters would definitely vote yes for the library. 37% likely vote yes for the library. You do the math at 74%. And things were not always winning back in 2008, even. But there was a lot of support. 26% of Americans back in 2008 were terrible humans. Now, it's changed a lot. This is 2018 now. Let me toggle back, 2008, 2018, 27% today. Well, just before today, a little bit towards in the last year, would definitely vote yes for the library. Let's drop 10 points from 37% down to 27%. And only 31% of Americans are likely to vote for the library now. And this survey methodology that OCLC used is bulletproof. It's tight. It's good. Again, I would really encourage you to read both the 08 and the 18 to understand where the snapshot of attitudes is and understand that 42% of our neighbors are likely are definitely going to vote no. Now, you can cut that in half. About 21% of folks are suspicious of the library, and 21% are anti-tax. The 27% at the top are those believers. And at 31% in the middle, they have some legitimate questions. Where's my money going to go? Who's going to spend my money? Sure. Why do we need libraries? Everything's on the internet? Absolutely. All right. This is what happened over the last 10 years. And we have to be working on this as an industry because it's where our money comes from. This is voters directly supporting measures of the ballot. This is constituents of elected officials in cities and counties and state government, national government, federal government. This is folks who are in some way or shape or form inclined to volunteer and donate to a certain extent. As a percent of the population in 2008, we have a lot more people who believed. 7.1% down to 6.5% over the last 10 years. That is not, I mean, it's six cents of a percentage point on seven points. It's within the margin of error. And yet I'm really worried about that because there used to be 80% of those people would vote yes. Now it's down to 64%. And their user habits haven't changed. They're still doing 15.9 visits a year. And they rate libraries more positively now than they did 10 years ago. This is the most fascinating part to me. And they also look at librarians in basically the same way, in a very positive way. They love the library. They think you're doing transformational work and they're not going to pay for it because they've gotten their feelings about a progressive tax policy to fund the common good disrupted by the rest of society. If our metric here is that, well, you know, if our advocacy work has been to make people rate libraries more positively, we have succeeded wildly. If over the last 10 years, our metrics about what makes advocacy successful is that somebody's going to vote for us that's gone down probable supporters. Those folks who are like, I have some questions. I have some questions. Why do we need libraries? Everything's on the internet? Where's my money going to go? What's happening? As a percentage of the population, those probable supporters for us have fallen. We saw it before. It's moving down to the bottom level. A segment that would vote yes for the library has fallen by 11 percentage points. The number of visits has gone down as well, but that's not a key driver necessarily because we're talking about post-recession. And they still look at libraries just as positively. One troubling point, though, is that they start rating librarians a little less positively. Yeah. I want to dive into that for a minute. Interesting. Yeah. Well, there's two parts of this here. One is that in Ferguson, Missouri, where every library helped Scott and his team on a citywide election day for the library, it was new funding for the library. After the riots, they got donations in from around the world. And they used those donations very prudently to improve the building, improve the collection, improve the services to the community. And then the donations were running out, so they needed to go for a ballot measure. We polled there using good polling techniques in the community. Found out that 82 percent of people love the library. Another 16 percent like the library, and only 42 percent would vote yes for it. In Ferguson, Missouri, where the only functioning unit of government was the library. So we spent two years working with Scott and his team on changing, well, essentially, engaging voters and engaging people's value systems and updating them on what needs to get, well, how do we spend some money, smart tax money, to fund this common good? Let me get to the image of the library and part of the problem here, though. Over the last 10 years, an OCLC from Lawrence to Funding 2018 discovered that over the last 10 years, we have lost ground on the image of the librarian. Used to be 2008, folks thought, 67 percent of folks at librarians were friendly and approachable. Now it's only 53 percent, and I want to find out what you people did to them. Because seriously, how can we have gone down that many points in years? They looked at us, looked at us, 56 percent looked at librarians, not us. I'm not a librarian by trade. I've never worked in a library. I don't pretend to be a librarian. As true advocates for lifelong learning, it's down to 46 percent, and that's a core function of our advocacy campaigns, that we're knowledgeable about our communities, is down, that you understand the community's needs, is down, has excellent computer skills, is down. Well, that might be because other people's computer skills have come up. But that said, well-known in the community is hovering around 30 percent. When was the last time we got out from behind the reference desk? When was the last time we got out from behind the CERC desk? And I know that you're understaffed and overworked, and I get it. When was the last time we put the name of somebody who recommended the books in that Facebook post about new books, new mystery books? When was the last time we put somebody's name in that? So now I should think that there's some librarian behind that decision. When was the last time that we put the name of a librarian in the post that's the story time 10 a.m. Bring Your Kids? Because I know Ms. Karen loves your kids. We've got to work on confronting this, and one of the things that we do in every single campaign that we're working on is confronting both the slide and voter support for taxes and the image of the librarian, while the metaphor that we use is the librarian is candidate, because they are. Because people are like, hey, not just where's my money going to go, but they're going to ask the question of who's going to spend my money. And if we're down at that 31 percent level, we've got some trouble. All right, in the data, this again, this is the OCLC data from Ornus to Funding 2018 and 2008. Please download it. You can get the full tables. They've done a beautiful job. We would not have started every library as a political action committee who was not for OCLC in the 2008 from Ornus to Funding Survey because of these discoveries. And it came out in 2008. We didn't get every library started until the end of 2012, because it wasn't being acted on otherwise. Political party doesn't matter. Political party doesn't matter in whether somebody is a believer at that 31 percent or a questioner asking the hard questions of where's my money going to go? Who's going to spend my money? Why do I need libraries anymore? Everything's on the internet. Political party doesn't matter if you're one of the suspicious people in town about taxes, because there's a lot of good reasons to be suspicious about taxes. And the only place that matters is if you put an asterisk next to somebody who's a card carrying member of like the Tea Party, and that's that bottom, bottom 21 percent. Card statistics in a town don't matter. Card statistics in a town don't matter is fascinating to me because we we we tend to look at card statistics as a proxy for people's support for us when in fact the taxes are the proxy that people have for their compassion. The statistics from the card holders don't matter one bit. It's whether or not they understand that 66 percent of people plus 25 percent who are like don't close the library because it would harm the other who say thank you to the librarians. Well, only if we only if we put ourselves in a position to be thanked. The last part of the OCLC data that's fascinating to me is that library use doesn't matter as to whether or not you're in that believer category, question category, suspicious category, or the any tax is a bad tax, never going to vote for you, never a philosophy of government category. I'm going to challenge all of you who are librarians who sit on the RA desk or the CERC desk or out in front at all to think about your your guys named Gary and Steve and Gary and Steve, your conspiracy theory dudes, like my mom, Betty, you've never met Betty unless you have and she's fantastic, Betty's retirement job. She used to work for Lions Clubs International. She works at the Burwin Public Library, my hometown library right now on Thursdays and Saturdays. If you want to meet Betty, come into Burwin, Illinois Thursdays and Saturdays, Burwin Public Library, and you have to like wait for her to finish talking to these guys who I'm going to call Gary and Steve. Teller John sent you. Teller John sent you. Exactly. She knows more about Gary and Steve. It's like a hippo violation for her to go to work. She knows a ton about Gary and Steve because they talk to her all day long. And then when they leave, they give her their manifesto about well, somebody's birth certificate or how the government's putting tinfoil on her heads. These dudes are in the library all the time and they ain't never going to vote for Betty because they have a philosophy of government that's entirely different. Also, a lot of users, this country is littered with libraries named after families that are too wealthy to use the place. There are book stacks, just piles of books with book plates, I should say, that are named in honor of people or by people who are too wealthy to, they got a Netflix account, they're cool, they use Amazon, whatever. You might be their book barista, but what you're doing for other people is massively impactful. All right, so what does matter? Two things. Two big things. One is the value system that the voters have, the value system. Like I said before, the beliefs that pew enumerated, clean well at a place, no fear, no favor, everyone can come in. We'll help you get what you need, technology, books, the discovery of self. It's not about the ROI for the individual. It's about what the, what the, I'm sorry, let me rephrase. It's not about the ROI for the voters in general, it's the ROI for the community together. So the value system, the deeply held beliefs that people have, and quite honestly, the perception of the librarian, because that top tier of supporter, those truly top tier of supporter, they still love librarians as much as they did 10 years ago, and they want to see you behaving in that way that is a proxy for their compassion. There's a big difference between voter engagement and advertising. There's a big difference between marketing and advertising as well, but voter engagement is where we spend a lot of our time, all of our time, because we need to talk to people who are going to actually punch a chat. We need to talk to people who are going to pick up the phone and call a member of Congress. We need to talk to people and engage the folks who are going to send that petition to that county commission at city council, which will engage them in a way that is not just pushing an ad at them. And it is certainly not about building users because the user status doesn't matter at all. And that goes two ways. One is if you say to somebody, we have a program that will help you personally bridge the digital divide and they don't need it, it means that they're not going to listen because all you're doing is trying to sell them a feature, as opposed to saying to them and engaging with them that says, we have programs for other people that help them bridge the digital divide, that help them learn first language, that help their kids get a leg up, and actually help the parents too. You don't need it personally, but let me tell you what we did for those folks and what the funding that we have does to help those folks out. Let me engage you as a voter in a value system that we're putting to work that we know we share. Those heartwarming type stories are the ones that really get people. Well, it's more than a story. And I'll come back to that in a minute because it's not just about the one person that we affected. It's about the ability to say, I did this work and we need these resources. And I'm going to come back to that in a minute because it's an important element of engagement. And it's unfortunate, Chris, that we've been doing kind of advocacy wrong over the last, I don't know, 25 years because we keep telling stories as if somebody is going to pop up as an advocate for us like a mushroom after we tell the story. All right, let me hit this real quick. There's eight reasons that libraries lose. And we know this from working on hundreds of library campaigns around the country with 109 election days behind us, etc, etc, etc. When the day of the vote is the first time that people see the plans, that's about marketing and engagement. There's a lot of focus in this list around any taxes of bad tax groups or local elected officials who are opposed or watchdogs or their personal opposition or how the community is changing. There might be some zero sum gaming game going on. Fundamentally, though, basically, the problem for libraries is that there's no engagement. There's tactical issues like that one elected official who's a real problem or an anti tax group that might, but in the main, we have a problem in talking with a full voice about who we are as libraries, what we do as librarians and the funding that gets behind it that either needs to be stable or needs to be increased. The engagement is where we tend to see trouble. People think that you run a stealth campaign for new money, you can't anymore. There is a lot of noise in that list of why libraries lose, but the lack of engagement, the lack of marketing and the reliance simply on advertising to build use is killing us. In fact, it's killing us so bad. OCLC did one more study. This is not part of the From Awareness to Funding Study. This is part of a survey of marketing they did in 2018. I have to put a better footnote on here next time. That said, they asked people who do marketing for libraries and communications for libraries, what is your desired outcome for your communications efforts? And despite the fact that 90% of our funding, 94% of our funding comes from the will of local voters or the will of politicians, it's to build community awareness or increase use of library materials. Despite the fact that the user status of the voter, the user status of the constituent doesn't matter, we're looking for more people to show up at library events and to increase traffic when I personally as a voter or constituent don't need what you're selling me. But I'm really, well, if you told me that you did it for somebody else and how much it costs and what your competency is as a librarian and doing it, I could be engaged. The current library FC model is something that we're really troubled by in here at every library. We're working against it quite honestly. The current library FC model is sales and it's advertising and it's a push. It is take this action when they actually ask for actions. But usually it's 10am, storytime, bring your kids, look, a kid got a kid, a kids now can read. There's a problem with that model. There's a problem with that model because, well, let me once you read the cartoon, there's a problem with that model because we don't actually know how people feel about what we've done. We don't give them a chance to respond and to engage back. And we have an undifferentiated series of audiences. We basically have like five audiences in library lands like kids, teens, seniors, genealogy, and then what your special collection is. We have a lot more value system out there in the community. Who else cares in the community about literacy? That one's an easy one. Our education, that one's pretty natural. But what about business development and support for small businesses entrepreneurs, side gigs? How many people care that your technology, that your computers are the gateway to like the global market for people who are consultants or self starters or looking to start a business? How many other people care about the whole life of a child that isn't necessarily about literacy but they could see this part of the whole cloth? How many people care about, I mean you can keep going with all your surface provision points. We have to ask them to do two things. One is to take an action based on their value system if they care. And the other is to self-identify what they care about. All right so this is the last piece of the From Orinus to Funding. I think I said that twice already. But in From Orinus to Funding 2018, they did something that I think is fundamental and we need to pay attention to in this industry. The word identify here at the top is in brackets because my colleague Patrick Sweeney put that on. We have to identify, cultivate and empower super supporters. Those folks who are in that 6.6% that those folks who believe in librarians the most and who are soft right now and their willingness to pay for it. The segment's loyalty should not be taken for granted but rather nurtured and protected. In addition library leaders can consider how to engage and leverage this as library ambassadors. Folks we're doing this every day here at every library on these local campaigns and the state level and regional level initiatives that we're supporting and nationally as well and we're looking to take it to a new scale this year coming up in 2020. Our approach with local campaigns at every library again it's 109 election days. We've supported dozens of negotiations with city councils and county governments and town boards. We run the save school librarians initiative with support from fallot on well turning around some of the problems in districts and schools confronting when a school librarian's job is cut or an entire department gets eliminated. We're focusing on each of these places at the local level whether it's a single zip code or single school district on the legitimate needs that have been identified by the local leaders for the library and we're helping them build a campaign to engage people who care also. Likewise at the state and regional level we've been working on this from a values system approach that we've got great partnerships going on right now with many of the state library associations and the state school library associations because they are the legitimate local stakeholders for the funding formula for libraries in that state and a policy formula or the policy environment for libraries in their states and it's based on seeing who else cares because quite honestly the policies are very particular and necessary for the libraries and very in the funding formula is very important for state library library systems and co-ops and individual libraries and yet the voters and the constituents in that state are really driven more by their value system of what who librarians are and what libraries do. Likewise our national voter engagement has been focusing on well so far so good with every library and we're trying to get a little bit bigger in 2020 and this is one of the cool things about why we wanted to chat today is because we've already had around 342,000 people on social media. I checked Krista just before we started that's our Facebook plus our Twitter we've got 155,000 people who are committed library supporters in our database today and I mean committed because they've taken more than one action and they've done something to put their value system to work it might be appealing to a county commission when they've made some cuts it might be supporting or signing a pledge to support school librarians again it's to help with that national the national picture where the states are the ones spending the funding that comes from the federal government what we're trying to do with with a big lift the next year though is to move into a national voter engagement campaign to move beyond or to take what we've got the competencies that we have with these local campaigns out of those 109 campaigns we've had 90 wins we've helped secure over 1.7 billion dollars in stable tax funding for libraries over the next 20 years it's about 332 million dollars a year if you put together all the small ones and all the big ones that's amazing yeah yeah no it's it's a fantastic number and we're only touching about 10 of the campaigns at any given time libraries 2020 hopefully libraries 2020 is going to shift gears and move into well you got you got trump 2020 you got warren 2020 you got bootages 2020 you got well libraries 2020 could if we get the funding that we need essentially build the the library party in the united states i'd like to see a national library party now it's not like england we're working in england right now with the british library association sylip on there recently yeah yeah it's a fantastic campaign to build public engagement and support for libraries across england and eventually the uk we're running vote libraries uk right now in advance of the general election over there they could actually have a library party they got the labor they got they got the tories they got the lib dems they got the greens they could have a library party we're not suggesting it's going to be the same as over there but there's a whole group of people who would like to self-identify as being supportive of libraries and well engage with librarians so libraries 2020 is is intended to be a integrated digital and real world campaign to talk to more than 342 thousand people that we already have we'd like to get to about three to five percent of the american public uh three five percent of the american public is a well we're talking about greenpeace numbers nr a numbers seara club numbers human rights campaign numbers and you see what policy change looks like when you look at three to five percent of the american public supporting second amendment rights or supporting gay marriage supporting fight for 15 minimum wage or recreational marijuana you see these numbers around three to five percent of the american public we think we can get there yeah it would be huge but we're looking at focusing the library's 2020 campaign not just on funding not just on awareness but on funding awareness you can't measure funding you can take to the bank and you can hire more librarians you can buy more books whether they're ebooks or or print you can have the databases that support the curriculum in schools or support business development in communities we are looking at libraries 2020 is being very very engaged in both public and school library issues and then it's about well that that that top tier of folks in our hearts who have us in their hearts their heads and their guts as well we have a big fundraising goal christa on giving tuesday and i'm just letting people know about it because this is not going to be a cheap campaign we would like to actually run a national library campaign with enough money behind it to do things and digital here is not the only venue i'll get the strategies or the tactics in a second but giving tuesday december 3rd we have a fundraising goal of a quarter of a million dollars a quarter of a million dollars is 25 bucks from 10 000 people a quarter of a million dollars is 250 people giving a thousand dollars and the reason that we have that that goal for giving tuesday is because we need to basically kickstart the design work and the infrastructure for 2020 because the first set of elections coming up right after the caucuses and in iowa or new hampshire and we run like hell all the way through september with primaries there's probably going to be 250 260 libraries around the country on ballots and there's going to be every member of the house of representatives there are 37 states that are electing state legislators there are school boards all over the place they're going to determine the future of school libraries in their communities we've got about a 2.5 million dollar campaign ahead of us and we were looking at funding fundraising for it i'm not making an ask of any of the library commissions or state libraries because it's out of zone but everybody else i want to have people throw in on this you know what we're going to do with it though is multi-channel utilizing what we already know we've run from zero people to 342 000 people on facebook zero people to 155 000 people in our database using these techniques that are digital and email focused asking people to take actions and not simply put up a poster above the drinking fountain let's actually take a step to put our deeply held beliefs in our value system to work let's pledge to support let's actually take that action we're going to be using phone campaigning as well and everybody hates telemarketing unless it's a call that you want to get we're going to be working on environmental which means the billboards and other signage each of the different regions of the country is going to have different aspects to libraries 2020 because the way that you fund libraries in california is different than how you do it in georgia the way that you fund libraries in Nebraska is different than you do it in florida or ellenoy or ohia for that matter and yet there's a conversation that needs to be had with the voters those people who who care so the environmentals paid in urdin media direct mail and then the big one is also going to be doing a page out of well trump 2020 warren 2020 budgeage 2020 out of the green piece playbook out of the human rights campaign playbook the canvassing what we're doing right now in england where folks are going door to door to talk about libraries where folks are posted up on the corner outside of the new york or san diego comic con signing people up hey do you have a library card you're a you're a you're a gamer nerd you must love libraries oh my gosh you do that's fantastic let's take an action to support those that sort of approach which is both digital and real world costs money but it bears fruit and what it does most firmly is it allows it allows well the industry to have a bench there are so many different times when there's a crisis and people more librarians come to us and say we need your help and we have to start from scratch there's nobody in town they may maybe five ten twenty members of the friends group there's nobody in town well what if we could get three to five percent of the american public together to be in your town in your town in your town and all those little spots on the map we had a great thing happen a couple months ago when uh the folks in oakland california were running a ballot measure for the library and we were able to to run um based on the work we've done in and around oakland for several years before their their campaign we were able to run the database and say how many folks do we have who live in oakland and how many folks who've donated before how many folks have volunteered through every library before we had 600 people on our database it gave them a nice jump start for their campaign and that's a big city but to also have 10 or 15 people in the greater well kind of rockford uh beloit uh rockville area rockville area in northern illinois when they were on the ballot these are powerful ways to bring people together to ask them to support libraries and to put their deeply held value systems to work i'm excited about it our strategies to build supporters not to increase awareness our strategy within libraries 2020 is to ask people to take an action an affirmative action and to build that library party there's a whole approach to engaging people to move them from being unaware of what we're up to as an organization what libraries are doing they drive by they see the parking lots full and they think everything's fine they have no idea what it costs they have no idea what librarians do this letter of engagement we've done it now dozens and dozens and dozens of places and we've been doing it now at scale nationally with additional funding supports and with additional support from the the library community we can do it faster and better in libraries 2020 there's a whole process here it's it's it's huge on how to engage the public i don't engage with voters and it moves through a system where you ask people to be a part of what you're doing give them an opportunity to operationalize that ask them to do things that are important to them like donating or volunteering for a campaign it's curious to me how we are we don't take a page out of the out of the best advocacy groups that are out there we tend to look inside libraries as if Greenpeace came up to your front door knocked on your door and was like hey uh i'm with Greenpeace do you like the whales yes you do great then come with me we're going to get in a boat together you and me on the north atlantic christa we're going to go get in a boat that's not how it actually works they're like hey yo knock on the door maybe a telephone call maybe a direct mail piece maybe to facebook ad hey do you like whales great then let's let's get engaged about whales okay cool uh how about you donate now and our team of whale sabers will go out on the north atlantic and do something that you can't or won't do well you can't because you don't have the time you won't because you're afraid of the water but your value whales we're doing the same thing here with every library around libraries and librarians okay there's four kinds of supporters that we're trying to engage relational are people that already love libraries are already involved in your circle we want to get to know them better and kind of bring them together so it's not just the usual suspects the ideological people those folks who believe in what we're doing as librarians we are working on active well we've got 342 000 of them that we've already worked on activating there are people who are averse to crises like litter illiteracy or um they're averse to situations like you know not uh in prison libraries where there's no there's no education they want to know what's up with libraries they're averse to kids not succeeding on tests because there's no school librarians we have a comprehensive campaign that we're working on through libraries 2020 and it all builds out with this digital and real world engagement to collect the data about who people are what do they believe how can they become activated for the local state and nationally our issues we're going to be crossing over with libraries 2020 all three languages of politics in library land we're very very comfortable being progressive in our in our vocabulary we have to learn well the political literacy conversation we have to learn about how to talk to conservatives in a vocabulary they understand and it's like the libertarians in a vocabulary they understand as well we're getting better at it and we need your help actually especially if you're disconnected from your own community you might need our help as well and then christa back to your point about stories we are not telling patron stories on libraries 2020 we're telling librarian stories and we're telling we help each one of our campaigns with librarian stories uh at the local level and at the state level too and if the two key driver stories are stories of the success that the libraries had and librarians have had that demonstrate their values that demonstrate their values because there's other people who share those values the success story the i did this and then the stories of failure as well because there are times when the story that we have to tell is about correcting a problem stories of failure that demonstrate our integrity are as powerful to people who want to see you succeed because they see you as a proxy for their compassion and then we can get to the stories about about people we care about which is a patron stories or stories that our decision makers want to hear like oh you love kids let me tell you a kid story but we are looking to in libraries 2020 elevate those stories of success and to be honest about where communities could fail if the library isn't properly supported we also are going to be marketing yesterday it's not advertising to tell somebody i'm sure it's not the advertising that goes out and says storytime 10 a.m bring your kids storytime 10 a and bring your kids there might only be like 30 people in your town who could bring their kids and only a couple of them are free at 10 a.m on thursday what happens when we start telling people what happened yesterday yesterday 30 kids showed up and we did something amazing for them we the librarians well miss karen did something amazing for them let me tell you about what it would look like if we could do 50 kids or 100 kids uh use fomo no because i'm talking to people who are don't even have kids what about everybody in town who doesn't have a kid who's like get off my lawn who's like oh wait a minute wait a minute the library's actually doing something that improves their lives those kids lives and eventually puts my value system to work which is about a hand up instead of a hand out i don't care if any more kids show up to that program right now i don't all right so this is us that's a that's a drastic thing to say to librarians i know but you guys can work on you can work on those 30 kids i'll work on making sure together with you as a partner of course make sure you have a funny scale i think what you said there's you know listening to there's like two types of marking advertising there is the here's the things we're doing the story time and then there's this what you're talking about and we got that first one down that's not that's not a problem that we've got that figured out we know how to make that work and i think we become complacent because it is working enough and we're missing out on all of this that if we don't keep up with what you're saying and do it do these things we're gonna not be able to do that what we have been successful at when we see our voter support hovering in the mid fifties right now in california like i said before idaho uh washington oregon sometimes depends on the ballot measure the way it's structured to 60 percent 66 to pass you know if you're not polling at 70 75 percent it's not it's not a smart idea to go out and and ask for new money a couple weeks ago beginning in november we had elections around the country and uh half of the uh library elections that failed were for new money i i'm sorry let me rephrase that half of the new money elections failed that's what i meant to say so when they were when they're asking if you renew their money sure it passed people aren't looking to close the library though we had one or two that that actually had some trouble but of the ones who are looking for new money to add staff or collections or or capacity half of them failed because we don't talk to folks we don't engage folks about where their money's going to go and more importantly who's going to spend their money so this is us here with the uh with the campaign on giving tuesday as well we've got a 25 000 money bomb that we're doing in advance which is would be great fun but if you want to hit libraries 2020 anybody who's out there listening um and pledge it ahead of time we do want to collect some we do want to raise about a quarter of a million dollars to get this thing going that's the presentation what's on people's minds what's on your mind christa yeah so um yeah the website is out there libraries 2020.org you can go there right now and i guess call it pre-pledge yeah that's right let me just do we have questions coming in or are we um if anybody has any questions or comments or thoughts on what uh john has shared with us type into the question section um if you want to use your microphone raise your hand and you can make your comment or question that way uh the as i mentioned the from awareness to funding that he mentioned if you do as he says just go ahead and google that phrase it comes up and OCLC is nice they have here's the new one for 2018 but they actually link right back to the 2008 one as well right on that same main page so um it's very easy to do find the same comparison information um that you i know some people uh that's concerning i think some of the all these statistics how do i find this and get it together and it's very easily out there you just have to do the rape yeah guling um and pew of course is something that many of us librarians know about hopefully we've seen it it's always we always share it amongst each other when things come up about that mm-hmm something i had a question about you had mentioned that uh you've worked with over the years the different partners working with the actual you know of of course specific libraries and and cities and library associates state library associations okay uh have you i wonder if you've worked let's try to work with and i know you did mention state libraries that it's it's a little different of that um working with them but have you have any of them partnered with you have you tried to partner with them like your raska our state library is the library commission but um yeah what we've done with several state libraries and state library commissions is uh trainings so we've been brought in we just recently uh in ohia i'm sorry oh hi oh we did a uh yeah we did a circuit around iowa with our friends from the state library sponsoring us we did four sites in four days we went counterclockwise no clockwise around iowa it's a full day it's an intensive it's about marketing to build support and there's times also where we do a political literacy training it depends on how the state library is funding the project it takes some money to move us around the country you know um yeah but it's been great fun to be able to partner closely with the state libraries themselves on those training needs and it's an important area of our work that political literacy and that marketing to build support information um state library associations we tend to work with them on specific requests for legislative or policy issues and we're supporting a number of them right now new jersey for example uh comes to mind where there's a specific um funding level request in trenton that njla njla is looking for we're doing a lot of public engagement around that and the you know at the local level we're we're working on campaigns right now i've got we're 13 or 14 on the ballot us uh 13 or 14 and 2020 already i'm probably we're probably going to do 20 or 25 um likewise we had about we had 14 so far this year in 2019 that'll be the end of it though because we're already way into november course is going to watch the days come up but we had 14 um this year alone that's a lot of i i how big of a staff do you guys have well you've got three of us full time uh and then a great group of interns right now we do both uh we pay our interns by the way um we yeah we have uh academic interns and we have from us library school programs and then we have um early career um interns as well folks who are you know transitioning out of like a poly side program and are looking at um you know the first job in politics yeah okay right so this would be kind of this yeah for not well i was gonna say not necessarily for someone in librarianship but it could be depending on how you want to go that round for your shirt we've had we've had some some fantastic interns from uh Drexel and from Syracuse and from um Simmons so yeah it's been great cool okay um so a question yeah how would if a community does have a issue an issue that they are struggling with and um they're not on your radar yet what's the best way for them and now we're talking right now about this library's 2020 thing but what if just they've got something they need your assistance with how is the best way to well we are we are very happy uh to hear from you i i'm available um john.craskett everylibrary.org info at everylibrary.org there's a report a threat um um page on every library as well as on our save school librarians uh.org site um public or school yeah yeah whether it's public library or school or school library issue we're we're equipped we're ready we're interested and we'll also tell you about whether or not it's possible sometimes you see these petitions out there where it's it's just not possible to do something you know in the current political climate that you have to work on resetting the library's reputation or the organization's reputation um and that sometimes is more of a back room discussion than a than a big advocacy campaign about half of our work is a big public facing advocacy campaign but half of our work is like coaching training and guiding the leadership team within the library to fix the problems behind the scenes so we're very open to both and that's something you mentioned earlier in presentation I think about the different um where opposition from to the libraries might be coming from and that and we I as the library development director here at the library commission one of my things is helping libraries work through those kind of issues sometimes and the um small town rural politics and personal um personal reasons of not supporting the library is sadly way too common more common than I ever wanted would have thought it would be yeah and that's not necessarily something about getting more money it's you've got to get a but you said you rebuild what the library is in the town and bring the community in to help support it we've got communities where yes they say oh yes the citizens they they love us okay but you still have your administration working against you you've got to get those citizens to become the advocates and to speak out for the library to the mayor the city administrator whoever it is that is anti-tax anti doesn't want to spend more money all of those issues that's right that's right well one of the one of the things that I think is is a problem in library advocacy training from other organizations is that they they they try and minimize the role of the librarian in the advocacy activities if you don't have a if you don't have a leader the librarians not front and center on it and that is an object but as a as a as a um an actor an agent um then really folks don't folks don't come along you know and it's important to help support that candidacy that the librarian has that's a key driver for what we do all the time I think many times they've been taught that the library that's the the job of a library board is to do all that advocacy and a lot of the job of the library director is to just run the library yeah I mean with the library they need to be more connected they need to both be doing I mean there's no reason yeah that they should be working more together on both of those things I concur you know the pronouns that we should be using in library advocacy are the pronouns I and we um we tend to use the word library as if it was a pronoun it's not um the the role of the the the I and the we um best thing that the the board can do is is use the phrase let me tell you about my librarians you know um and that that that my in there that ownership ownership's the wrong word it's more like a sense of belonging you know that we belong together personal investment into it exactly and we got some good boards that are like that and it's great when you hear from them for sure yeah all right I know that we're top of the hour here yep anybody have any last minute other desperate questions you want to ask of John while we have him here uh you can type into the question section there um and I'll wait and see if anyone does I'm gonna pull back presenter control to my screen go um here there is the library's 2020 website oh thank you and yeah that I have up here so um this is where you can go to right now and it does say they're launching on December 3rd but as you can see you can pledge to donate ahead of time any amount uh you like there it kind of makes countdown going and some already got a little bit going some people we'd love to get the first $25,000 pledged ahead of time that'd be fantastic I guess 10% of the way there yeah so um take a look at that there and see everything that's going on there also the from awareness to funding that I mentioned you I just like I just googled it here is the the lclc page the current one and then here they talk about in 2008 they published it that's the link right out to the previous one so you can go ahead and see the comparison and the decade there so it doesn't look anybody has anything desperate they want to ask right now and that's fine you guys have the website information John's email so thank you so much John for this is great I'm glad I was able to get you on the show to talk about the the new um program launched for next year where well next month we'll say with the the giving day um and hopefully we'll we have some um can have you on again to talk about as things progress or other things you guys are doing I would love to do that it'd be fun to thank you we've come to work with the library commission with you guys and doing more um advocacy in the state uh uh let's do a phone call then yeah all right all right so that will wrap it up for today's show everyone um and as I said it has been recorded and here on our encompass live website there we go is where you'll find the archive um probably by the end of the day today as long as everything cooperates with me as long as go to our and youtube cooperates um these are upcoming shows but underneath here is the link for your archives and those recent ones at the top of the page so we will have a link here this was last week's um to the recording and to um I think the presentation slides um did you want to post them on here as well or have we linked them somewhere John we'll we'll we'll send them over to you to put them up by the end of the day all right we'll have that there um when it is available when it's already I will send an email out to everyone who attended today and everyone who pre-registered to let you know um that the recording is available it also push out onto our facebook and twitter all of our usual places uh while we're here in the archives I will show you we do have a search feature here so you can search all of our archives I mentioned at the beginning of today's show that all the various topics that we cover you can search the entire archives are just the most recent 12 months um that is because encompass live is um premiered in january 2009 so we're over 10 years and all of our shows are archived here if you scroll all the way down to the bottom you'll get our 2009 shows so as you're using you in the archives just pay attention to the date when something was originally broadcast things may change websites may change links might not work anymore services may no longer exist or have modified change since we first broadcast the show but we are librarians this we archive things and we will as long as we um have the ability to do so we will keep all of our archives out there for you so take a look at our history if you want to see what I was doing 10 years ago yeah or if I didn't yeah so so that is where our archives will be um we do have I mentioned our facebook I do like our facebook page here's our facebook page over here we push that information as well um here's where I promote logging into today's show when our recordings are available we post up on here so if you are a big facebook user please do give us a like over there and um you can be notified of things we're doing here three or four times a week maybe we're not we'll bury you in things on facebook so that will wrap it up for today um I'll help you join us next week we've got our here we have our December shows listed here we have one more I'm waiting for description on and you're going to start seeing the January ones pop up as I'm getting things finalized for that but next week we have pretty sweet tech this is our monthly tech um focused episode Amanda sweet is our technology innovation librarian here at the Nebraska library commission and she comes on usually the last Wednesday of the month with us to talk about something tech focused and next week she's talking about design thinking how technology is made so you want to learn more about that join us next week for Amanda's pretty sweet tech session and please do sign up for any of our other shows we have coming up the rest of this year and in 2020 but thank you everyone for attending thanks you so much john for being with um with me and with us here this morning thank you too this is great and hopefully we'll see you another time I didn't come us live bye bye