 Okay, folks, welcome back. It is 10 a.m. Central Time, and so we're going to stay right on schedule here and move on to our next speaker of the day. This is Natalie Bazan, the director of Hopkins District Library in Michigan, and she'll be giving a presentation entitled, A Community Working Together. So Natalie, go ahead and take it away. Well, thank you, Bob, for, you know, having an amazing presentation, and now I have to come after that. EGAD. Sorry, no big videos. We're not that interesting. I'm afraid we'll work on it, though. I want you all to do me a favor and get your little typing fingers ready to go and check by the red arrow. I believe there's a hand-raising signal. I have several slides in here that I'm going to have you guys write in. So we're going to keep this a little bit interactive because I can't lecture for 50 minutes straight. I'm too boring, trust me. We'll have my slides show up after the presentation, but I just want to point out there are notes under each slide, so when you're looking at it, if you print it out, please print it out with the notes. That way you'll have some extra information about each one. All right. So a community working together. We have, I'm a tiny library as well. We serve 4,700 people, but it's over three townships, which is about 100 square miles. So we're pretty spread out. It's very rural, and we've had a few issues in the past with, well, let me jump over there. So it's about a 50-year-old library. It started with six ladies who got together and decided, hey, we're going to have a library in this town, and that's how it was run. It was amazing, this tiny, tiny little village. I'm from a slightly larger area, also farming, but probably about twice the size of Hopkins, and it has no library. It's never had a library. But Hopkins had one, and they did amazing things. And then slowly but surely, stagnation set in. Somebody had been there too long. They didn't want to change. They didn't want new things to go on. In the background, you can see our library with the old sign that says we're a public library still. And about three years ago, they got a new librarian, and she started the trend or the movement to change it over to be a district library. And she started a book club, and she started getting the community to realize we do have a library again. I know several people in town and several people where I used to live, not too far away, like 15 minutes away, had no idea that there was a library in Hopkins. So this was about trying to get people to understand we exist. Which hopefully not too many of you people are dealing with, but if you are, hopefully this will help a little bit and get you on the right track in moving forward. I started about a year and a half, two years ago now, and it's been fun ever since then. We've been causing a lot of trouble in our community. So we're going to talk a little bit about a couple of places that you can go to to get people interested. If you could do me a favor and raise your hand if you have a school that's within walking distance or so of your library. And I don't care if it's pro-kill or if it's an elementary and not the rest of the schools or whatever it is. Is everybody raising their hand? Hopefully. All right, now I'll ask for the results towards the end of this slide. So we all know that schools are amazing literacy partners. But have you talked to the teachers? We started talking to the teachers about a year, year and a half ago or so. And we asked them, I'm lucky, I should say. I have the middle school, high school and elementary that are all within walking distance of my library. They're just behind us. It's probably a five minute walk. So I have the ability to either go over there and pester them or ask them to come over and fill the library up. And they do. About a year, year and a half ago, we started talking to the elementary school teachers and asking them if they'd be interested in bringing their classes over for tours or for small events to get people interested in what's going on at the library and to increase sign-ups because we were having a lot of issues with that. The previous librarian that Stagnation had sat in under had not been very encouraging of children. She didn't like children in the library. She thought it was too much noise, too much hassle. So they had stayed away and she had not encouraged the school to become a partner with the library. And that we had suffered substantially from all of that. It had given us bad media. It had not helped us find grants. It had not helped us with anything that we could have been booming at that point. But regardless, so we started making small programs. It didn't have to be big things. One of the elementary school, the first grade teachers, brought over snowflakes and we had them decorate snowflakes and we read them a story for Christmas. We had a lady from the community who came in and brought in cast ornaments and they painted ornaments for Christmas. We had just yesterday actually there are several greenhouses in this area and I asked a couple of them if they'd be willing to donate some of their plugs, which are plants that are slightly grown up that you're going to plant into baskets or arrangements or whatever. That way we didn't have to worry about the seeds not sprouting and the kids being very sad. So we asked a couple of the school kids to come over and we did this in 2012 for the first time and we had 50 kids. We had two classes. This year we had 100 kids and the principal warned me. You don't know what you've started. This is only going to get bigger and next year we're probably just going to cancel school and I'll meet at the library, which I'm kind of worried because Fire Marshal limits us to 49 people. So we might just take over the school next year. We'll see. It's amazing how much media the schools have access to. Yes, we have a local newspaper, a free one that goes out to everybody, but the schools have newsletters of their own and if you can get in those, a lot of people don't read those free newsletters. But if they've got kids, they're listening to the newsletters that come from school because they want to know what's going to happen. And if you're nice to the secretaries into the schools, they might be willing to announce what's going on and their announcements, their daily announcements at the end of the day or at the beginning. And since I have a lot of people who walk home after school, a lot of those kids are fine with stopping in the library these days, which is a huge improvement for us. We're very excited. We have several grants that if you start looking around, you can find grants that say, hey, if you're going to work together with another organization, we'll give you a grant for programming or sometimes for collection development, generally for programming. And a lot of places like to give you money for after-school programming. So you can try that. If you work with the schools, work with just one or two different teachers. You don't have to work with everybody. If you have a teacher that you're really fond of, maybe it can go from there. Okay, I'm going to skip ahead to the next slide, but can somebody let me know how many people have schools close to their library? A rough count, it was about 80. Very nice. So if you don't, I'm sorry. That's all right, because we have other slides and we have other possibilities for you. So if you don't have schools or even if you do, you might have some community groups nearby. And I'm just going to ask you to type in maybe one or two community groups that you have in your town or village or whatever you happen to be near. So why do we want to involve community groups? If you give them support, they're going to give you support and return. And having a community group involved in your programs or even giving your programs means that you don't have to worry about getting an audience because they're going to do a lot of the advertising for you. It's a little bit less work for you. They might be your instructors. A lot of these organizations have grants that are available or have funds that they're willing to donate to sponsor a program. And a lot of these organizations are fundraising organizations. They are amazing at what they do. So if you're having problems with fundraising or you just want to get started or get into it, I'll admit I don't have a huge background in fundraising, but I'm learning. And a lot of these organizations are helping out. We had the Boy Scouts who came in and as one of their projects, they landscaped the side of the library. We have a Lions group nearby that's going to work. They're working with the village currently to renovate a building so the village can move into it. The village said we can use it anytime we want for our programs, which is amazing. The Girl Scouts come by all the time. If you don't, I'm sure you have at least one of these organizations somewhere nearby. And hopefully you can get them involved. I know a library just north of us, Door, has a beat. I believe it's American Legion. It might be VFW. I think it's American Legion. And then they had the gentlemen from there come in and read stories to the kids, which the kids absolutely loved and adored from everything I've heard. I would really love to get them in one of these days. It's on my list of things to do. So you can get them to advertise for you. You can get money from them. You can have them come in and do a round table meeting. If you have several of these groups and people are thinking about joining, if they hold recruitment days or something like that, you can have them do it at the library. It brings more people in. You can be more connected to these organizations. And you can make sure you have advertising for your programs up at the same time to get them interested in what you're doing. Okay, so what kind of community groups did people have? We've got a lot of things coming in here. A lot of common themes that seem to be coming up in Girl Scouts, Kwanis, 4-H, FFA, Nebraska Wesleyan University. We finally got that Garden Club quilting club. Oh yeah, clubs is the next slide. Don't worry. We'll get to that. Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts. Yeah, so a lot of common things. People doing a lot of the same groups. Yeah. Great. And I'll tell you, FFA, we are talking with them currently. We also have an FFA. And I, for some reason, I forgot to put it on my slide. But they are going to be helping us out with our quote-unquote secret project that we're doing this year. I'll tell you a little bit about those with clubs. Here we go. So if you have a hobby, just one, if you could type that in. You know, hobbies bring people together. I don't care who you are or how much you hate your neighbor. If you both happen to do some obscure hobby together, you might actually talk to each other. It's amazing. If you stop, I have been stopped by people in stores who, I have no idea who these people are, and I obviously do not work for that store. But they will ask you all about it, because you're interested in the same things they are, which is wonderful. And it's a great way to start with if you haven't done collection development for some of your nonfiction things in a little while. I know mine is very old. The librarian who had not done programs also hadn't updated our collection in the past almost 15 years. So I'm doing a massive renovation of that section. And knowing what clubs you have in the area, knowing what hobbies people have can be super helpful when you're trying to figure these things out. So if you don't, I know a lot of people, especially my library is very small. The picture in the background is not my library, but one of the previous slides was, you saw that. It looks a lot larger, but we share half of that with our township. They have offices in there. So we don't have a huge amount of space. Like I said, our building is rated for 49 people max. We do have a giant table. I will tell you that we have a giant table that I encourage quilters to come in and pin their quilts on. And everybody who wants to meet around, we do lots of programs at the table. But that doesn't help us if we want to have a lot of people, or if we want to do anything messy for that matter. We are lucky, and the picture you see currently is the park that's across the street from us. And by across the street, I mean kind of the parking lot. We can see it right out the front door. We also, just behind us, happen to have a villager township hall, which anybody can use, and as long as no other group is in there, we're encouraged to make use of it. That way, somebody is doing something there, and it's drawing more people into the community. So we have, just in the Hopkins area, this is what I found out so far, we have a gardening club. We started a knitting and crocheting club at the library. We have a lot of people who do felting and fiber arts and things like that. We have a painting. We have a school for painting just north of us, and they do drawing as well. We have a gentleman who's apparently a nation nationally known for taxidermy. Who knew? We have a gentleman who's coming in to teach fly tying in two weeks, and we have a group of ladies who started meeting at the library long before we open, although the cars are usually still there when I get there. And they walk around town. They're our village walkers, I guess, and they are working on their exercise. We also had a group, they stopped meeting at the library, but they did meet at the library with a nutritionist. We have Native American tribes in the area, and the tribes had hired a nutritionist to meet with anybody who wanted to meet with them in the tribe, and they had asked us if they could use the library, and we said, sure, why not? Come in any time you want. We have that giant table, and we really need to use the giant table because otherwise it's a giant table with no use. It's kind of a problem. So, if you don't have a meeting room or anything like that in your library, hopefully you have a park nearby if you have a village or township or city hall, but even, you know, a parking lot, if you can find somebody who has an awning you could borrow or umbrellas or something like that, we'll be doing a smetcast leave program. We did one last year, and we're doing one this year and we plan to do that in the parking lot just behind the library. That way we don't have to worry about stuff getting all over. We did a tie-dye program, and yeah, we didn't want to do that in the library. We do have carpeting, and that could be an issue. I'm pretty sure my cleaning lady would kill me. So, we did that one outside, too, but even if you don't have any of that and you don't want to do it outside or you have terrible weather like we often do here in Michigan, there's schools and there's churches and there's other meeting rooms or, you know, Borrow Somebody's Barn or Borrow Somebody's House that happens to have a really large room. It doesn't have to be something formal and you can just make sure, like Bob did, that you brand your event and make sure you have posters up that say, brought to you by XX Library or whatever it is, and make sure you have a wonderful logo that you can put up all over. That way you don't even have to say who it's by. There's pictures of your logo everywhere. It's wonderful. So, what type of hobbies do people have that maybe I haven't listed yet? We've got quite a few. A lot of things here. Lots of, of course, quilting, knitting, crocheting, spinning, gardening, excuse me, genealogy, riding motorcycles, making jewelry. Oh, shortwave radio. That was a good one. Wow. Flying sporting kites. Oh, flying kites. Very nice. A lot of genealogy, too. Do you want to mention that other group, association? Oh, yeah. And we did get one after I told you all the answers to the first question you asked of groups they partnered with. A unique one. Apparently someone online has a correction, people with corrections in there watching with them, and they've partnered somehow with the Hell's Angels. Oh, well, that could be interesting. We do have a couple motorcycle groups. Well, we do have some motorcycle groups in the area, not quite so controversial, but, you know, you could always have them meet. We have recently started buying a couple motorcycle themed books and things like that to support those people. We're not quite, yeah, not quite Hell's Angels category yet. We're working on it. I have also found that, in addition to helping us with collection development, talking to our clubs has helped us the same way talking to the organizations has. It has helped us with advertising just by word of mouth or getting people in to do things. We have done some jewelry making classes and things like that, and I had no idea where I was going to find instructors. I have a lot of friends who are very crafty, which is wonderful, but you can only bug your friends for so many classes before they start to get, they don't know if they want to come down to Hopkins. It's a little ways out of the way. We're kind of in the middle of nowhere. So finding people in the community who do all these things and, hey, make a list. You know who these people are. You can always find them again and pester them all you want. I do. I know I do all the time. Although nobody's yelled at me for it yet, which I'm glad. So now the controversial governments. We have... The library itself is located in a village which is within a township and we also, in our district, we have parts of three other townships. So we spend a lot of time trying to cooperate with our local governmental organizations. I'm curious if you could raise your hand. Do you or somebody from your library go to the local governmental meetings be it township or city or village or whatever and talk about the library at them? Just to see where this goes. I'm kind of curious how many people. I usually try to go to our outlying districts about once every other month and our village and township, their meeting is on the same day. One is in my library and one is in the village hall, I don't know, 20 feet behind my library or so. So I tend to go to both of those every month. I can tell you, I came into this job. Nice. Very nice. I'm glad that a lot of people are going. I have had really good luck when we were switching over from a village library to a district library. We needed all the townships to agree and we needed them all to understand that they were all going to be paying the same millage or levy and they were no longer going to have to... They were contracted service areas except for our township and our village where we are. And this made them all equal, all the same, and we tried to get them information like we would our village. So we tried to keep everybody involved. Whether you have... whether you go to the state meetings or the county or the township or the village, it helps with advocacy a lot. We've had a lot of issues with personal property tax and they are planning on repealing that and that's going to hurt libraries quite a bit because we get some of our funds from there. But it's not just that. It's making sure that people understand libraries are here and we're doing a lot for the community and it'd be really nice if our government supported us. We've seen state aid increase recently which is very, very nice and I'm sure that the Michigan Library Association and from all the small libraries talking to their local people has helped a lot. We are lucky we happen to be one of the people one of the areas that our local state representative comes and sets up a town hall meeting. He started doing that last year. We asked him if he'd be willing to add us to his roster and he did. So he comes in and anybody from the community has questions. He talks to them about what's going on what he's planning on doing, what's coming up pretty soon. It's very, very helpful to keep people in our community involved and keep them knowledgeable about what's happening in their government. In addition, we have the village and the townships that we happen to be in and they have, we try to have them have meetings there. Like I said, the township always meets there. The local village has a DDA Downtown Development Authority and they capture a small part of the village so they have money to do things in the village to help the citizens and it's good when they have meetings at the library where people can attend and tell them what concerns they have what things they would like to see changed or updated or just seen to someone would pay attention to them and this gives them that opportunity. Now we get back to funding. Funding is always a good one. If you're going to do lots of programs, you need the funding. So I have noticed that if I am having trouble finding funding for something like a large summer reading program if I want to have a juggler come in and teach you all how to juggle which we're probably doing this year it is really nice to be able to go to the townships and the village and say, hey, do you want to sponsor this person? I know it's going to be about $200 I know that's probably not going to hurt your budget as much as it's going to destroy my programming budget which was $600 for this year. So it is really nice and they have been very supportive of us and they give good will. These people are out talking to people all the time. They're politicians. They might be small town politicians but they're still politicians. They know their neighbors, they know their community and even though I grew up 15 minutes away I didn't go to this school district so I don't know everybody and that makes a huge difference. Just talking to these people and having good will of our local government has helped us connect with other groups that we wouldn't know we wouldn't know existed. I had no idea we had a Lions Club. I would have thought that they would have been in a slightly larger town north of us but no, they meet and they're active in Hopkins which is wonderful and going to these meetings even if you're sitting through the four hour township meeting where they're discussing all sorts of fun road activities or putting in drainage ditches or whatever it's going to give you a better idea of your community and it's also when you're talking to them you're talking to people who maybe they don't go to the library maybe they're concerned with who's going to put in the drainage ditch in front of their property but they're not concerned with coming in to find the latest issue of People Magazine or check out the newest Janet Ivanovich book. You're going to give them you're going to give them ideas of what's going on at your library you're going to hopefully be able to connect to them and say hey, we're doing a fly fishing class or we're doing some type of thing that will appeal to them and get them to come in so they realize you have resources that would be interesting to them and not only that, government officials are really really good at writing policies and if you don't have a huge amount of experience and you don't have all the money to pay a lawyer to do it for you it is really nice to be able to lean on them a little bit to help you phrase that policy correctly or to get their opinion they know the people in your community really well, I'm sure you do too but this gives you another opinion out there that you can throw in front of your board and say hey, these people are worried about this in addition, they usually have plans for the future of your area and if you do too it's really nice if those can sync up because that might save you a lot in funding it might save you a lot in research if you're planning on adding on to your building and the township or village happens to be in your building or if they really want to move because they don't have enough space suggesting in addition might help you both it's very very nice when you can talk to them about programs like upcoming things like that and local businesses so we all have if you're from a small town, undoubtedly you've got a couple closed buildings like this one, okay maybe not quite so English looking but a couple closed up shops it's really nice if you can take the time to benefit your local businesses it's nice if they're willing to donate to you too but joining the by local movement or whatever you happen to call it in your area and mentioning them like Bob did and his presentation in his videos we have a section on our website that I'll show you in a minute where we list all of our local businesses and contact information so people can find everything in one place and that hopefully helps them from saying well, they're a small town place I don't want to do that we have a lot of people who move in and they commute to we have two larger metropolitan areas both north and south of us and they're exactly the same distance about a half an hour, either way well, on the expressway anyway and people tend to work there so we want them to understand please don't do everything you have to do in town you can do those things in your home in your home village in your home area you can support your local businesses and that's what we're really trying to do but, you know, it doesn't hurt anything if they're willing to donate so we do ask them for donations we ask them for besides just funds we ask them for materials if I'm doing a concrete leaf casting class I might go to local hardware and say, hey, do you have a bag of sand or a bag of cement I can use or I might go to the local grocery store, dime store and say, hey, do you have some box tops I can use we found that very effective, we put the box tops down and sanded it and leaves on it and cement on top of that and away you go and that way they're not donating high value things they don't need to you don't necessarily need all those high value things for your programs but it's nice if you don't have to buy everything and they're getting involved and they're getting more press for them people are seeing that, hey, these people are really supporting your library these people are really supporting you learning new things you trying to broaden your skills and you being entertained at home without having to go half hour, 45 minutes, hours away who knows to go to a community center they have found that local businesses those people know their stuff if you ask them to put together a class on basic plumbing or you know, home improvement topics or gardening classes they can do it they've been doing this for a very long time and usually they want to share these things it's just like our clubs they are enthusiastic about what they do they are excited about what they do otherwise they wouldn't still be running that store and having them asking them to come in and share that with your patrons and bring in more patrons that maybe want to learn it or maybe want to brush up on it is always great they are some of the best advertisers too they are talking to a lot of people maybe that stop by town that you can get involved in your programs or people that come all the time but hey, I have a lot of farmers they don't necessarily get to the library all the time and they're not necessarily interested in coming in but if I tell them that we are doing programs and hey, I happen to have this big display of plumbing books or home improvement books or how to raise a better chicken books we have all of those and you can come in and get them and maybe you can learn something new it has been very helpful to us just to talk to the local businesses and just put up a poster at the very least in their window or on the door wherever they'll let you do it now becoming a community center we have been libraries are the center of the community there are a lot of different ways that you can become the center of the community but if you want to become an official community center there are a lot of different things that you have to overcome I've been talking to community centers in West Michigan anyway to see what type of programs they have that maybe we can do and where they get their funding and where they get their instructors but I don't see us becoming an official community center a lot of them are 501C3 nonprofit organizations and that's very difficult for us to do we're working on getting our friends group certified like that and unfortunately if we don't get certified as a 501C3 and call ourselves a community center we can miss out on a lot of funding so the pros I mean if you become a community center or if you just want to expand your community offerings you have more diverse you can have more diverse programming you can ask for first aid classes we'll be doing self defense classes and things like that but if we wanted to become an actual community center for our area I would see us doing things like putting together a little league or trying to get a soccer team started or maybe even doing craft markets or language classes or things like that but yeah a lot of that you can do just as a librarian not playing around with the community center title but if you do add the community center title to it you can get additional funding there are grants out there there are a lot of grants out there but that brings you back to doing the 501C3 and having to have the time and the commitment and realistically I know none of us have the extra time I'm aware of this but if you can get a couple volunteers together that want to do it that are willing to spend the extra time that are willing to man the library for these events maybe when you're not open if they're too loud or too obnoxious I'm thinking self defense classes may end up being in our village hall or in the park because we have a giant table but we don't have a lot of space in the library so to give you kind of a couple of ideas you know under cons I have funding for additional events and resources there's funding out there like I have the grants under pros but if you get some of that funding you're going to have to be you're going to have to do additional reporting um let's go over to the funding side when you're looking at the reporting section here if you have an account or bookkeeper that works for you you're going to have to make sure they check with their auditor or they just check into it that you don't have to do an additional single audit in addition to your regular audit which can just be a pain in its additional reports that you need to follow up on it's really really nice to be able to have the funding but if you don't have the time or the amount of money to put into your account or your auditor looking at these things then it's not going to be worth it for you so just make sure that you check on those before you put in for any of these community center grants or these high dollar grants check with your account first I have been talking to ours and I don't go too far over last year we we won $45,000 in grants and large donations which was very exciting I realized it's a low amount for a lot of people but this was the first year that I had really kicked in trying to get funding for our library and we hadn't done that in almost the 50 years that we've been there and it was very exciting but ways that you can get funding that might not trigger an audit or cause you any more trouble you can search on Google there is a blog that's called Library Grants and they are pretty good about putting up national grants that you can go to some of them might be for school library some of them might be for university libraries but the majority of them are for public libraries and that will give you a chance I mean national grants yes you can do it you don't have to be a grant writer to get grants you just have to do what they're asking for make sure you read the grant over the application and you do exactly what they're asking for and put your heart into it they really you know I'm sure they get bored reading the same thing over and over again if you can make your stand out you can do this maybe they have grants I know a couple the county here has a couple grants that I'm looking at putting into look at less common organizations if your area is a big gun supporter I suppose the NRA has grants that we're actually applying for to do 100 safety class and you can talk to your friends and put in for those or we have talked to organizations like build a bear and ask them if they'd be willing to donate bears for our summer reading program or dollar general is amazing with their grants for summer reading programs and for literacy programs but you know asking is probably our best way that we have gotten grants and donations we have a jar we have a jar that sits on our counter sits at the gas stations and I take it down for a couple months and I put it back up with some new thing currently we have posters for our summer reading program saying you know please support us please help us make this happen you can do fundraisers or silent options or even live auctions a library just north of me takes their donated books that they don't put into the collection or that are duplicates and they sell them on ebay you can sell them on amazon you there's a we did a craft fair just south of us at the township hall this past winter our winter bizarre and craft fair and we had our local quilting group put together a couple quilts for us they just kind of showed up with the quilts actually we didn't even ask it was amazing um we did a silent auction for them and raised some funds that way we had another lady who brought in some aprons she had made and we put them in our friends the library book sales or a friends group could make some money that way and this coming year when we work on our craft fair we're hoping to expand it and do a silent auction to raise money both for the library and for our local food bank we have one of the churches that runs a food bank in town and we'd like to split some of the funds with that it's not necessarily all about making funding for the library for us even though like I said my programming budget really is $600 besides donations if I get donations that adds to it which is wonderful um it's about getting community getting our community going making sure our community stays going small towns are having a hard time in Michigan and all over the country and anything we can do to support our small town means a lot to us a lot of these families have been here for 100 years or more they don't want to leave and we don't want to see this town fold okay onto something a little bit more fun so understanding your needs surveys so how many of you people do surveys if you could raise your hand for me either in your library or online or whatever you do so we tend to do informal surveys we like to talk to people informal surveys the written ones the digital ones every so often but we do a lot of talking to people at my library and just my library clerks or librarians whatever you want to whatever title you want to give them they are amazing at talking to anybody who comes in and saying hey what do you think about this program we just did or what do you think about these new books we got in what do you think about that display of posters over there pretty much anything and everything a lot of my new programs which have filled up immediately like fly time have been suggestions from patrons who have come in and when I started about a year and a half ago they were very wary they weren't sure what I was doing here why was I asking why wasn't I just telling them what was going to happen but me telling them what's going to happen isn't going to necessarily make it happen it'll happen at the library but whether they'll bother to attend who knows but if they have input in this and they feel like they own it then they're going to come and they're going to tell their friends hey do you know I suggested this at the library and it's going to happen yeah isn't that cool we're going to have a fly tire yeah we also have the gentleman who does taxidermy I'm definitely not doing that one in the library I think that's another park one but it has been amazing the suggestions that we've gotten we've had a couple jewelry making classes we had the juggler coming in because somebody really wanted them we have we had the west michigan glass art center come in and do a fuse glass class they do at different organizations and that led to me talking to their director and we're putting in for a joint grant to do 95 pieces as part of our secret project for this summer and without having some of these organizations coming in I would have never talked to their director they're in a different county for me level out a different township but we were lucky and we did get involved with them we've had them back several times and I have to admit everybody loves them it's an educational program it's an entertaining program we put out additional books on glass painting and glass crafts and mosaics and all sorts of things and all of a sudden even though my nonfiction collection is kind of dated some of those things a lot of the old patterns and things like that are coming back and people are very very excited that we have some of that and they can look at it and they can grab it and take it off the shelf and run away with it and try it at home it's very very nice okay so we have also looked back on our records I have boxes and boxes and boxes of paperwork so what worked how many people signed up for these things in the past the few programs that they had from the very beginning of the library okay I don't think I'm going to have the nail pounding competition at the library but maybe we'll do the hula hoop contest because lots of people came in for that and catering to your population is really really central to all of this you need to know what they like to do you need to talk to those clubs you need to talk to those organizations and figure out what they like and a lot of that is about creating good survey questions and that way you have it on paper and making sure that they have an opportunity to express what they like what they're interested in the notes section at the bottom of this slide gives you a couple links to SurveyMonkey or howto.gov for basic survey writing or constant context types on effective writing of survey questions which I have found helpful and that way you understand writing survey questions is an entire college degree of its own basically it's amazing how much goes into these so how many people raise their hands that they do surveys at their library it looks like we had a little over 50 for that one that's not bad and like I said they don't all have to be written on paper you know formal if you're talking to people you can do informal surveys it's very helpful okay so now just the general pep talk speech don't give up just get organized and get moving yes people are gonna say no yes hundreds of people are gonna say no yes you're gonna write a million different grant applications I know but you're gonna get some and that's the main important thing make sure you send out those thank you cards put some pictures of the event if you made something at the event make sure you put a little of that in there and people are gonna be more likely to donate to you in the future it's really exciting when you get that first yes okay so if you have any questions or comments feel free to contact me anytime you want and there really aren't any stupid questions I was a teacher for a long time and if you've got a question that means you have curiosity that's exciting I am glad to hear that so contact me anytime with anything really okay so I'm gonna quickly pull up my website here and show you our local interest this is a plinket site by the way and Nebraska I believe is a plinket state isn't it we were briefly we're now running a statewide wordpress install oh I love wordpress wordpress is wonderful so very similar well not very similar but you can do a lot of things and I really encourage you to go to your state library and say hey do you have any of these things but we have plinket here in Michigan which is a free website that we can put together which is much better than the single page I had before that had one link to our catalog and that was it so I put on a local interest page here and we started up a friends group so you can find information about that you can find information about what's going on here I have links to the churches, links to our different groups around here the 4-H and the FFA and the let's see I have Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and a couple other ones assistance organizations very helpful for rural and poverty stricken communities which we have a lot of that going around here and then the local businesses the most important one here which was just added about a month or two ago and it's not real pretty yet I'm working on that one but if you want to find any of these businesses I plan to add a section that tells you what they do and you can find them you can click on their links you can call them up everything all of the phone numbers that are on here I have tried before so they all work it's been very exciting we've had really good reviews from this from everybody community does anybody have any questions in general that I have an answer to yes we do Natalie have some questions here great let's see going back to from the very beginning of your presentation actually someone says that their school librarian thinks that we're stepping on her toes whenever we reach out to the local grade school how do we get her on our side you know I had that problem too and let me go back up here oh I can't show you right now okay so I have tabs that are hidden unless you log in and one of those is librarian chat I'm lucky that I have the high school librarian is on my library board but we have two elementary schools in the area and one of them is farther away and not in my district so I keep reaching out to them through library and chat that I created and we just hey I found this grant for schools hey I found these things for your school kids do you find anything that I might be able to use it has helped a lot that's a good tip yeah um okay someone also has a problem with that they do not have a meeting space and want well just want to know what you but just as you have actually dedicated meeting space in your library I don't I have a giant table I'm not kidding I mean this thing's got to be 20 feet long I don't know where it came from but it was donated at some point in time and I was told I can't get rid of it that's my meeting space but besides that no I have no open space in my library so I really do steal that park and steal that building behind us all the time it works really well it's surprising I'm planning on working with one of our local churches to expand out our winner bizarre because we were full building and I'm this is Michigan I'm not doing that outside yeah the winner in certain areas yes yeah let's see what else do I have here someone has an interesting idea said to connect our community with local businesses we've considered cataloging them instead of just making a list so for example if you search the catalog for gardening you'll get the local garden club alongside gardening books there's a module for that apparently in their ILS that is amazing that would be a great idea we have added less conventional things to our catalog like we have a fly tying tool kit that we're going to have available for people to check out after our class yes and knitting needles and crochet needles and cookie cutters and things like that but to catalog a business that is a really great idea I've never heard of that before someone else has an idea for if you don't have the actual separate meeting room that you can do something while the library is open do things in the evening when officially the library is closed this library does Zumba classes at a library in the evening when they're actually officially closed so maybe doing the programs in the building when you're not having other people come in which is great around that we were looking at having a girls night out on Friday evening because we're closed Friday evening we close at five and seeing if we could get some of the ladies to come out and do a couple things and maybe bring some food if you know I know some libraries don't allow that but we're good with it as long as they're clean and one person said they didn't hear this is very from the very beginning a little after ten what program was it that brought in so many of the local school kids in I call it flowers in February we're trying to coax spring out a little bit early so this is flowers in February two was this year and it went yeah it went from 50 kids the first year with two first grade classes to 100 kids three first grade classes and one kindergarten class this year and I've been warned by the principal that they're going to make us do it again next year we're never going to stop this it's kind of one of those problems you like to have I can handle that I gave them all sign up cards and said hey bring these home to your parents and these flowers yeah it was fun it was great what size is your staff so I want to know how many people you have on staff to do these that is a great question I have two part time ladies and I am also part time we are open 37 hours a week and somehow or another I end up working 7 days a week I'm sure totally unintentional for my library board yeah but I have a good time with it okay that will wrap us up for our questions we're out of time for this session if you do have any others I'm sure you can reach Natalie at her library if you want to know more about different programs