 Good morning and welcome to this edition of Encompass Live. Encompass Live is the Anaraska Library Commission's weekly online event. We cover a variety of library activities and topics. The show is free and open to anyone to watch. These one-hour sessions are held every Wednesday at 10 a.m. Central Time. Normally hosted by Krista Burns, our special projects librarian, but I'm filling in today. They include a mixture of presentations, interviews, book reviews, web tours, mini-training sessions, and pretty much anything presented by either NLC staff or guest speakers. Today we have a guest speaker. Mary Beth Stenger is here with us. She is the director of the Southern Area Public Library in Las Creek, West Virginia, which was recently named Library Journal's Best Small Library in America for 2013. Take it away, Mary Beth. All right. Thank you. I'm very excited to be here. As you can see, there's the library journal cover. That's me on the front in red. What I hope to do today is something I talked about yesterday at a presentation, which is to help us all understand that everything that anything, any library does that gets national recognition or recognition in your community helps bring all of us up in a big way and helps our community see that we're all vital, that libraries are vital to their community. An example I like to give is when that library got on NPR for the SEED library, I was away at a conference at the time. I got so many emails and Facebook posts about could we have a SEED library because they heard that presentation. By the time I got back from the conference, we had a SEED library. I didn't have to think up that program. I didn't have to put a penny of time in it and we now have a SEED library all because that library came up with a creative program. We can all raise each other up. One thing it takes and one thing it took for us to get there was a lot of passion. Not that kind of passion, although that's a good kind of passion. Not this kind of passion either, but I put this slide up because I do want to talk about a kind of passion that you might want to guard against. A lot of small libraries are run by one very dynamic person who has a lot of passionate ideas. And that's great. That's how you become the best small library in your community and in your state and in America. But you have to be careful. When I took over as director on July 1, 2010, that was a height of Twilight. Twilight series is similar to Fifty Shades as in some people are very against it. Usually when I show this slide, I ask how many people have Fifty Shades of Gray in their library and most everybody will raise their hands. But I know there are some libraries that don't have it because the librarians are comfortable with the topic. That was the case with the Twilight series in our library when I took over even though many patrons had requested it. And I want to try to help you guard against that because any patron who comes in and requests a book that you say we won't have in this library, any patron who comes in and says I want to learn knitting, I heard about a great program, I heard about the seed library and you just immediately say, no, that's not something we can do. We don't have a staff facility, whatever. Any patron who comes in and is upset with one of your policies and you don't say, let me take that under review and instead you say, no, we're not changing that, that's our policy. That patron is going to go somewhere else because they're going to get their needs net somewhere. And right now in the library world, we have a lot of competition and we want to make sure that every patron that walks through our door wants to come in again. So you want to bring the right kind of passion and that's what we were lucky enough to have a very passionate community, very passionate trusting board, very passionate staff to get us to where we went. On our road to being the best small library, we started out and are still the smallest library in West Virginia, but we managed to gain national attention. And today I'm going to tell you a little bit about how we did that, how you can do that for your library. Okay, so usually when I'm at West Virginia function and I say, well the smallest library in West Virginia, somebody likes to argue with me because they have a smaller building. But what I'm talking about is we are definitely the smallest funded library in West Virginia. And I bet all of you already know this. If you want to talk about limitations, seeing the smallest funded library is a strong limitation on what we can do. Our tax-based income, the income we can count on year in and year out is approximately $32,000 this year. It's increased a little bit since I started three years ago, but not much. From that we pay payroll for two part-time staffs. We don't have any full-time staff. I only work 20 hours a week. We pay most of our utilities. So in a math wiz is out there with pencil and paper. You know, I'm making a lot less than half of that $32,000 a year. But that means everything else, our books, our programming, our tech updates, anything else we want has to come from outside funding. And to get that, the fundraisers, the grants, the donations, you've got to get your community passionate about your library. That also means, because it comes from fundraisers, grants, donations, that we can't always count on that money. Yes, tax-based funding can get lower, especially in tough economic times, but the fundraising, the donations, they go down as well. But I'll tell you, you can't let a little thing like funding, a small thing like funding bother you when you're trying to become the best library you can be. I'm going to show you where we were in 2010 when I started out. I took over, I got hired in May. I took over in June, well, I started in June, but I spent the entire month in June working on the summer reading program. And I'm going to run through our stats and let you see a little bit about where we were at that point. We had a service population of 467. That has not changed much, and neither has it projected to change much in the next really 25 years. But some of these other numbers will pop out to you, this is where we were, and I want to look at them because the next slide is going to tell you where we went to in two or three years. But anyway, give me some background. When I was hired in May 20th, Ward was very concerned about the upcoming summer reading program. That's something that all board members know the library should have, and they weren't happy because nothing was playing for. I have a little bit of background. I'm a homeschool mom, and my kids, of course, have gone to library programs over the years, so I knew a little bit about summer reading, but the old director handed me the big packet of the summer reading collaborative, the great big binder, hadn't even been open yet, and said, here you go. So I had to spend the whole month of June reading that. I had to play in the program because the funding that hadn't been done yet advertised the program. Then I spent one day at a bigger library learning how to get us on circulation. And I'm telling you all this to let you know where we are. So you can see, hopefully all of you are in a better place now, so you can certainly be in an even better place in two or three years. But at the time we were, we are in a consortium with about 40 other libraries that do circulation together. We have our books in the same system, cards in the same system, and we were the last library to start circulating on that. The patrons had their cards in the system, but after the initial card was put in, no one was updating them and they weren't being checked out on the system. So I had to go in and learn training because July 1, the board wanted us to get on this system. I'm not just over this directly. The woman at this larger library that trained me spent about 15 minutes going over how to make new patron cards and realized that while I'm a CPA, I had no library training whatsoever. I've never had, never even volunteered in a library before behind the surf desk. I've done some other things. So she gave me this very brief training on how to make patron cards. That was it for the whole year after I took over. Every time someone walked in and said they wanted a patron card, my heart dropped to my toes because, you know, you've got to get all those comments right. It's kind of nerve-wracking. Anyway, on July 30th, the board had a going away party for the retiring director. She handed me the keys to the PO box. Where we got our mail. I didn't realize till the next day that I didn't even know which box that would be. I had to dig out some mail and figure out even what our address was. And that was about the extent of my training for this library. At the same time, there was no budget. There were no financial statements prepared. There was an audit being done. But all the receipts were put in the POC bags and we took that year forth the receipts and tried to match them at the end of the year to checks. It was kind of a nightmare. And while this is October and it's a good time for story stories, I'm not going to go through the whole story. I just want you to see where we were. So you know, you can compare to where you are. I want you to especially look at the number of registered borrowers in 1882. We had certain national materials at about 5,000 with a set. And it doesn't say here, but there were about 12,000 pieces of materials to borrow in the system. That is about the only number that went down. It went down to 11,000 over the three years I was there because there was so much mold in the library. There were books in the elementary section so tight together that a child could not pull out a book to see, you know, a kid wants to see the front of a book before they're going to choose it. You couldn't get the books out. In the adult fiction section, any new books, especially in the inspiration section, which was something that that particular director really loved. So there were a lot of new books in that section. The new books were being put in front of the stack because there was no room to put them inside the stack. So there were just too many, too much material. Just taking out the weave alone though got rid of about a, I mean for a mold alone, got rid of about a thousand pieces of material, which was a shame. But at least it got us down to where the patrons could look through the books in a more comfortable level. Library visits at that time, when I took over, were about 3,000 a year. And then I think the number that really put us over at the top in this particular award was when I took over there were 28 programs needed before attendance of 299, which it's a nice attendance. That's about 10 people on average per program. The 28 programs is not very many programs, especially when you consider, most of that it was probably the previous year summer reading. There was a genealogy group that completely met on its own, that did use the library and I think she was telling that. And a book discussion group that when I said I did volunteer a little bit, that's what I did. I read the book discussion group once a month. So we usually got six main people that came to that a month. So that accounted for most of the programs and probably all the programs. There was no Facebook page when I took over my Twitter account, my Pinterest account. The web page was just a minimal information. There was no even for sure handouts of people when they came and joined the library or wanted to learn more about it. So that's where we were. You should get your statistics together and try to figure out where you are and I'm hoping you can better than that. I hope you're in a better condition so that when you start working on becoming the best in the library and community, your numbers are going to pop even better than that. And this is what the committee saw. This is what we did in two years. I've been there three years now, in the two years that the award coverage. Just to kick your award, just look at what you've done over the last couple of years. A lot of people think you have to go to grade. That's not necessarily. So you can go from a program that you built up, say, Flag of the Bethlehem. It went from no collaborations to a lot of great collaborations. You don't have to start the bottom like we did. But anyway, we did and we changed. Our registered borrowers, as you can see, went up about a hundred a year. We're still getting about 75 new borrowers at least a year. That, to me, is significant because, as I said, we're in a consortium for our patron cards. So that means any other library when there's over 40 that has already given some hard, when that person, when that someone walks into our library, we don't get to give them a new card. There's another library in our county that they're not in the consortium. So if our patron walks in their library, they get to count them as their patrons. This is just great new people who've never had a library card walking into my library. And honestly, an article can only be at $196. I don't know how we're averaging 75 to 100 new people every year, but we are. And it's exciting. I hope you keep doing that. So I talked about getting down the materials. One of the most significant changes you see there when we're from 3,000, approximately 3,000, library visits, to almost 8,000. I really wanted to break 8,000 this year. We still stayed around 7,900. One of my just fun things I'd like to do is to say it's called Break 100 and try to get 100 people in the library in one day. We got almost that many people last year will be celebrated at our award. So I'd really like to see us get or no, I think it was the day we could picture for our award. But anyway, I'd really like to see us break 100 one day. That lets you know how small we are. We've never broke 100 in one day. That might get us over that 8,000 library visits. But we significantly increased our library visits. But the number that really popped out for people, that everyone talked about, that saw these two figures, these two sets of data, is, of course, the program. We increased the program by, I think, 888% or something like that. And I don't have it written down here, unfortunately, but you can see we weren't doing 28 programs to 227 programs. And that, at the time, we have two staff now. At the time, it was pretty much just me. I did have an assistant that she became after school. So it's tough. We weren't as busy when I first took over. So I often read programs on my computer instruction class while working in the service. So those things are possible. It's hard. Now that we're so busy, it's not something I can do. But as you get busier, you get more people excited. We now have a guy that wants to teach our computer class. So he comes and he teaches it. And I don't have to. In fact, he's so enthusiastic. We call him our tech guy. He pretty much fixes our computers for us even in the state. We'll come in and do that. He does a lot of little stuff. So we don't have to wait for the state. And he's gotten the reputation in the community. People will bring their computers and call him to come over to their house to fix them. And bless him. He does it for free. So a lot of times. So we did and tried any and every program I could think of. Our program attendance obviously went way up with a number of programs. We got Facebook page. We got Pinterest account. I updated the website when I first took over. And I updated it again this year. When I say I updated it this summer, actually it was a collaborative effort. And that's something that I think is the new exciting area in libraries. And I hope if nothing else that you take away from this presentation is that you go out there and try to figure out some collaborations. For my website, I was at a state conference last year. And I went to lunch with a young lady, Kathy Flaverger. She is at the big library in our county. And she has read on the website a fantastic job. And I was congratulating her on that. And while I was congratulating her, I said, is there any way you could maybe do our website? I said, you could probably do it in half the time. I could do it. But it would take me a lot of time. I'd have to brush up on my HTML all over again. Is there any way you can go to do it? And they do have what's called a service affiliate agreement, which is something you need to think to us in your bigger library. She tried to help small libraries that have directors that don't have any last degrees. So she's getting paid through the state to help us out a little bit. And she said, yes, she put a great website together. But it was through that partnership that we were able to get a better website that I could have put together and saved my time that I would have this been putting that together. So big collaboration because let's face it, if you're a small library and I assume if you're listening to this, you are probably a small library, we have limitations. We certainly have the funding limitations, but we also have some others. That's what this next slide is going to show you. This is one of our limitations. That's our building. Last couple weeks ago, now I was at our community annual fall festival. We have a book sale during that time. We have our annual book sale. We don't make a lot of money at it. Probably by the time I pay the staff person to be there, we might lose a little bit of money. But it gives us a chance to get out in the community, talk about our programming, just show that we're part of our community. It gives us a chance to get rid of all those books that people want to donate to us over the years, the year, the year, we don't have anything to do with it. So anyway, I was sitting there on the night and we all wanted to talk about the library. And she said, she's a former magistrate in our town. We don't have magistrates in our town. We can't see it at that time. We did. Back when she was younger, she said she allowed her chambers, her magistrate chambers, to be used for the first library. They had to have some place called their own space to get a grant. So they called for changels, the library, and they got a grant. And the Southern Air Library would use our spaces and left over buildings ever since then. I think the next building was this odd-celled building. In the room in the community building, both sites, I believe, were flooded out with pretty much all that was ruined. I remember getting one-time $50,000 worth of damage to the library contents for one of those floods. Then in 1985, the local bank, which is unusual between our sites. We were lucky we had a bank that's been there. Since 1910, this building was built in 1910. But the local bank decided to build a new building, and they gave the old building to the library. Got us out of the flood zone pretty much. Luckily, we should have any more flood damage. So we got this old building. Beautiful building. Of course, it was built in 1910. The former director and his family and friends did a wonderful job getting grants. Caught the bricks, re-brick, to short off the building, which was wonderful. The windows and the doors, we got a grant in the first trip over to get all those. We had a lot of energy leakage. For the longest time, the old bank, great big marvel, Teller Station was still in there. People had to walk sideways through the stacks if you were carrying the child, because the stacks were so tight together. All that's fixed. It's beautiful when you walk in there now. All through grants. But we still have our government invitations. Our children's programs are done upstairs in the hallway. It's a wide hallway. I'll give you that. But it's still a hallway. We recently got a handle. The chief can't run to try to give it a little bit of pop. We have art here and there. There's a lot of work to be done. We put our tools on board so we can display the children's artwork. We have room in the walls. We created one of our students. We did one of her children. He's pretty good. He can do it. He's going to do the kitchen area. There's some great comfortable chairs up there. People can change our Wi-Fi access up there. There's dinner, laptop. One of our future friends were hoping to see him. There's a board room up there. Got a lot of genealogy stuff in there. Which is huge but not. Because we can move by lights. I'd like to put a team game area up there. But of course we've got a team on this place. I have a patient down there. There was no director's office until I took over. There was a room that they were using for tutoring children. I prefer the kids to be tutored out there in the hallway. It may be something that's safer for our tutors. It just doesn't be out there. It's sort of an enclosed space for the students. So I changed that into a director's office. There's a CPA and a lot more comfortable going up there and doing a lot of financials. In the practice of an office, instead of having a state-of-the-art knowledge and a service, I had to do the first year. But last year, I had to tell our tutors to take over our calendar. Given our space, given our limited staff, we had as many programs as we could possibly handle. And that's where it was that collaboration. That's yesterday's limitation. Yes, this next slide. I'm going to show you another limitation. It's not me and Wilma. That's my assistant on the right. My very great assistant, Wilma Bennett. We're not the limitation, but the number is limitation. Having only two staff members, having a small building, obviously limits us. So the next thing we're going to do, and we're going to share that, even though that has nothing to do with the point of the award, but we're going to get outside the building as much as we can. And one thing we're really pushing for this year, we have an elementary school in our community. It's just, you can actually walk to it if you want to. We're trying to do a lot more with them. We're going to take some of our programs. First of all, kids are really busy. It's hard to get them into your library because they have a lot of things to do. So we're going to go to the kids' room. We'll almost go over there. We have three movie tickets to the teachers to give to the kids first incentives in their classroom and then they can come and watch a movie at our library. So we went last year. We had the same movies. We didn't have to have a ticket. Anyone could come. We couldn't get anybody to come this year. We had the incentive tickets. We're at the school and we're averaging about a dozen kids every month. So it makes a difference, these collaborative efforts from the individuals. Certainly a two-person staff can be a limitation, but if you're bringing that passion, and one of our passions both in our life is to bring a sense of friendliness to our library. I can't tell you the number of people that come into our library that they like because we're nice. In fact, I was asked as I gave a talk on Geek the Library, which if you're not doing Geek the Library, I can give you a little two-minute spiel on that too. It's a great program. But I was doing a talk on that, and somebody came up and said that their friend, who lived in a whole other county, comes to our library because we're nice. We have that all the time from all kinds of other libraries. And folks, being nice is free. Being nice, it doesn't matter how big the building is, it doesn't matter how many staff members. We try to say hi to everybody that comes in and we're trying never to say no. We try to get people a break. We don't have time to overdo it because we do have a small community. Sometimes people don't even have the transportation to get the book back. They're doing the best they can, so we don't charge for that. But they use a book or damage a book and we try to work with that. It's not necessarily charging you a replacement value or a support value. Your staff can feel invocation if you don't have enough staff and need help, but it can also be the best asset. In a certain form, our staff is limited. Okay, this is some of the programming we had on the run-through. At first, I always like to ask everybody, and I hope you put in the chat box, or if she unmoves the button for you, tell me some kind of unique programming that you have at your library. And I like to ask this question for two reasons. I want us all to know that we are, we're all doing our best to have the best small libraries. But I also like to steal all your programming, great programming ideas if I can get them. So if anybody wants to type in a programming idea, I'd love to hear it. That's an excellent idea to steal your people's ideas. We've all got some good ideas here. Let's see, we have one person right at the end, they have a Newton Linux user group, a ham radio group, and an Arduino group. Ham radio, that's really interesting. Yeah, that sounds cool. Let's see, someone says they have a summer book van program. We deliver books to individual homes. That sounds exciting. Yeah. Anybody else? I have a friend in Utah that runs the library, Garland Public Library, and I was just looking at some of the things she does, and she puts books out in their different businesses, books they don't need anymore, with a little bookmark that says, free book courtesy of Garland Public Library. Oh, that's a great idea. It's not a great idea. Yeah, we all get so many books donated that are in great condition, but you already have a copy in the library and just don't need it for something. So that's a great thing to do. Anyone who didn't speak up, I want to say that part of being the best small library is self-noted. And some people think that's a dirty word, or networking is a dirty word, but it's not because you're not just helping yourself when you say, hey, I have this great program, you're helping other libraries too. You're showing the community and the person, the community. They're starting to think positive about libraries. They think libraries are the place to go to get community. And because of that, then they see a value in libraries and they're helping find all of us. So don't be afraid to let everyone know what's great about the library. I sat through, I gave this talk before, and at that time I could point everybody out and made everybody tell me a program. I'd do that to all you guys. And one person when I got to them, shook their head, no, they didn't have a program. Later on in the speech, it happened to come out that they had a labor robotics team at the library. Well folks, that's not a fun program. I don't know what it is. So obviously they had a fun program, but they were embarrassed to promote themselves. Don't do that. That's part of your job marketing, which is where the geek comes in if you're uncomfortable with marketing. It's a great program, and I know that their moment is almost up. So it's going to be first time, first serve, and there's not a whole lot less. Take advantage of that if you can. One of our unique programs, and one of the ones, if you went back to our cover and you saw it, said Little Library with a big heart. At the same time that I was trying to give this award, we were launching our big part campaign. And that's something that's pretty unique to us, but also once I started it, something I saw other libraries picking up. And it's exciting for me because this is part of my passion. I really like helping the Q&B. I like to help the underserved, and that's what this does. How the big part campaign works, a lot of people usually want me to explain it because it's a little hard to understand until I go through the examples. Every month, the library picks a different charitable organization, a charitable activity to sponsor. The library didn't spend any money. We didn't have time, we might decorate a box to put the collections in. Usually we ask the charity to come over and pick it up themselves so that, hey, they can see the library and be, we don't have to spend some time going over there and doing it. What some of the things we've done, this is October, we do a trick or treat for UNICEF, so we have a little box and if anybody can come to the box, they can collect money from UNICEF. We don't get a lot, but it helps our kids learn about troubles in the world and it helps them feel like they're making a difference in their charitable career. In November, we started October, November last year, so we've run through one fiscal year. Some of the ones were changing, one of the ones were changing. Well, let me backtrack to September because that's the beginning, what I consider the beginning of our year. So in September, what we did was we collected school supplies for the local elementary school. We donated it to the school. We let the teachers decide if they want to keep it in the classroom or if they want to donate it to our child. They know that child doesn't have any consensus on whether they can send it or possibly send it. So that's the way to start this collaboration with our elementary and we're kind of coming with two boards of friends. We're doing this collaborative programs there and we're also showing that we're doing these things. And of course, it's our patrons doing these things. So it's drawing people in, getting excited about the library. In October, like I said, we did UNICEF in November this year. Our fiber arts addicts club has been wanting to knit things for someone. So what we're doing is knitting scarves, tass, gloves, and we're going to donate it to that same elementary school. They're not dressed for the weather. We have to go home without catapult clothing and we've got to wait for the bus. This way they can put some hats and gloves that are homemade and they're not just something, somebody that's called something special that they can keep and really knit up that child. Those are the kind of things that I'm passionate about and that we're going to bring up to the library. December we do the Maine Society. It's a thing for most people and it's a whole community excited. We have what's called birthday in a box. There's a mission, a homeless shelter in our county that's not in our city. We don't limit our charitable things to our city. And what we do is patrons bring in all kinds of birthday things. We might do it for a child's birthday. Stream those balloons. We also work with the mission and they're going to, because they're allowing the parents to make that child's paper in their missions. We bring in the little trinkets you know that you give out in birthday parties. All those things got dumped in the box. This is the one where my staff remember and I did donate some time. We got shoeboxes also donated by patrons. We wrapped those in really colorful wrapping paper, wrapping paper also donated by the patrons. And we made a birthday in each box and then we took those to the mission where they came and picked them up and when a child is living, a homeless child is living in the house, a shelter, whatever their birthday, the mission staff can take that box and give that child a person's party and they can't stay at home. That really resonated with a lot of people throughout the community and also honestly throughout the nation to bring this program we have in January. February we did love letters, there's a website about that that we wrote with and did that. In March we did a similar thing to the party in the box for the domestic violence shelter but it's not a birthday party. We send up care boxes to the women with the shampoo and toothbrushes and piles of work. Something that those women can have when there is a domestic violence shelter. It's not a birthday away but it's something we want to do to help those women. In April if that's child abuse awareness month we donate a lot of live animals. Not live animals, stuffed animals, randomly stuffed animals to the Augustin group that has forensic interviews with these children so that during the interviews they do have this stuffed animal that is us. And that got a really nice turn out with our patrons. In May it was a forest. We wanted someone to collaborate with them. They had the heart they wanted to build fires for every woman in their circumstances and they donated a lot of their time and money that they couldn't donate the whole amount of the fire there was just too much for that little force to do so we collected money and we thought we would actually pay and throughout the summer months just to give our staff a break. And we had a break. We had just one fundraiser and also to draw the idea that the summer summer reading, summer program we would talk together we would call it change for change and we collect change and patrons can have a little bit of fun guessing how much change is going to be at the end of the summer. Whoever guesses the closest they get to donate that change with the only caveat being I have to okay it because I don't want the charity of their choice to be themselves. But other than that, and this year is our first year to do that it actually ended up being a win-win for us because the person who won their charity a choice with the library so we actually got that money. Anyway that's some of our programming that the community already saw this is some of our funding now I didn't send that particular slide or that pie chart to the end with my narrative but it gives you an idea of where small libraries coming from 82% of ours is tax based but it's not a lot of money so I guess like 32,000 what I would like to see is that percentage decrease obviously I don't want to see the 32,000 decrease but I would like to see only half of our money coming from that tax base and half of it coming from donations and fundraisers grants, etc. So that's kind of the goal we have is to decrease the percentage of funding in this tax base because it's so fixed I mean if you're lucky it's fixed and I'm lucky it's going down but it's hardly ever going up but you can get your donations and grants and that kind of thing and I think that's part of what the community is interested in was our fundraisers I'm just going to put all the programs together a couple of unique ones I already talked about book sale the flyer sale is not unique that was something that friends really wanted to do so I'm just looking forward to that the doctor book is something that the president of reference group came up with it works similar to Adopt an Angel, a Christmas tree book book titles on a tree and people come and doctor on that book of course and it's the only way we pay for our job non-fishing budget is less than $4,000 every year that's for every piece of material we buy and we simply don't have money for about non-fishing we don't get enough turnover to use that $4,000 on without non-fishing so we couldn't get any books except for those that were donated and us we had this fund raising last year we had about $400 for the books we asked for we got all $400 books just to put this out and on the other side I'd like to see I'm hoping we'll get every book the trustee Tim Tim is something we really did this year but it was put in the narrative but we're going to do that it didn't work as well it's been helped so we're going to have to see this which is something we have to think about whenever you're doing anything it's very easy and I can see this after I've been here for years it's how we do it it's not working but you have to re-evaluate even if you're on a big numbers course and you kind of have a feel for whether it's going to be successful we look at it we're not going to dump the trustee Tim Tim at this point but we are going to do it and what it was originally it's something I got out of the book we get 10 people to donate money to donate $10 and we were really hoping to get 20 people to get from people we raised about $2,000 we didn't do that, we raised about $500 which is still a nice chunk but it's not what we were hoping for a lot of the trustee and the friends groups that did the tickets were not comfortable asking people to buy a ticket when they weren't getting anything we really wanted a raffle prize so this year we're going to come see if we can get a tablet or something and we're going to say that you're buying a ticket to get a chance to do this tablet it's not quite the spirit of the fundraiser that was in the book but you have to go with what works in the community and you think that this might work for the better if we have a prize for people not so much to get the people to donate it to because they seem happy to don't know who ever was asked but to get the people who were selling the tickets they weren't comfortable selling them and that's really one of the things a taste of soup is something that I actually stole a program idea and you can also steal fundraising ideas I stole a taste of soup from someone at the conference at the Association for the World's Small Library if you're not a member I highly recommend it it's based on how much you make so I only pay $8 a year to be a member of how much I donate but that's okay but somebody I set in at this Arsenal conference they have all these great workshops on what works for small libraries and they have this thing called signature events I was trying to push a signature event with my friends group they were too small they wanted to do flower sales things like that and I came back from this Arsenal conference with this great idea but as I say I totally lifted from someone else that this year's Arsenal conference when I gave the same talk she came up and said hey I'm the person you stole that from I did, I did that but anyway it's a fundraiser we had it in January and we made $1,500 we were sold out we couldn't have had another person sit down at the table and it simply wasn't ruined it was crazy how popular it was and in fact people who didn't come came up to us and said we're going to have another one because I want to do it so we are also speaking there were people that said they wanted to make soups so we're going to open up that and if you're curious about exactly what case the soup is and they just pop the question in there and I'll go into it in more detail so you can steal the idea too but the point is some offices successful fundraisers that work in the community and try to get that money up a little bit because you can't just rely on tax dollars first of all they're decreasing that's another very sad third of all by having something out of case to soup it gives the whole library excited about the community when we had this case to soup we invited obviously our funding partners to the council a program going to them about funding that we had a city councilman come up to us and say he has a band and he's going to fundraisers of course have a band concert and everybody that comes and all the money he raises is in the library that would have never happened if we went out there talking to the community if we went out there having this community fundraiser so these things multiply okay why did we win one of the judges was also the guy that heard the article John Barry and he gave it a little insight into what some of the judges were talking about the things that are most excited about the use of technology we did I do embrace new things we were the first library in this community the library which I've mentioned several times if you haven't heard about it feel free to send me an email and I would be happy to talk to you about the library for anyone but because we are embracing these new things and you have to be seen as a vital changing exciting part of the community if you always do what you've always done you always do what you're always for or something to that effect is to say and you don't want to be seen with that libraries already have that stodgy image I think we're overthrowing quite well actually but it's still there at the presentation I was at yesterday the speaker before me said something about we were doing this fundraiser at some library and somebody wanted everyone to go shh as a joke because you have to be client libraries and the library was full of like oh that's all all those are anymore so you want to be seen as vital and important to your community anyway so we try to adopt a lot of new things I do want to say something I think most of us realize that just being a book lender isn't libraries anymore but I think we're also a little bit off of the new track thinking that being a place where people can get the internet is going to save us because I've seen just in my library when I first started doing it people became king everyday I set on my computers to get on the internet they now have internet in their phones and I don't know about you but I carry my computer in my pocket it's called my iPhone I don't need to go to the library to get on the internet so we can't stop we can't say well now that's all the problem people who use this for wifi cafe internet cafe no you have to keep re-inventing yourself you have to keep looking for new programming you have to keep your community support and get out in the community to find out what they need and what they want why I think the one honestly is what I started which is the impassion all these other things are important but not just my passion but if you have a great passion for the library and this is just a little life tip and then I'm going to quit talking really quick so people can ask questions but if you're not passionate about your job you can find another life short course and you shouldn't be excited going to your job every day that you go in if you can life short our jobs are important so we should be having a lot of fun doing it so I think our passion is what we want but certainly our commitment our community's commitment the community's support and our willingness to try new things all that is my passion my assistant's passionate woman she's incredible I can't say that enough I'm on her days off I have a special room to just wish her out of the building in the end of the day that's not true but it's about like that she loves our library okay we have a lot of things up next I'm not going to go through all that because I really would like to get to questions but I just want to say collaboration that's what's up next for us should be up next for you I think that's where everything's going I believe other things in the community the less we have to invent the less staff we have to use up the less resources the less community we have to use up for those of you who do want to try this in the festival I believe here is the link it can be hard to find in there and here's what we're going to do it's actually to do it's still in November so you might want to work wait and work the next year I've heard about it a year before I'm not really that hard someone came up to me at the last art school conference and I said oh it's a lot of work and I thought they meant acting when that's when a lot of work is I'm pretty exhausted from that but this stuff before they understand that we're small libraries they don't expect it to be someone polished you know wow they just want to hear the wow stuff we do in the community okay I think that's it for me I want to turn it back to questions great thank you we did have a couple of questions come in one person asked when you were talking about stealing programming ideas one person asked we have had issues in the past attracting our local homeschool groups would you happen to have any recommendations for attracting and keeping homeschool groups is that something you've explored it has it is actually in fact when I took over I actually homeschool I used to be state homeschooling president so that is near and dear to my heart I homeschooled all three of my sons and I am still while working homeschooling my 10 year old girl so I'm still part of that I'm not as big a part of the community because I don't have time honestly I couldn't possibly be state homeschooling president and work through it must be crazy but when I took over that's one of the things I told the trustee actually even in my interview that I wanted us to be the homeschooling library because quite honestly as a homeschooler as somebody who wasn't you know in library work at all I could tell you homeschoolers felt unwell from the libraries we reached out to libraries several times to try to get them to do programming for us we had obviously we had older than preschool kids and we tried to do something with one of our local libraries and what they ended up saying to us was a preschool program and we had kids 10 and 11 who were board staff so I knew that there was a need out there and there is a need out there the best thing to do is probably find a couple movers and shakers in your homeschool community and try to see what they need what organizations they're in if you don't know or you don't know any of the local homeschoolers there are state organizations which you could certainly find a website for you can get in their newsletter believe me homeschool newsletters or always look at all I used to freelance for the local newspaper and everything everybody is looking for copy put in your library program and send it to our state homeschooling group there are lots of ways to reach out to them let them know that you want to be the host for a library in your area and they'll come great that sounds encouraging our other question that came in was working the opposite direction on stealing ideas they would like to take you up on your offer to share more information about taste of soup since it sounds like it was a great success for you it was and it was a great success for the person I stole from too so it's worked at least twice what that is is the first year we had just the friends and the trustees do it but each person makes about two gallons for the soup and then you come we're ten tables for the soup people buy a ticket so you know ahead of time how much how many people are coming so the tickets ahead of time they come and they get just a little like cup of soup to try each soup so you've sold your tickets then beside each soup you have a jar where they vote on their favorite soup so you get a little bit more money that way I didn't think we'd get much money that way but it was just funny because the women that cooked soup their husbands wanted them to win to make them feel good about their cooking so they would put $25 checks in there so we actually raised a lot of money with the voting for your favorite soup we also added a little different mix this idea we did not steal we came up with ourselves we invited local authors one of our friends members came up with this idea and that gets you know the chance for the local this is another collaborative thing we're helping the local authors they get to come in, they get to pedal their books talk to people about the books we don't charge them for their table that's not a way we're making money they in turn donated a copy of their books to the library plus it makes we kind of had free entertainment at our event because people could go around and talk to these authors besides having the trustees and friends make the soup we've got Bob Evans to donate some soup and we've got Panera Bread if you have a Panera Bread in your area they will actually at the end of the night any bread that they have any bread products they will donate to local organizations so we went Saturday night our thing was on Sunday Saturday night we went and got they put it in garbage bags which is pretty gross but we got two or three garbage bags full of bread products and they were very popular at the event and they're only a day old and it is for free so that's something else you can do with it something we're going to do this year is there were a lot of community members that said they would like to make some soup so we're going to have a little contest they can win like a $25 gift certificate or something if their soup is picked it's the winner something the other group that did taste the soup they did the winning soup got to present the same soup the next year that almost seems like a losing thing because it's really a lot of work to make two gallons of soup so I'm not sure that's money or anything but I guess they were excited but anyway that's what it is and it doesn't really take any money or time from the library we were lucky that there's a community building that because the city council is our funding agent they've agreed to is that we can use their building at least two times a year we can use it for summer reading in case of soup but honestly I think they've made issues of work we needed it so we get the building free so it doesn't cost us a penny the great thing besides the fact that it raised $1,500 which was wonderful obviously the great thing was how it brought the community together and made the community feel like they were supporting their library how many people came up after and said folks are all out they realized we needed them and they wanted to be their force and it's really made a difference in their minds great thank you we have a couple of follow up questions on that coming in one of them you just answered they asked if it was hosted at the library and that was great that you had space to use the community building someone else wants to know how much did you charge for the tickets to this event okay that was a point of contention with the friends so the person that I took it from I think they charged 10 or 12 I can't remember the friends did not think first of all the president of the prince group thought the whole thing was crazy nobody said nobody likes soups she said nobody likes soup and nobody's going to want to come taste just a little bit of it so she was not too crazy about the whole idea but she won for best soup I think she'll be more enthusiastic next year so we only charged $8 a ticket I believe somebody else wrote up the tickets not me so I can't even go off the top of my head that well but I think it was $8 a ticket one thing that helped us get to that $1500 was not just the fact that we sold those tickets but because the community was all there and we're talking about funding and we're talking about library support some people actually like I said some people voted on their wife's things by getting $25 checks we donated some one road check for I think $150 just to donate to the library while we were there and this person is certainly aware of the library but I don't think he would have popped in to give us a $150 check he did it because we were there and having this event so it helps in a lot of different ways absolutely that's very important one more detail people are curious about what day of the week and time did you have the taste of soup event we have a little church right behind us where actually our patrons park and a lot of our friends actually go to that church they felt it would be an advantage to us to have it on Sunday right after church let out well actually church was out at noon they wanted to have it I think at one o'clock or 1230 or something but this year we're going to have it immediately after church because that's when people came people ready to eat the minute church let out so now we're starting immediately after church but we did have it on Sundays a little noon we had it for two hours with our feelings and see this is why you never know where you're going to get we thought people would struggle in throughout the two hours no everybody came at noon that was tough so everybody had to fit in this space at once nobody struggled in I might the people I sell tickets to I might tell them come late next time you never know what you're going to get so you do it but that's why it's great to have the same thing here after you can keep improving on it absolutely that's great well on a different subject we have one last question that has come in and anybody else who has questions please feel free to go ahead and submit them while we're talking about this one this question says we have a hard time attracting people to come to our program we have newspaper on our Facebook and hang flyers at community locations we have people say they are interested but then have very few people or even no one come in any advice on how you will lure people to come in for your programs I just want to tell you we're all there every time I bring this up or any time I'm with lunch librarians we have that same problem and in fact I've had programs that other people said they wanted and I'll go to all the trouble to put them together and even that person to come so that's one reason we're doing starting this collaborative stuff we're taking our children's program to the grade school if I go into the second grade I've got 25 kids who can't get out of their best they're stuck they're stuck in my program and because I come here and they get to meet the librarian then they're going to feel more comfortable maybe coming down and getting the books or something like that and we also are going to try to take it some of our craft programming for adults out to the CEOS and that kind of thing which if you don't know that's just women's group that something West Virginia has but take some of our programming out to other groups they're always looking for programming ideas we can provide some of that programming and go to them instead of trying to get the people in there I think especially when you're a small library our library hours are limited we close at 6 o'clock programming that people want to come to the library for so we're going to try to go to them I did mention in case you missed it sometimes just tweaking your program for example that movie Afternoons that we were having for kids when we just advertised it in those ways that this person mentioned Facebook Flyers etc we honestly it was my daughter and my staff's daughter that came to the movie slash year and that was it we just couldn't get anybody we decided that I was going to quit having a movie license I was ready to quit having it this year and because it cost us $160 a year and I decided one more time I'm going to try one more thing and we started giving these incentive tickets to the teachers to give out they can they get to pick they want to give it to the best student the most improved student the student that needs the most encouragement we don't care who they give it to they can give it to whoever they want I was sitting in the library doing something and I saw my assistant when we get up she told these two kids it was almost closing time she said you've been so good today here are two tickets to our movie so that they felt like they had won something by having good behavior but really anybody can come it's just like last year because they think it's an award we're not averaging I'm not exaggerating 12 a movie and all we did was we make you have a ticket now so you don't know keep tweaking and keep looking out there and finding out what other people are doing but I think this is the problem that everybody's having because people are so busy I know with my own daughters we have soccer almost every night I wouldn't have time to get into library programs if I wasn't already in the library so it's tough it is great that's a good point and actually we have a comment coming in along those lines of tweaking things someone in our audience says that their attendance at their basic technology programs went down so they moved to one-on-one tech question time from three to five open for anybody to just come in and ask any questions so the jury is still out but it may have helped yes that is a fabulous idea we did a similar thing when you see that 227 programs I had resume creation program we'd get one person trick away and if we were lucky so I changed it on Mondays when I'm doing the surf desk and I try not to do any of my director I want to try to be at the surf desk and meeting people and finding out what's going on downstairs I have from one to two one-on-one resume job help that kind of thing and every Monday I've had somebody come in they didn't want to come to class they didn't want to be in maybe with a lot of other people or they didn't want to come at a certain time but they come in Monday and Monday happens to be a really good time because they've had the Sunday paper they saw one ads and now they want to fight for that job so we've had a lot more where we're helping people yes this might not come in our stats our state doesn't let us count one-on-one programs but I don't care because what I'm trying to do in my library and I know you're trying to do is help your community and I think that one-on-one tech stuff that one-on-one job resume job help one-on-one thing we do is college applications college essay I think that's what people want and I think you're right about that it makes a difference great well we don't currently have any more questions that came in I'm going to go ahead and take back control of the screen if anybody has any more questions feel free to go ahead and type them in while I am doing that okay we should be back I don't see any other questions coming in definitely contact Mary Beth if you have any questions after the fact she seems more than willing to share yes anybody can email me at any time I'm happy to talk about that great well thank you so much for presenting it was wonderful to hear about your success congratulations on your award for those of you in the audience as I said in Compass Live we do this every week so here is a look at our upcoming programs we'd love it if you would come back and join us for another one and thank you very much for attending