WebJunction

You've developed and expanded your story.

You've looked at what your library does particularly well. You've brought in others to offer fresh views. You've looked at the place itself, and you've gone to your patrons, your community, to see how the library improves their stories.

You've thought about various aspects of that story:

• What's most important? How does that relate to your mission statement?
• What's your "elevator pitch"—a key message that takes no more than 30 to 60 seconds to tell (figure 75 to 150 words)?
• What about a set of longer stories—ones that would work as ad campaigns or newspaper columns?
• Is there a single overarching story worth telling in long form?

Now you need to tell that story (or those stories). If you're not afraid of the term, you need to market your library.

I'm not the one to tell you how to tell your story. Fortunately, WebJunction includes excellent resources along those lines—and there are blogs to consider as well.

Iowa's Tool Kit

The State Library of Iowa (a WebJunction partner) offers Telling the Library Story Tool Kit. It's a fine place to start. Here’s the quick description:

The Telling the Library Story Tool Kit was jointly developed by the Iowa Library Service Areas and the State Library of Iowa to assist Iowa libraries in explaining and demonstrating the value of their services in order to increase use of and support for libraries. Whether you need a bookmark, a template for creating an annual report, or suggestions for talking with with policy makers, this site has what you need...and more!

The site includes pages on plot (what's the story?), audience (who are you telling the story to?), characters (the people in the story), technique, script and props.

Annette Wetteland has done a fine job on this site. It’s mostly collections of links to other resources—some of those resources prepared by Iowa, some not. There's a bit of recursion on the Plot page (which quotes from and circles back to the first in this series), but that's not why I recommend this toolkit. Most of the site was developed before this series and the recursion wasn't there when I first recognized the quality of the site. The link to library statistics is, of course, Iowa-specific, but most of the site will work for any library.

WebJunction’s Marketing Tab

This series appears under the Marketing subhead in WebJunction's Resources menu (under the Library Management link)—and there's a lot of other good information under that tab. A few examples:

• Jill Stover's What's Marketing Got to Do with It? may convince you that marketing is the right word to use and offers some good ideas on marketing your library. You don’t need to agree with everything Stover says or be equally enthusiastic about marketing to find her advice useful. That "take it with a grain of salt, but take it" advice may apply even more to Stover’s blog, Library Marketing—Thinking Outside the Book. I suspect her blog is the best place to look for other marketing-related blogs.
• The Advocacy Brainstorm from WebJunction's Rural Library Sustainability workshops includes a broad array of suggestions for advocacy—and, if you didn't pick this up already, "advocacy" is a synonym for "telling your story" is a synonym for "marketing."

Even if I've already mentioned it, you shouldn't forget the Library Use Value Calculator. First developed by Massachusetts Library Association in spreadsheet form, then adapted for the web by Chelmsford Public Library and mounted by Maine State Library (another WebJunction partner), it's been adopted and adapted by a number of libraries. It's an interesting way for community members to calculate the value of their own library use. The Maine site includes pages on how to customize the calculator for your own library or library association. Of course, dollar amounts for otherwise-purchasable services are only one piece of your library's story, but they're an important piece when budget time rolls around.

There's a lot more here. As you explore it, think about your own community and how these tools and suggestions will play out.

In Closing

You should never stop refining your story—and you should never stop telling your story, not as endless PR bombardment but as a regular part of how your library serves your community.

That's really the end of this series about the library's story—but there's one more topic, one you may not have considered and one that takes advantage of changes in technology. Namely, even smaller public libraries can now be content creators, publishers and facilitators—telling your community's stories and helping community members tell their own stories. That's a natural extension of your role in collecting and organizing stories; it's a local role, which helps anchor your library within the community; and it's one that's far more feasible than it used to be. A little more about those possibilities and some of the tools next time.

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