My name's Jennifer Peterson and I'm helping to host today's session.
We'll also send you a certificate for attending today's session, that will be within the week.
If you do have colleagues that aren't able to attend today but do require a certificate for their learning, know that all of the learning in our WebJunction catalog provides a certificate for learners and is available to everyone.
So, we encourage you to explore all the other learning available there.
As I mentioned earlier, there is a learner guide for today's session.
It's a resource for you to explore after the session, to customize, to add questions that you and your team have been meaning to explore together.
It's a resource that's available for all of the sessions we've done in this series, so feel free to circle back for additional learning.
This is the final session in our three-part series, we've been really excited to partner with COSLA.
All the recordings will be available, as I said.
I'm going to go ahead and get our recording started here and do a quick introduction of our presenters today.
Linda Hofschire has been with us for all three sessions in the series as a wonderful moderator.
She's the director of the library research at the Colorado State Library.
Rebecca Jones joins us today.
She's the director at the branch and neighborhood services for the Brampton Public Library.
And Chantal Stevens is here, she's the director of the Community Indicators Consortium and they bring a wealth of expertise and insight into the topic of today.
Welcome, Linda.
>> Linda Hofschire:  Thank you so much, Jennifer.
And, welcome to everybody that has joined us for this webinar.
It's great to have a crowd that's interested in this topic.
And as you can see from the slide, today we're going to be talking about moving toward more meaningful measures.
As Jennifer has mentioned, this is the third webinar in a three-part series and I'm going to give a quick overview about the Measures that Matter project in case you weren't able to join us for the first and second webinars.
So, Measures that Matter is a year-long project.
It is being conducted jointly by the  -- taking stock of the public library data landscape and looking at the nation level to collect and report on data about public libraries and based on putting together that landscape.
Then, thinking about how we can better streamline and coordinate our efforts in the future, to collect data about public libraries so that it can reduce burden as if you are responsible at all for reporting data for any of the national collections, I'm sure you know what I mean when I talk about burden and we want to work on reducing that.
But then also more significantly, considering really, are we collecting the data we need in order to tell a meaningful story about today's public libraries?
So, that is what this one-year project is doing.
If you are interested in learning more about the project, I would recommend going back and listening to the first and second webinars.
The first webinar in the series, we really took a deep dive into the projects in terms of explaining all the details of it, what it's all about.
And then in the second webinar, we explored data and research concepts and then thought about how those concepts impact what we currently know about public libraries based on data.
And so today, we're going to be turning our attention to, what are the measures that we can collect that will most meaningfully tell our story?
And so we're excited to be hearing from two presenters today.
One from outside of the library field and then one from inside of the library field, just to help us broaden our perspective.
Finally, just to give you kind of a feel for where we are with this one-year project, you can see that at this point, we're up to webinar three, July 26, that's today.
We've had several different presentation opportunities because we really want to get feedback and input from the field.
As Jennifer mentioned, as we were waiting for the hour to begin, we are collecting feedback at all times.
So, we encourage you to reach out to us about this project, if you have any thoughts.
There will be an in-person data summit.
75 stakeholders will meet and start to develop an actiont plan.
That action plan will propose ways to tackle kind of the issues of streamlining those data collection efforts and moving towards more meaningful measures and that plan will be completed at the end of this calendar year.
But obviously, more work will continue after that, to actually put this plan into action.
So, that's where we are now.
So, I am going to turn things over to our first presenter.
She is chan chan RR, the executive director of the Community Indicators Consortium and she will be talking a little bit about meaningful measures from the perspective of her field.
So, Chantal, thank you so much for joining us.
>> Chantal Stevens:  Thank you, Linda.
It's a pleasure to be here today.
I work for the Community Indicators Consortium and it led me from environmental science to the public feed and directing the pioneers of community indicators project.
My current position here, where we advance and support the development, availability and views of community in  indicators in making measures.
So, it is clear that I will be talking about community indicators.
So, let's start with the definition.
Community indicators are measures that are chosen with and for the community to affect change.
So, I just started talking, I mentioned community several times.
So, what is a community?
For our purpose, a community is a group of people who share a characteristic.
usually it's a town, city or a county.
States and countries are usually considered to be beyond a community.
It could an island or a watershed or a community-base or social characteristics, such as an area that has become a neighborhood.
The community can share other characteristics, like sharing an activity or a belief system.
Indicators are usually presented as units of measure.
The measure, for example, air temperature, it creates it.
So, to understand what I meant when I said that community indicators are measures that are chosen with and the community to affect change, let's take a look at how they come about.
The first step in the development of community indicator effort is -- or should be -- a are bust community engagement process.
If you are to measure progress in a community, you need to understand what matters to that community.
And there are many ways to do that.
Maybe a future webinar.
The first product of this community engagement process is usually a set of goals or areas that matter.
Here, you can see four sets of goals for four different projects.
On the left is act Rochester.
Those are not community indicator, but I have included them here because they can be used as a whole or in part as a framework for the development of a community indicator set.
You may not be able to read them so let me read the first five.
No poverty.
Zero hunger.
Good health and well-being.
Quality education.
And gender equality.
The next set is in Reno, Nevada.
The first couple ones are future and enrichment and civic engagement.
Finally at the bottom, you see the domain set.
Those areas or domains or goals create the framework under which the measures will be organized and identify the areas that are important to the community.
Boston, for example, and not surprisingly, is an area called technology.
There is a land use area and Rochester values financial sufficiency.
Looking further into the work of act Rochester, once the general areas have been chosen on the --
on the left, the community and experts get together to identify what specific indicators to measure and then, they develop a process to identify data sources and then track measures over time.
I mentioned the role of experts working hand in hand with the community because it has to be the partnership.
The community knows what things look like on the ground and what matters but you need the opinion of the experts to help keep things in check.
A community may be entrusted in different measures than the one that is suggested.
That would -- the measures would help them understand the well-being of children and youth.
The data may not exist to track those indicators or maybe too expensive to acquire or science may not correlate those with the outcomes that have been tracked here.
In this case, the well-being of children and youth.
Just a quick note on the right, Rochester is tracking the indicator of birth weight of babies over time and comparing it to the neighboring areas into the state of New York with a line across the bar graph that represents the U.S. Average.
Indicator project can be associated with a strategy plan and can, but not do always, set targets.
In this example from San Antonio, the target is a prediction in poverty by the year 2020.
It's an ambitious goal.
So, again, community indicators are measures that are chosen with and for the community to affect change.
The next step, now that we have goals and measures, is to give the measures back to the community by reporting back to them.
How you report is almost as important as what you report because each method, we work with different stakeholders.
In this first example, the neighborhood indicator alliance, used online maps with data.
That works well because the indicators are geared toward community advocates, the press and policy makers.
This is a sophisticated graphic that includes information in a small area and therefore, can be distributed widely as a fairly low cost, which requires a certain level of understanding of how it works to get the most out of it.
A dashboard like this one gives an at-a-glance look at where things are getting better and where they're getting worse and can be very effective with decision makers and policy makers but usually exists online.
Finally, a report like this one can be printed, which makes it widely available, but expensive.
It can include a lot of information for all levels of understanding and can get into the why's and the who -- why it's important to track certain things and what one can do to affect change.
So, this is a good segue into the next area.
All community indicators aspire to create change and it you can go about doing it in several ways.
One is by simply sharing the information as in this example.
And hope that learning of other trends will aspire change between businesses and policy makers.
Two, organize the community around change.
This is an example from Spartanburg, South Carolina, a project that has been around for a long time and puts out excellent indicators.
They have been very successful in organizing the community around action.
On the left, you can see they have three groups working together.
The project staff, the cabinet, which is the steering committee, and the indicator area leaders.
On the right, you can see how those indicator area leaders are organized and you can see why I chose this example.
So, Spartanburg Public Libraries, they have the civic health area and work on community connections.
This is not unique.
Several libraries are members of the Community Indicators Consortium and are involved in moving libraries in this direction.
Indicators that include library services to the community are also included in other projects.
The set I found is with the Arizona indicators, which is a project of Arizona state university, where public libraries are a whole area and they track service area, registered borrowers, dollars spent on libraries and annual visits to the library.
And they track it for all the counties and for the state, as a whole.
More typical are those two examples, such as act Rochester, that track library visits, which incidently, looks much higher than the state average, which is the blueish line across the bar graph.
And on the right, the community alliance.
But libraries are not always included to the level that they should be.
For example, this has excellent indicators, did not include library services as part of their involved and engaged citizenry.
Durham neighborhood, it lists and tracks banks and buses and pharmacies, among amenities, also did not include libraries.
Libraries are the center of community life for many things.
They offer things to immigrants to learn and adapt and raise education attainment, to strengthen community adhesion.
Community indicators track those outcomes and bring the community together to further-improve them.
Community indicators project exist in many, if not most, cities and counties in the U.S. 
a partnership between libraries, community indicators partnership offer highlighting library services and improvement in communities and a large amount of data.
So, let me move to a different area, different base, and talk more specifically about measures and how to use measures that matter.
And I will go a little faster through this because I think that my -- my time is running out.
Starting with this, which you have probably seen in previous webinars, the step ladder of input activities, input, outcomes and impact, each -- 
sorry.
The slide was not advancing.
Each of those areas can have measures and each of them are important to understand what happens in your organization, what resources you offer, what services, what activities you do, who do you reach?
What do they do?
Changes that happen as a result of activities and then the big picture result.
But really, if you are talking to the community -- to founders who are alected officials, there really is only one story.
What do you do and what difference does it make?
This is your theory of change.
So, I'm going to give you a couple examples.
Joe here, he's a maintenance employee for your county government.
Joe provides maintenance and repair services so that his boss is happy with him -- within meetings -- his boss can report to her boss that buildings are safe and her boss can report to the county executive that the city infrastructure is safe.
The first two levels of what we call performance measures, they're very useful internally to track efficiency and effectiveness or expensve and how quickly work is being done.
Those are measures.
The top two measures are more in the realm of community measures.
Really, what the public cares about is that their city is safe.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  I can grab the ball and move us forward, then, if there's a problem.
Let's see.
>> Linda Hofschire:  No, that was good.
Go back one slide.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  Okay.
>> Linda Hofschire:  And I seem to be unstuck now.
Thank you.
Sorry about that.
Joe provides maintenance and repair services in county buildings so that the city is safe.
One could also argue separately that his work has the cost of government to be lower so more money can be diverted to important services.
That would be another outcome of his work.
In this example, a nonprofit offers classes to inmates and tracks number of classes, number of inmates certified in a skill, number of inmates that find a job upon release.
Really, here again, the story for that nonprofit organization is that they train inmates so that the community's safer, as measured by the purse sent of inmates that commit crimes after release.
So, in the previous two examples, you saw how you can link activities to outcomes.
We often talk about indicator mapping.
Let me skip this slide, just take a quick look at the picture in case you encounter the terms.
One predicts the future.
The leading indicators predict the future event and tend to change ahead of the event and lagging indicators tend to follow an event.
This is the work of sustainable Seattle.
It was done as part of a huge community engagement process where they identified a set of goals.
You can see two of these goals, livable neighborhoods and communities.
The next step was to organize the indicators through a logic model.
Why is something happening looks at root causes.
Those are the indicators.
What is happening now?
What issue are we really tracking, if, for example, you want a livable community?
Those are the status indicators.
Why is this important?
This is what we need to know to understand the impact of those actions and those are the downstream indicators.
A quick note to say that this is a very fluid environment, no pun intended as we are talking about the environment.
An indicator that is upstream can be come status or downstream indicator under a certain goal and actually, any of those are interchangeable depending on what you are looking at, specifically.
So, the story you can read here is that investment that have been made in the past, in alternative transportation, for example, are responsible, today, for how walkable a place is.
And the walkability of a place has an impact on the perceived safety of an area, as well as on social cohesion in obesity rates and whatnot.
Another example is under the responsibility, the way they plan the task, affects the amount of surface covered by pavement, the surface areas, which in turn impacts the ecological health of our streams and river.
So, you have root causes, current condition.
If you want to fix your rivers in the future, you may decrease the amount of pavement by changing the density that will be there during the future.
Another quick change of pace here, but definitely really almost out of time now.
You can be sure you are changing what you are measure but you need to measure when.
I could spend the next few hours talking about ways to measure, to use statistics, how to make them -- I will just give you two quick examples here about how not to tell -- not telling the whole story can affect equity for certain populations.
This is one of my favorite exampleexamples.
It comes from Canada.
On the left, you have the typical graduation rate for high school students by social and economic status.
Based on the 12th grade, students receive a diploma, 76% graduated from high school compared with 96% of the students in the higher socioeconomics status.
That's only part of the truth.
On the right, you have the results of another study.
It takes into consideration of all 18-year-olds.
Only 11% of those 18-year-olds graduated.
On the above, 30% were in 1 the 12th grade and of those, 12% did not take the final test so they were not counted on the left.
The other number -- the others were held back in the lower grade dropped out.
11% is a mind-boggling number and it's the whole truth when you go into the data.
It is clear when looking at the data on the right that there is a terrible problem and services and assistance folked on the future generation need to be urgently provided.
Another quick change of -- 
sorry.
Here's another example from the king county equity and social justice project.
King county is rated a good place to work and live.
But if you look closer, you will see huge differences in education and income by race.
For education, while 81% of white graduate from high school, only 55% of native Americans do so.
While annual household income is as high as $75,000 for whites.
It's barely $38,000 for African Americans.
Looking at it by place, you can also see a huge difference in the quality of life indicators and that those places usually correlate with racial and ethnic differences in the population.
The same is true in Boston.
This comes from the Boston indicators.
Difference in education attainment ranging from 20% to 80%.
Child poverty from 5% to greater than 40% and unemployment higher.
I do not have enough time to cover all those areas where data can be used to tell a misleading story.
But thing to leave you with those few examples that show the power of data that either omit information or highlighting the differences.
In conclusion, I want to invite you to read this wonderful speech from Robert F. Kennedy.
I'm sure you'll find it in your materials.
He was referring specifically to the gdp.
The health of a family, the quality of the education, the safety of our streets, the intelligence of our public debate and how we need to find a way to do so, so we can have meaningful measures that matter.
Thank you.
>> Linda Hofschire:  This is Linda again.
I had the pleasure of attending the Community Indicators Consortium, the organization that Chantal directs.
I found it helpful to get out of the library world and gain a new perspective, just in terms of how to -- how to demonstrate meaning and impact within our communities and so, I encourage you to check out the indicator projects that she MINGZed during her presentation.
Those will all be up on the event web page, as well as there's some of them highlighted in the learner guide that's on that web page.
It can just -- it can help you to get some fresh ideas from a new perspective.
Now, I want to turn to our second present R.
So, we are coming back to libraries and I am excited to welcome Rebecca Jones, who is the director of branches and neighborhood services at Brampton Public Library.
So, Rebecca, I will turn things over to you.
>> Rebecca Jones:  Thank you so much, Linda.
I was just absolutely eMURSed in your presentation, Chantal.
I couldn't agree more, Linda, that that's exactly what we need to be learning and positioning library indicators.
Chantal talked about the lagging indicators, I'm afraid that most of our data, to this point, has been lagging and that is not where we want to be.
So, let me just position this by saying, my presentation's going to be very practical in terms of how we have been, the steps we've been taking, our stakeholders, meaning our board and council and city staff and library staff through -- to really do some of the positioning that Linda talked about at the very beginning of the webinar, where Linda, you said, that it's so important for libraries to have the data to tell the story for public libraries of today.
And, that's sort of where we started.
So, let me just tell you, Brampton -- you've probably never heard of it.
We're outside of Toronto, the gta.
We're the ninth largest place in Canada.
For us, it's growing so quickly.
At 5% each year.
And, the interesting thing is that of those 600,000, only 51% were not born in north America.
They are predominantly from India.
They are young.
The median age is 34.7.
And, to serve those 600,000 people, we have six library branches.
That is almost unheard of in the library land and the library was not greatly supported until our most recent CEO came in.
One of those is completely supporting our move to develop the measures that matter, so what matters?
Well, it really depends on who you are talking to.
So, if we think about, you know, first of all, the stakeholders being council over here.
The second being customers and the third being staff.
And, yes, I did have permission to use that photograph of staff.
When we look at what matters for each of these, for council and the city staff, what matters to them is cost.
Yep.
Does it move their agenda forward?
How does what we are doing move their agenda forward within their various wards?
And, is it important to the residents and to the voters, particularly, for council?
Secondly for the customers, when you have really young families -- and I know most of you out there would -- would -- 
be able to resonate with this --
you don't have a lot of time.
Nonfiction is not a real mover and shaker at Brampton Library because young families don't have that time and the residents -- we did a big poll as part of our strategic planning -- what's most important to our residents is academic achievement.
They have come to this country to succeed and they feel that schooling and education, academics, are extremely important for their children.
So is what you're offering worth my time?
We are both working.
We have three to five children.
What's it in for me, the WIIFT factor.
What's in it for my child and my overall life?
What matters for our staff?
We know from research from years ago that for public library staff, the most important thing for them is not what their supervisors think, but are their customers happy?
Does it make sure customers happy?
Does it make the library staff job secure?
Do they feel valued in what they doing and what in earth is driving the decisions that senior management is making?
Maybe somebody else is laughing right there.
Where is this decision coming from?
And, headed towards that sweet spot.
So, this is the sweet spot from Jim's work with hedgehog.
The sweet spot is to bring these three things together so you are not looking at separate data and measures, but you're really pulling it together.
What matters in terms of operational and program and service decisions, to pull that usage together, those outcomes together and the satisfaction, is to be able to report to all three of those stakeholders, that 5,7000 people come into our branches and 85% of them are seeking information or are borrowing products, digital or physical.
85% of them are extremely or very happy with our lending services and 85% of those participating in our programs feel more knowledgeable about and confident and able to apply what they've been able to learn.
So, to be able to boil it down into some simple messages.
So, our approach has been very practical and I hope that, for those of you that aren't under way withoutcome measures and pulling together your data, this will give you some pointers.
Our very first step was to build staff understanding.
What I'm about to show you was presented both to the library teams and actually to the board.
So, we started out with, of course, what they already hear all the time.
The libraries change lives.
Outcomes actually say how we change those lives.
Starting with that shift, so starting to use new language.
Again, I'm going back to what Linda said at the beginning about the world in which libraries exist now and what Chantal pointed out, the community indicators and the implications of those for libraries in those communities.
So, certainly the shift is -- 
but our stakeholders and staff need to understand this -- it has gone from transactional to interaction and engagement with our communities, with our neighborhoods, with the people, the residents and the attention has gone from physical to digital.
You can call it electronic if you want, you can call it in web.
Our language has to have shifted from being about library and about our processes to being about our residents and our community.
So, we very purposely started shifting our language and talking about this, that we can't take on new concepts until we have the language to describe those new concepts, to be able to talk about the new context.
Going from circulation to borrowing.
Going from talking about reference and research, which is quite problematic in a community where there are many engineers and scientists.
We really, you know, needed to be talking about the advising and the interacting we do with customers.
From gate counts to the number of people that we welcome into our branches.
From not talking about active card holders because it's not about the card, it's about the member engagement.
And going from talking about customers to members.
We have customers, they're the ones that aren't members yet.
But everyone can be a member and have member benefits.
And going from numbers and satisfaction, that is not to say that we don't, but more to the outcomes of what has come out of those numbers and the satisfaction for our members?
So, here, too, is the very simple logic model that we use.
The logic model that Chantal used is the perfect, absolute logic model.
We have just removed two parts here.
We've removed the activities and we've removed the second part up here.
We go from the input, from the resource perspective.
So, what we put into it, our resources.
Let's be honest, most of which is staffing in the public library, to the output, which means what we're actually delivering, so those output numbers.
And then to the user perspective spective or to the member perspective.
To the impact, the stakeholder perspective.
Imagine you're putting on all these lenses and up to what is changes for our customers.
As Chantal said, all indicators are to aspire to make changes.
So, we take this and we made it very simple for people.
We said, think about the input as being what you would feed, what you would take in to produce something and then of course, the all-important output, which is just as important and still has to be managed.
To the customer who benefits from that outcome, okay.
So, the happy customer.
But thinking really about what's in it about, the WIIFT factor for whom those outcomes matter who for whom experience that actual impact.
Since we were using that exact PowerPoint to talk with staff, we wanted to also put in it, what's in it for you?
So, being data-driven and working a lot on evidence and outcome measures and outputs and bringing that all together into those messages that we need to convey, is that we're going to be conveying the message to staff as well?
So, what's in it for you, we said?
First of all, when you're asking how are these decisions being made?
You're going to see how they're being made and you're going to be a part of that and we're going to use the data.
Those decisions drive not only the roles that you are -- you have and that make all the difference in the world for the customers that you care so dearly about, but the competencies and the skills that you need and how we are allocating resources.
how we are allocating staffing across the branches and across the neighborhood services.
The second step was to engage staff in measures about their daily work, the stuff that they really care about.
And in fact, that we have always looked at.
This is -- and I just love all the images that Chantal was showing.
And I have many libraries outcome measures and dashboards on my desk right now because we're putting together something for the board.
This is a very simple dashboard.
It was put up in our workrooms and it to look at queue one and queue two year-to-date for each of our branches and it's level of activity that is important to the people in the branches.
But also, to management.
And, this Friday, the branch managers will be coming together and looking at all these and we'll involve the branch libraries and every branch manager and branch librarian will be talking to their staff.
We want to look at what's going up, what's going down, not only within some branches, but across the system.
Our biggest and busiest branch has been significantly downsized while its going through a renovation and it opens again on Tuesday.
So, we expect that the systems statistics will shoot up.
Someone put we have an increase in outreaches.
Yes, we do.
Look at that!
We are changing the language.
This is going to change from outreach to off-site.
When you have six branches for 600,000, we have to start doing things outside of our branch walls.
The third thing was to involve staff in redesigning our core programs and the outcomes for those core programs.
So, we were very careful, as you can appreciate through this whole thing -- because I was relatively new here, I had seen in other libraries, where somebody had come in and people felt they were being rolled over and hadn't been involved in it so we've taken a step-by-step programs, family storytime.
We went back to retraining everybody and every child ready to read and in helping them understand that it is about the confidence the parents have.
That's the outcome that the parents want, is they want more time interacting in a meaningful way with their children and that they have a better understanding of how this impacts their children's abilities in school and that they would recommend these to family and friends.
If you're involved in project outcomes, you'll see that these are the questions used in project outcomes.
Yes, we do use a different way of conveying the results that we get from project outcomes in very simple visually-appealing ways, both for our staff and for our board.
And the same with maker.
Our maker programs, again, thinking about our community, very interested in STEM.
Not steam, to this point, we're going to be bringing in more steam.
It's been science, technology, engineering and math.
They want their children to be engineering  -- knowledgeable about engineering and science.
And conveying this kind of simple message to both staff and to the board has been extremely meaningful.
Summer reading program is under way right now and this is our results from last year.
It was the first year that we used project outcomes and it was fantastic as responding to the need of public libraries to be asking the right questions, that for all neighborhoods, they wanted their children to maintain or increase their reading skills.
Bang, we did that.
They wanted their children to be much more confident in their reading skills and go back to school being more confident.
Is this as high as we want it to be?
No.
We are looking for aspired changes for the summer of 2017 for our summer reading program and we hope to see that.
The fourth step was to start to bring all this together, very simply, back to the slide I started with.
And to keep in front of everybody what we're doing, what is our progress is to-date.
These questions are what I ask.
The whole purpose of doing any kind of measurement is that we gather the look and look at what our activity levels are, those are the dashboards and the outcome levels are.
So, what does that mean?
What are the various things we can take from that?
And readying to decide.
Now what?
What changes do we have to make, like the summer program, what changes to we have to make to move up on strongly agree.
So, we keep it in front of everybody that we're contributing to project outcomes and measuring.
We started with the core programs.
We are analyzing our customer satisfaction surveys.
And that we're surfacing and analyzing the activity levels with all staff.
And, now getting ready to make decisions with them.
So, this is, as I said, the way that we're going to be communicating it here.  It won't be a visual like this, but this is a good way for me to pull 2 together, is for the board to understand and for all of our people to understand that the people who use the library, 60% of them use it to borrow and find answers to their questions and to study.
The borrowing is the physical items, it's going to down 16% but the digital items have gone up 52%.
We offered 8% more programs but that was to 44% more participants and 10,000 kids to the STEM program.
And in terms of our customer satisfaction, at 90% rate, our services and staff is good to great.
Pulling it together here.
We have a testimonial that says, I have been using the library for the past seven months from the time I came do Brampton.
It has been a heaven, a home away from home and a companion.
This has open my eyes to so many things, especially e-learning and to keep up with what's happening around the world today.
There's our very simple info graphic that goes out to all city staff and up to our board so that we know that one in four of Bramptonians are active.
One of our board members said nobody else can say that.
Thank you very much.
>> Linda Hofschire:  Thank you so much, Rebecca.
And it's so helpful, I find, to hear about how you've tackled this topic of meaningful measures in your library.
And especially in terms of thinking about it from those various stakeholders.
And, so we have a few minutes left and I am going to invite anyone who might have questions for either Rebecca or Chantal, because we didn't take time really at the end of Chantal's part of the presentation.
But, I will invite everybody now, if you have questions or comments, please go ahead and share those in chat.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  This is Jennifer.
We can mention, too, it was great to see a question specific to community indicators and I know I just encourage everyone, too, to explore all that the community indicators project site has to offer.
I'll put that link in there.
And, the examples really are the Community Indicators Consortium, are the tip of the iceberg for what's in there to explore.
We included an activity in the learning guide for you to look at community indicator projects to get a sense of who's measures community indicators and how you could leverage those with your work at the library.
So, a special plug to that.
>> Linda Hofschire:  Yeah, thanks, Jennifer.
And, so, Rebecca, I'll direct Elaina's question to you, in terms of talking about the outcomes of family storytimes and reading.
>> Rebecca Jones:  Yeah.
In fact.
I'll tell you that with family storytimes, we actually did -- 
we had to redesign it so it was built as a series.
Our family storytimes is a drop-in and so staff was concerned about how would they build the outcomes.
So, we are designed it as a series.
The staff was trained and very happy to do this, to say, this is the series for the next 16 weeks.
We know you won't make it every week.
We did a survey to give us a starting point.
As I said, the most important impacts that our community's looking for is school readiness and then academic achievement once they get to school.
So, those were really the ones -- and that's why with summer reading, for us, it's about preventing the summer slide.
>> Linda Hofschire:  Thanks, Rebecca.
And, we had a couple questions that came in that were just sent to Pamela.
I'm going to go ahead and share those in chat so that everyone can see.
I hit the wrong button there.
Let me try that again.
I will share those in chat so everybody can see them.
And so, the questions were, I would love to hear how Brampton informs staff of this process.
Do you have in-person meetings with the director?
Department meetings?
How much time does your staff commit to project outcome.
We're a bit daunted by it.
[LAUGHTER]
>> Rebecca Jones:  Don't be daunted.
Take it one bite at a time.
So, how do we keep people informed?
As I put this presentation together, I'm thinking it's time to get out there and talk to people about it because we are doing a project to operationalize outcomes.
And, so, do we have in-person meetings?
Yes, I try to get out, as I say, to the branches and talk a little bit about it.
Also, because some staff just took it and ran with it.
I mean, ran with it.
Wanted outcomes built into every program that they were doing.
And -- but we really do just try to keep it simple and one thing at a time.
And we have -- now the people that present the program are also responsible for doing the -- the data input for us.
So, it's all good.
We're going to online very soon and that'll make a big difference.
I hope that answered your question.
If it didn't, please follow-up with me.
>> Linda Hofschire:  Thanks, Rebecca.
I'm going to have both of you, Chantal and Rebecca, address one more question from betsy.
She's asking about whether your administrators work on this or do you have a team.
Chantal, if you are able to answer that for the community indicators projects, that would be interesting.
>> Chantal Stevens:  That will be a quick answer.
A lot of projects are very small, small staff.
So, they usually use, you know, three apps to do a lot of their work, including the infographics.
The ones that have more resources are the ones that are sponsored by universities or cities or counties.
But, mostly universities, those have a little bit more resources.
They can use students to do the work.
Very few indicator projects have had resources to do that kind of work.
>> Rebecca Jones:  So, let me echo that.
[LAUGHTER]
You can tell, from our info -- 
we do have that lovely, final infographic and that, of course, is done from someone external.
I did use a free app to do it the first time and they cleaned up and made it all look nice.
And I'm being perfectly honest.
I go on images and Pinterest and I find whatever looks appealing -- we're right beside Toronto public library, they have fantastic graphics.
So, you know, I leverage their graphics and we -- we try to input it in the same way.
Did that answer your question?
>> Linda Hofschire:  Thanks, Rebecca.
I was just putting into chat -- 
it's called r and d, rip off and duplicate, with permission, of course.
>> Rebecca Jones:  We just got permission and just hired a performance and measures data librarian and, oh, my god, that is just changing my life.
I can't tell you.
>> Linda Hofschire:  That's wonderful.
>> Rebecca Jones:  That took two full years of justifying and it's when we were doing outcome measures to the council and board that really drove it home, how important this work was.
>> Linda Hofschire:  I'm starting to see those positions pop up in more public libraries.
Well, we are just about out of time.
I want to thank you all for joining us today and I -- I can want to highlight, as we go, that learner guide, which Jennifer and I have mentioned a couple times during this session.
Please check it out.
It's a great resource to explore what you've learned in this session and a little bit more detail.
And how it applies to your library.
That is on the event web page, as well as a lot of the other resources we talked about today.
As I mentioned at the beginning, we are very interested in getting your feedback as we continue our work with the Measures that Matter project.
We encourage you to reach out, if you have any questions or comments, you can see there's a couple email addresses on the screen.
For ways to get in touch.
You can also follow the Measures that Matter project on Twitter.
And then finally, there is an email distribution list if you are interested in getting updates about what is happening with the Measures that Matter project and Jennifer has put that link into chat.
So, thank you, all, for joining us today and have a great rest of the afternoon.
Good-bye.
>> Linda Hofschire:  Thanks, Linda.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  Thank you, bye-bye.