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The first stage in the journey outlined in this road map is crafting a strategy. Planning is a crucial precursor to quantifying your impact and making your case.

Assess your resources

Your approach to demonstrating impact will vary greatly depending on the size of your library and the staff resources you have available. It's true that many of the projects in this road map were conducted by larger library systems. But the principles of a good strategy for demonstrate impact are the same for libraries of any size—just ask the library in Petersburg, AK. Whatever your size, fit your plans to what you are capable of doing. You'll be surprised by what you can accomplish!

Identify whom you need to convince

To whom do you need to demonstrate your value? City council? County commission? The board or constituents of your library district? The critical first step to your success is a thorough understanding of what makes your funding sources tick, what their political and social values are, and what they like to hear. Whether they are naughty or nice, pro-library or not, you must find a way to express your library's value in terms they can understand.

If you do nothing else before embarking on your Demonstrating Value journey, read Eleanor Jo Rodgers' article on Value and Vision (which first appeared in American Libraries magazine and is reprinted here on WebJunction). It's a clear-eyed, potent and inspiring call to think about what your library has to offer from this broader perspective.

Become a “library lobbyist”

There is no external resource that can tell you one of the most crucial pieces of information: with whom are you trying to communicate? Go to city council or county commission meetings, build personal connections, and become a “lobbyist” for your library. Here are a couple of resources that will help you plan for making these relationships:

• Although oriented toward Congressional lobbying and public policy legislation, there is much good and relevant advice about building effective relationships with public officials in the excellent article Make a Difference for Your Cause in 3 Hours per Week, from Charity Lobbying in the Public Interest.

• Rebecca Miller's Library Journal article on 11 Keys to Your Statehouse offers practical tips for cultivating relationships on the state level—and many of these principles are just as applicable at the local level.

Consider alternative funding sources

The typical library receives 90% of its funding from public money—but perhaps it's time for a change? The idea of multiple funding sources is gaining momentum in the library world. Take a look at Steve Coffman's WebJunction article What If You Ran Your Library Like NPR? and WJ's Grand Tour of alternative funding. An interesting sidelight on the relationship between libraries and retail is Chris Rippel's What Libraries Can Learn from Bookstores.

Identify what is important to your funders

What keeps your board or council members awake at night? As you craft your strategy it's your job to make linkages between those concerns that are on your funders' minds and your library's impact.

Supplement the information you collect from your all-important personal connections with some hard data: check your local press for recent surveys of local constituents, reports on economic trends, and your community's hot-button issues.

• Here's an example of a local community survey from Wyoming.

• The excellent government information portal FirstGov has reliable, current, and easily accessible statistical data down to the city and county level. Take a look at FirstGov's Local Governments and state and local statistics pages.

• The Library Research Service of the Colorado State Library has a Community Analysis page that provides a useful worksheet for zeroing in on the demographic and economic issues your community faces.

These are the numbers your funders are looking at and care about. Understanding these numbers yourself will impress them and enable you to communicate with them using a common language.

Identify what you do best

Establishing a firm and clear statement of your library's role in the community is a critical part of strategizing a plan for demonstrating impact.

• A clear mission statement can be a powerful tool for helping you focus your funders' attention on where you add the most value to your community. If your mission statement is not fully cooked yet, here are some examples from the Mid-Hudson Library System and Sheila Webber of the UK's Sheffield University.

• A more thorough way to gain clarity about your library's value is strategic planning. If you've already done strategic planning, preparing your strategy for “Demonstrating Impact” is the perfect time to review this work. If you haven't gone through a strategic planning process, the Northeast Kansas Library System has put together a focused and useful set of tools for an Internal Library Audit. And here's a page with links to additional planning resources from Wisconsin's Outagamie Waupaka Library System.

Determine how to articulate your library's value

There is a wide range of ways to think about the benefits your library brings to your community. Although any of the following items could be part of your strategy for Demonstrating Impact, focus your efforts on those that create the best fit between what you have to offer and what your funders value. Your audience's attention is limited, as is the time you may have to conduct the supporting research to substantiate your claims of community impact.

Joan C. Durrance and Karen E. Fisher’s book, How Libraries Help, offers a comprehensive methodology for defining and measuring library outcomes.   We’ve got an excerpt right here.  And Jeannette Woodward’s book, The Customer Driven Library, explores what it means for libraries to "Focus on the Bottom Line.”

The Friends of the Libraries USA has an excellent workbook with complete advocacy planning materials.  We’ve posted an excerpt that outlines advocacy campaign strategies.

The PLA's “Planning for Results” program has identified 13 types of outcomes that libraries provide.

More detailed descriptions of these outcomes are available on pages 6 and 7 of the instruction manual for the Library Research Service's “Counting on Results” project.

The Southern Ontario Library Service's “The Library's Contribution to Your Community” workbook is an invaluable tool for demonstrating impact, and it lists the following categories of contributions libraries can make:

• Personal Growth/Development
• Community Development
• Support to Community Groups/Agencies
• Direct Economic Impact
• Support to Local Business
• Indirect Economic Impact

These categories are spelled out in more detail in the workbook, which is available for purchase from the Southern Ontario Library Service.

For a “sterling” example of how a huge library establishes its economic benefit, check out this British Library study that analyzes the economic return the people of the UK receive for their tax support.

Find the connections between your library's value and your funders' priorities

Having reviewed the many ways your library makes a difference, your task is to “connect the dots” between what you offer and what your funders care about. “Value proposition” is a marketing term that can help you correlate these two points of view. Here's a WebJunction article, Value Propositions for Libraries, that introduces you to this useful strategic concept, and see also the Public Libraries article, “Bridging the Value Gap” (not available online, it's in PL volume 42, no. 5, from October 2003).

Once you've developed your strategy, you can turn your attention to collecting the facts that will lend support your case.