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You need to tell your story. Whether you call it story-telling, marketing, advocacy, promotion or community outreach, you need to make your library's story heard in your community. To tell your story effectively, you must understand your own story-what you're about, how you're central, what you offer and what you should offer.

What's your story?

Story and Brand

Those comfortable with marketing might rephrase that question as "What's your brand?" For most of us, that's not a true equivalence. At best, your brand might be the shorthand version of your story-the "elevator pitch" or one-sentence highlight.

Traditionally, a brand is a trademark, distinctive name, or distinctive category. Your library logo and motto constitute your brand-but not your story.

Today, "brand" has taken on broader meaning. It's shorthand for the apparent public image behind a brand-or, if you like, the apparent story, what you think of when you hear a brand.

If I say "Halliburton," you probably have one mental story. If I say "Johnson & Johnson" or "GE" you have a different one-and I wouldn't have a clue what that story might be, although both corporations try to mold our mental stories. If I say "Nooenautica," on the other hand, you probably have no mental story at all: You don't recognize the brand.

If I say "public library," the overall brand is "books" or "free books." The OCLC Perceptions report demonstrated that effectively-and did that come as a surprise?

You can and should go beyond books-books are only the beginning. Your story needs to inform your brand and support that brand, and you certainly do more than provide free books. But note the word that I did not use before "provide free books"-that is, "just." Don't try to run away from books as a brand. There's nothing negative about providing free books, and most of your community appreciate that as a fundamental part of what you do.

What's Special?

Special comes in two flavors.

One should be easy, at least for a partial answer:

• What do you do better than anyone else?

A few possible answers:

• You make good books available for free. Who else does that?
• You make CDs and DVDs (and probably some videocassettes) available for free too!
• You tell interesting stories to groups of kids, and maybe to other groups. For free!
• You organize those free materials so they're easier to find and so related ones are close together for your patrons looking for "something on…" Oh sure, bookstores organize. You organize better, don't you?
• You provide breadth and depth, serving special needs and maintaining worthwhile stories across time.

That's only a partial list of the things you do better than anyone else in your community. What's on your list?

The second flavor may be tougher:

• What's distinctive about your library?

You're not the same as the library two towns over, are you? If your community numbers 7,000, I'm certain you're a whole lot different than Los Angeles Public Library (3.9 million) or Redwood City Public Library (75,100).

You're also different from another library serving 7,000 people. You have different strengths, different weaknesses, possibly different unique services and collections.

What makes you special within the library field, as compared to other libraries with similar community sizes, or as compared to other libraries in your region?

Maybe the answer to that question isn't as important to your community, but it helps to know where you lead (and where you lag), particularly when funding issues arise.

Fleshing Out Your Story

The two questions above should help you discover your core story-what makes you special, within your community and beyond.

The rest of your story also matters. That's likely to be the story that's constantly changing. That story encapsulates everything you do and want to do. It includes the people on your staff. It includes the story of your building(s), past and present. It includes the special stories of those in the community who treasure the library and find more than average value in it.

Don't assume people already know any given aspect of your story-especially when you consider your story as a source of newspaper columns, blog posts and other ways of telling your story. Chances are, for almost any service other than free books and materials, and for any special program, most people in your community don't know about it, since they don't use it. For that matter, do newcomers, particularly recent migrants, all know and understand that you really do provide free materials?

As you flesh out your story, you need an effective way to store and maintain it for reference. That's not a bad use for a restricted-access wiki, if you're ready to try one of those. Almost any database will work. So will a simple document, but it's important to maintain flexibility for two reasons:

1. Your story will change over time.
2. Just as fish probably don't know all there is to know about water, you may be too close to your own library to recognize some aspects of its story.

But that's a topic for the next installment...See  Developing Your Story.
 

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