I was recently in Jacksonville, Florida giving a workshop about “Optimizing Your Library to Increase Community Engagement.” Preparing for this workshop, I did some thinking about the intersections between marketing, community engagement, public relations, and libraries.
One big thing that I think libraries forget is that it’s not enough to do community engagement activities, you need to tell people what you’re doing. In many libraries, community engagement is happening every day, but there isn’t necessarily a big-picture strategy, or even a record of what every library is doing.
When I worked at Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, I knew we had a lot of partnerships with community-based organizations – government agencies, nonprofits, academic institutions and others. I wanted to be able to tell that story, but the more I asked my colleagues, the more I realized that we didn’t have a record of it. I wanted to be able to say, “Our library partners with X number of organizations,” but I couldn’t. So I organized an internal partnership census, and it revealed so much beyond a simple statistic. We learned that we partnered with hundreds of organizations, and in many cases, we had multiple points of contact with the same organization that we weren’t aware of. This internal census became a new way or us to communicate internally about our community engagement strategies, while also breaking down long-held silos.
So as I prepared for the Jacksonville workshop, I wanted find a way to bring that kind of thinking to community engagement. Because it’s about more than just partnerships. Community engagement is the process of working collaboratively with community members or partner organizations to address issues for the betterment of the community. In that sense, almost everything a library does is community engagement.
About halfway through the workshop, I had participants give me a bunch of examples of community engagement activities their libraries were engaging in. Then, during the break, I made a crude “map” of those activities.
If you were to ask an average person walking down a street in the US, they would have no idea that libraries are doing all of this. If people don’t know about it, they don’t value it and they don’t see a need to fund it. So I think libraries have some work to do to. Here are a few things I recommend to get started.
- Conduct an internal partnership census so you can get a sense of what everyone is doing and get people on the same page.
- Talk to your partners about cross-promoting what you are doing and raising awareness of the benefits of working together.
- Create a “map” of everything you are doing that fits the definition, “working collaboratively with community members or partner organizations to address issues for the betterment of the community.” Use it to internally educate your staff about community engagement, and to break down silos.
- Consider creating a public-facing version of this story. It may not look like my crude map. It could be a video, a news story, a blog post, or something else.
- Don’t give up! Remember, it’s not enough to do it – you have to tell people you did it.
What are your thoughts about community engagement? Email me, or – better yet – join our Facebook Group, Friends of Library Marketing!
Cordelia Anderson Consulting 