通过Laura Damon-Moore
Effectively reaching out to your community can be tricky. On October 31, Laura Damon-Moore, Co-Founder ofLibraries as Incubators Project，shared her expertise on community outreach for the weekly金宝搏彩票盖尔野人. Laura was unable to do the usual live Q&A because her webinar was prerecorded; however, she still answered listeners’ questions… see below!
我也很失望没有能够在那里“亲自”为我们的谈话上周五，但我很高兴能够继续分享与圣智，大风今天的读者社区推广一些见解。金宝搏彩票
I’m going to expand on some questions that I received after the conversation on Friday, in hopes that others will find my responses useful.
How do you use the community based mentors or volunteers IN your library to support programming?
For various things – for some events I ask volunteers to help with setup/cleanup, but I try to find more “engaging” ways for them to participate as well.
- For school-age programs, I recruit retired teachers to help with planning and facilitating activity stations.
- 对于像诗188金宝搏北京赛车野餐，我在我与Andy谈话提及的事件，我聘请本地艺术家，以促进艺术创作的项目，因为它们通常可以解释和比我更好的展示的东西！
- At the moment I run a lot of our tech-related workshops myself, but I would do the same with tech workshops if I had access to a community college, computer science students from the high school, etc.
- I’ve worked with our local community theater to host a murder mystery night for young adults during our Summer Library Program for two years, so that is another way to utilize the talented volunteers in your community!
你做与当地各具特色或艺术类的任何工作？
I guess I’d need more details on this – do you mean hosting crafting or art classes in the library? We definitely offer some arts and crafts activities as part of our broader programming picture, but we don’t host formal classes on a regular basis or anything. If you mean do I connect with crafting or arts groups outside of the library, I do on an informal basis (and it usually involves inviting them in to help us with things at the library) but I do not do presentations at crafting/art classes around town (an interesting idea, though…). The closest I might come to doing that is to present to our local Literary Club; I will present on “libraries as creativity incubators” for them in early 2015.
I’d like more guidance on prioritizing outreach efforts. I’m a one-woman show in a community of a half million. I focus on early childhood but try to serve as much of the community as I can. What do you do when you are just spread too thin?
Whoa – yes, you have a lot on your plate! Of course every case and every community is different, but I personally am making early childhood/early literacy a priority this year, so I scaled back my efforts with other partners in order to put more time into connecting with early childhood partners. But, I found a way to maintain the solid connections I had established with those other partners. Instead of going twice/month and reading aloud at one of our retirement homes, I am going and doing slightly larger-scale events that include a read aloud and memory-related activities 2 times/year. Maybe there’s a way to do this with the early childhood partners you’ve connected with in your community – find a way to scale back or down, while still maintaining that good partnership you’ve formed.
Here’s a sort of half-baked idea – perhaps you could even make your personal outreach years “The Year of the Small Business Owner” or “The Year of the English Language Learners”, “The Year of the Older Adults”, etc. You could spend a full year really exploring and establishing connections with the users you’re trying to reach out to (and maybe talk with your library admins about what they’d like to see as priorities and let that help guide who you decide to approach first), and see after a year is up what things you’d like to maintain from that year. And you don’t have to continue EVERYTHING but choose 1-2 partnerships to maintain, or whatever you think is realistic. You can be real with the people you reach out to – say, “Hey, I’m really working on making connecting with [older adults, for example] a priority this year. Do you have any ideas of how we can work together?” If you do this, it’s not like you’d have to wipe the slate clean each year with your outreach efforts, but rather just make one group your main focus, while maintaining those handful of awesome connections from year to year with other groups (like I said in the top paragraph of this response).
I think balancing how much you do PROGRAMMING as outreach vs. SPREADING THE WORD helps too. Spreading the word efforts I find usually don’t take AS MUCH prep/facilitating time (think Activity Fairs, school visits, Small Business Fairs, etc.) so I can commit to more of those than, say, committing to going to a particular preschool once a week or even once a month. Finding that balance is important!
How do you partner with business’ specifically – chamber? Score organizations? One-on-one’s with small business owners? How does she identify them and partner with them?
The way this happened for me was pretty easy, to be honest – when I first started my position, I contacted the organizer of our local Women’s Entrepreneurs Group and asked if I could get on the agenda for one of their meetings (i.e., totally invited myself to that party). I did a presentation on something I figured they’d be interested in (social media for small businesses) and as part of that presentation I filled them in on a bunch of ways that the library can serve small business owners. I offered up my time for hour-long, one-on-one computer instruction and made sure that I had a signup sheet with me and passed it around. I send library updates to that group via email every once in a while, especially if we have a workshop/program coming up that might be of particular interest to them.
For a recent Chamber partnership, here’s a good example of planning a party to invite people to: for our Olde Fashioned Christmas weekend, I am working with a local library volunteer and the Chamber to do an awareness campaign called Storefront Stories – basically, families sign up to “read in windows” in businesses up and down our quaint Main Street during the Olde Fashioned Christmas weekend. This is a REALLY good excuse to call up the Chamber and say, hey, we have this idea, can you help us promote it? They alerted their email lists, Facebook group, etc. and we have the partners we need to make this program happen.
For libraries that say “this is all fine and dandy…but we’re too small and we don’t have the time/staff to do outreach” (which I hear all the time!) how does a small library hire/re-organize or find someone on staff to do outreach?
Yes – this sort of happened at “my” library before I got here – when I was hired, they were looking for someone who would mostly work on programming and outreach. I would say, if you’re hiring someone to do it, put it in the job description/posting and ask people about their experience with outreach, and for tangible examples they can point to. If they’ll be the only person doing the job, you want someone who can hit the ground running.
至于内部重组推移，我会说，最重要的是要从小做起 - 我用的是“试点”宽松在这里！从监管的角度来看，我不知道怎么劝你，当涉及到重组，因为我没有与太多的经验。无论重组你做什么，最终让工作人员开始非常小，工作的出路 - 说不定您一起谈论一个潜在的社区合作伙伴的候选人（日托，说），让他们对这项工作得到到位的事情，而不必担心我们镇里的其他四个日托接触。一旦“试点”期间完成，希望与地方合作，那么它更容易评估和接触其他潜在的合作伙伴。
安迪在我们谈话的末尾提到，我更谈了一个一对一的基础上对我的做法社区推广的方式上完全开放。我想从你们学习呢！你可以跟我在Twitter上连接@ LauraDM08orsend me an emailany time at I look forward to talking with you!
Among different strategies, another item discussed was how分析点播can help the cause. This new, affordable data solution helps libraries of all sizes quickly and easily learn more about their users and communities.
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About the Author
Laura在公共和学术图书馆曾在威斯康星州，是目前的助理主任金宝搏彩票热切免费公共图书馆在Evansville，WI。劳拉是ALA的美国图书馆的21世纪委员会的成员，并服务于教育者咨询小组长丝游戏。她的图书馆利益包括编程，特别是对儿童和年轻人;社区外展和参与;与开发和支持的强大的图书馆+艺术合作伙伴和项目。劳拉的其他利益包括瑜伽，阅读，电影，NPR和艺术创作。
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