SL2.0 Suggestion Camp: Library Powered

LIBRARIANS, I CAN’T HEAR YOU! GIVE ME ANOTHER “LIBRARY POWERED!” LIKE YOU REALLY MEAN IT!

Are you someone who needs a drill instructor to push you into marketing your services? If so, be assured you are not alone. Marketing what you and your library can do for the school seems to be a hard item for many librarians to tackle. Luckily, your friendly drill suggestor has some tips for spreading the message about your library.

This summer, a couple of member librarians from the system and I attended a series of workshops on marketing and branding for libraries. They were quite interesting, and we all felt that we picked up some great information and very helpful tips. I will be going into more detail about marketing throughout the year as we tackle the development of a draft marketing/branding plan for our region’s school libraries. Here, to get the year kicked off in the School Library 2.0 way, is a sneak preview of some upcoming features.

Suggestions:
1) The first thing that is needed for this mini-marketing bit is a message. For this suggestion, I will be using the message from my writing about School Library 2.0 – Library Powered! Now obviously the message needs to be expanded a bit. We need to mix it up and keep it fresh. Here are some ideas for possible messages. Okay, so those aren’t the best little messages, but please accept my Creative Common’s Powered approval to modify as desired. When you come up with some great new ideas…please share!

2) The stickers in the Word document were designed using a template for Avery Label #5293. These stickers come in packages of 600 for about $13/package – or about $0.02 per sticker. Feel free to refer to the application of a sticker as sharing your $0.02 worth about the importance of what you and the library do for the school.

3) Consider branching out with your new message. Find some appealing little bit to use as a logo and add it to the top of notes – especially ones that accompany resources you created with your professional skills and knowledge. Custom imprint shops can also create sticky-note pads with a custom logo and message – a quick search gave me a ballpark price of about $25 for 10, 50-note pads – about $0.05 per sticky-note. The price is more expensive as it is for a very small quantity order, but think about the impact of having every book you pull for a teacher’s lesson show up with a custom Library Powered sticky to display the note…

As the saying goes – sometimes you have to spend money to make money. Well, sometimes you also have to spend money to get your message out there. Trust me, in the grand scheme of marketing budgets, $38 for some labels and some custom sticky-notes is a very, very small drop. We have a valueable service, but the value added to a school that doesn’t know how/why to use their library is zero.

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