Outreach to your community

1. Contextual Outreach:
Making the Library Matter
for your Community
Presented by Amy Mather
April 19, 2012

2. Agenda
• Who are we not reaching?
• Vibrant communities
• Library as linchpin
• Marketing
• Business Outreach & Reengaging your community
• Contextual outreach & the future of libraries
• Big picture

3. The patron exodus
“we are failing to engage people who are a huge
portion of our tax base and potential advocates:
adults between the age of 20 and 40ish.”
Abigail Goben, LISNews, February 15, 2010
Don’t Forget About Us

4. They continue to frequent…

6. New community work spaces

8. Intellectual entertainment

9. Intellectual entertainment

10. Intellectual entertainment

12. My game changer
Gary Vaynerchuk
– A glut of user-generated content has changed the game.
Any more, context is more important than content,
because there's so much of the latter. "There's so much
content that comes through," Vaynerchuk says, "that
there’s only so much you can consume."

13. Vibrant communities
What makes a vibrant community? Often times
community development is reduced to the
development of physical space or capital, but a
vibrant community is made up of much more,
including: social, human, environmental, financial,
political & cultural capital.
From I to We: Changing the Conversation 2011 Young
Professional Summit. Holistic Community

14. Six components of a vibrant
community
• Physical Capital
• Social Capital
• Cultural Capital
• Financial Capital
• Environmental Capital
• Human Capital

15. Physical capital
Neighborhood
Associations

16. Social capital
• Your Neighborhood Association
• Your Local Faith Community

17. Cultural capital

18. Financial capital

19. Environmental capital

20. Human capital

21. What was missing?

22. Library as linchpin & long tail
(Nexus and long reach)
• Leverage - what is your ROI?
– Outcome measurements – measure impact
• Adaptive – More proactive, less reactive
• Patrons versus communities – pulse
• Strategic alliances versus partners

23. Market segmentation
• Helps organizations find new customers, gain
insights, improve service delivery and become
customer-centric
• Tapestry segmentation classifies neighborhoods into
one of 65 segments
– Douglas County has 42 of the 65 segments
– The top eight segments account for just over half of the population
(266,352 people) while the top 12 segments account for two-thirds
of the population (336,671 people)

24. Tapestry market segmentation
• 20’s /singles/couples (organized by lifestage)
– Young and Restless (22.2)
– Old and Newcomers (11.4)
– Metropolitans (3.8)
– College Towns (2.5)

25. Tapestry market segmentation
• Single/Couple Professional
– Enterprising Professionals (6.1)
– In Style (1.5)
– Laptops and Lattes (3.2)
– Metro Renters (1.8)

27. Tapestry market segmentation up close

29. A closer look ‘Young and Restless’

30. Business Outreach - Resources
• Leverage your databases – target appropriately
– Business Decision
• Bibliocommons
• Libguides and partnerships
• Book Clubs
• Workshops & Classes – Have Laptop Will Travel
• Business Center

31. Business Outreach – Social Media
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Pinterest

32. Business Outreach – Get Involved
• Young Professionals
• Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce
• Leadership Omaha
• Educator Directors meetings
• Entrepreneurs
• Attend meetups& other social business events

33. Reengaging your community
• Entertainment - Board Silly, Craft events
• Connections – Book Clubs, Speed Dating
• Community outreach – Farmer’s market, Buy the Big
O, Young Professional Summit, Bar Camp
• Business outreach
• Issuing library cards…wherever you are!
• Facebook,Twitter, & Pinterest

34. Contextual outreach & the future of libraries
• Seth Godinwas right:
“Want to watch a movie? Netflix is a better librarian,
with a better library, than any library in the country.
The Netflix librarian knows about every movie, knows
what you've seen and what you're likely to want to
see. If the goal is to connect viewers with movies,
Netflix wins.”

35. Contextual outreach & the future of libraries
• Seth goes on to say…
“The library is no longer a warehouse for dead books.
Just in time for the information economy, the library
ought to be the local nerve center for information.”

36. Contextual outreach & the future of libraries
• And Seth brings it home with
“The next library is a place, still. A place where people
come together to do co-working and coordinate and
invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a
librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who
can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge
and access to information to bear.”

37. People will create their own space

38. Big picture
• Environmental Scan
• Find the Woo in your organization
• Get involved!
• Bibliocommons
• Discover stuff outside the library world
• Outreach
• 24 hour advocacy

39. Questions?
• amather@omahalibrary.org
• facebook/matherita
• facebook.com/WhateverMathers
• pinterest.com/matherita/
• linkedin.com/in/amymather
• prezi.com/user/matherita/