PLA Blog

This institute ran for 6 hours, but it was well worth it. Because of its length, and the mileage covered, I’ll break my posts up into parts for easier consumption, and start with an introduction to the campaign.

The Smartest Card Campaign, with the tagline “The Smartest Card: Get it. Use it. @ Your Library” was launched in September 2004 to coincide with National Library Card Sign-up Month, with three goals:

1. The library card will be the most valued and used card in every wallet.
2. Funders/community leaders will value and support America’s public libraries.
3. All library staff will understand the value of the campaign and be enthusiastic supporters.

Quite the lofty and ambitious plan, right? At the same time, the plan represents the level of importance libraries and their cards should have anyway, so it’s a good plan, and I think it’s on a path to success.

This isn’t your typical campaign, with a limited time span to produce results and highly-structured implementation guidelines. Since a great deal of this plan is based on a wide-scale marketing of the library, the key will be consistent and strong branding to help the program the long haul. To allow every library to create a brand that really works for their particular library and constituency, The Smartest Card Campaign is designed to be flexible, providing a toolkit to get libraries started, and encouragement for libraries to be creative with the graphics, content examples, press releases, and templates to tailor the program to their local needs. And the PLA board is committed 100% to seeing the plan succeed.

The key factor in this campaign is that it’s not just about library cards. While increased use, funding, and cardholders are measurable results, advocacy is really at the root of the program, and staff buy-in, from pages and Friends to librarians and trustees, is essential. Everyone who works for the library is not only a representative of the library, but an advocate who can speak to the library’s importance in and contributions to the community, and are trained as such, then encouraged to go out and talk it up with patrons, community leaders, local government, and businesses.

The upsides that I see in this program:

• With a program this flexible, it’s harder for libraries to say, “This program really doesn’t fit our library, so we won’t do it.”
• A great deal of work is being put in to ensure that even small libraries without PR representatives can work with the basic materials provided without even customizing them to get started.
• The benefits are really clear, and the campaign is dedicated to supporting libraries however they can.

The downsides:

• I can imagine a library saying, “It’s too much work to customize these materials.”
• Trying to balance the branding provided by the campaign with any local branding brings up some issues.
• This level of change requires library staff open to change, and the success of the program is dependent on the buy-in of the staff.

A lot of good stuff came out of the long meeting. More posts to follow…

Tags: ALAMidwinter2005, conferences

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 15th, 2005 at 1:14 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.