I love your examples to explain “what is Outreach” and will credit your comments to your site.

Blessings!

Victoria

I think also in previous comments someone mentioned the need for a coordinator for marketing and outreach type activities and I couldn’t agree more. The problem might be making the argument for boards/institutions to fund such a thing for the library…

First, I notice several people referring to “marketing” as “the M word” so I feel compelled to point out that I contribute to a library marketing blog called “The M Word.” (http://themwordblog.blogspot.com/) My blog partner Nancy Dowd and I are fighting to make “marketing” less of a dirty word to librarians!

Second, some of these thoughts do relate to semantics, but they are important ones. Most librarians do not know the difference between these words, which is why I always start my conference sessions and workshops by defining them. Briefly, MARKETING is the top-tier activity; everything else you’re talking about falls under that. Advocacy, outreach, promotion, advertising, are all part of MARKETING.

As to know how and why to do all of these activities and make them work: this points out the need for every library to have a unified marketing plan (which should fall under its strategic plan). And, in my dreamworld, every library system would have a full-time position that coordinates all of this. Technically, that position should have “marketing” in the title, since all related activities (inc “outreach”) fall under that umbrella term.

Yes, what is necessary to make all of this work is a major shift in thinking and in organizational culture. I’ve been waiting a decade to see this happen and I’m still disappointed. All talk, little action.

I agree w/ what Jennifer Parsons says. She gets it. Her back & forth w/ Sarah hits on important points. What I think they are missing (most libs are missing) is actually understanding, and IMPLEMENTING, the set steps of what I call True Marketing. (see explanatory chart on my website: http://www.librariesareessential.com/library-marketing-resources/cycle-of-true-marketing/)

People in libraries do bits & pieces of marketing, then wonder why their efforts fail. Tired of watching this happen, I poured all of my knowledge from editing the Marketing Library Serivces newsletter for 15 years into a book. It came out in July, and it’s called The Accidental Library Marketer. It answers many of the questions that are being discussed in this post.

One other thought: yes, outreach, promotion, elevator speeches, etc should all be part of every librarian’s responsibility. BUT that requires training and practice. One reason that outreach itself is insuffient is that it has only people in those positions only reaching outside library walls. Library schools have not prepared staffers to do any sort of outreach or marketing. (Another reason I wrote the book.) So people in these positions need to also view fellow staffers as target audiences for their messages.

So my main thought on Emily’s orginal premise is this: I don’t think we need to kill outreach positions; they should be part of marketing positions. I don’t feel that killing the word will help make the activity part of everyone’s work. I think that librarians desperately need to be trained to reach out, to promote their work, and to shout about their own professional value. But there does need to be a position that coordinates all of this — just asking everyone to do “outreach” w/o direction and coordination leads to what we have now — lots of enthusiasm, very little serious success, and almost no way to measure (and therefore prove) that success and value.

It gets depressing when you really think about it, doesn’t it? We have a very long way to go.

Outreach = (social services) “Provision of services to those unable to seek them.” (Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language, 1989)

“In order to meet the changing and growing needs of our communities, it is becoming a basic service to reach out beyond our walls and make library services not only accessible but also relevant… This means service that goes beyond the traditional realm of what we have offered in the past, and far beyond the clientele to whom we have offered it.” Marcia Trotta, Managing Library Outreach Programs: A How-to-do-it manual for librarians (New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, 1993).