Sign Wisconsin Assignment of Partnership Interest Online

Document type sign assignment of partnership interest wisconsin online

good afternoon hi everybody i am jamie machek the education consultant for the wisconsin valley library service thank you for joining us this afternoon for our second webinar in the building and then maintaining customer relations theory today we're going to talk about library engagement what your community needs to know and how to respond we have pat wagner with us presenting the series out of colorado she's been a library consultant for over 40 years um is an excellent presenter and if you missed last week's presentation i will post the recording of that in the chat um and just want to remind you the third presentation is next wednesday so not next tuesday next wednesday um so without further ado pat please begin great thank you jamie and thank you folks for joining us today and jamie failed to mention that i am a proud graduate of george nelson shrimp or high school in kenosha wisconsin and lived in milwaukee for several years before i moved here to colorado this particular program about engaging your community and responding to their uh things is is almost like one of the core values that i teach these days and it goes back to when i first started helping libraries with strategic planning and going into various communities and running community assessments and talking about what libraries are for and i want to share a story about somebody who inspired me very early in my career as a library consultant her name is annette chozick and annette was not a quote library and she was educated woman didn't have an mls working for a large library district here in colorado and because of one of those weird political anomalies that happened in the middle of the city and county of denver is a separate government agency called the city of glendale and it's its own political base own mayor owns city council all this stuff and it's in kind of just between you and me a little more shabby part of town where everything is high-rise apartment buildings and part of our what was that our hospital program there with the university of colorado some motels some strip malls and everything but not what you really think is a city and the library was one room in town hall which was a small town hall so it's always been kind of a weird place i'm sorry glendale's weird and so annette was assigned to take over this room that was little better than a reading room in this library unbeknownst to her or the people who ran the city because of local religious organizations 3 000 immigrant russians people who were on the whole mostly older not english-speaking not um well to do by any means were sort of plopped into the middle of glendale and these were people who because of their health and age and other things would never become american citizens but they were there on hardship visas so annette and the town of glendale woke up one day to have 300 russian citizens there and the question was how to serve them well annette was amazing she immersed herself in the rule the role of refugees and immigrants reached out to the community and basically started from what is it that you need and she kind of lucked out because russians are passionate about books and passionate about culture but because everyone came from different parts of russia and poland and so on some of these people have hated each other for centuries she ended up with something like 40 different book clubs because nobody could stand to be in a book club if one of them from another village was in the particular book club but then she started asking what is it that you need and she didn't have any preconceptions of what a library could do so one interesting problem was that these folks again were on hardship visas and they had to renew their visa with the russian government every two or three years well if you can imagine you have a bunch of little old ladies who don't speak russia don't speak english who live in denver and the nearest embassy for the russian government was san francisco so they were forced in effect to go on greyhound buses sometimes with a little group of friends go to san francisco get their papers stamped and come back to denver that was not acceptable to annette and that's a nice lady and i'm not a pushy lady i don't know how she did it somehow she convinced the russian um ambassador in san francisco to come to colorado once a year and he would set up in this branch of the arapaho public library district in glendale and he'd set up a table and all the old ladies could come to him and get their documents stamped that was the first thing she did the second thing is that there is no school or school district in glendale per se they're part of the larger arapahoe district many miles away so every child who went to public school was bus out of that little anomaly a group of high-rise apartments and such and then basically sent miles away to the school and then would come back and there was nothing for them to do and most of them weren't necessarily russian some of them were but there was nothing for them so she um and they were in this large building so she arranged with i think it was the baptist church for them to have an after-school program in the basement of the city and county building and most of the russians were jewish and it was sort of like a shared joke that no we really don't think our children are going to be you know kidnapped by the baptists in the basement and forced baptized or anything like that i mean everyone was so sensible about it and so they could have after-school activities together nice and loud and noisy and work off energy before they came upstairs to the library she went to every possible place she could find for grants social service grants of different kinds health wellness food grants whatever and she said usually she was the only librarian in the room she did such a good job at these things she actually received an award from the russian government for the way that she took care of the immigrants well some of the people in the library community in colorado and elsewhere were horrified that she was not doing typical library services and one day she was confronted at a meeting and someone says you're doing things that a librarian doesn't do and she took librarian to be a compliment even though at the time she didn't have her mls and she said i'm a librarian i can do anything and so i think of i think of annette at times like this because she was one of the first people i met in library land decades ago who felt that i was there to serve the people regardless of what they wanted so my default for the strategic plan for any library as you're there to support the better future of the people you serve usually what this means on their terms and i'm gratified to see that in the last five to ten years more and more libraries are becoming customer centered maybe in a way that they weren't before in what we might think of as a more traditional library so when we're talking about library engagement i want us to start with the basics and the basics is that you know what no matter what kind of advertising we do or promotion or advocacy work no matter what else we do it comes down to how people feel they were treated when they walk through the doors and we can't indulge people who think it's okay to come to work grumpy or rude or to show their distaste for a certain class of people for example and so my belief is right now and i feel stronger about this every day that if you work in any library anywhere in america and you don't like people and you're not willing to treat everyone in a respectful manner you really shouldn't be working for a library in the united states another thing we have to think about before we start talking about collecting data and finding out more about our communities even if we live in a small community that we think we know everything about them that we really want to respect the issues of privacy so there's three issues first of all that we should consider one issue is if you're collecting data on people always voluntarily and it would be information beyond what you might have in their in your database regarding information from their library card you know name address a phone number something like that how are you keeping that data private we've been in business 44 years and we have our database of our customers that goes back that many years and we have about right now about 4 000 names never once in all those years have we ever put the database up on the cloud we it is not accessible to other people uh it's behind closed doors on a computer if you want to think of it that way so never in 44 years have we had a data breach never in 44 years has anyone had their data shared in a way that they didn't want and we don't share our data we don't share our data actually so um a lot of people trust us because of that they're willing to give us information because they know that we are taking every opportunity to safeguard that the second thing and this is kind of touchy there are places you might go to get data for example there's a lot of information you can get from people specifically and generalized from different kinds of public databases you can go to the voter registration poll database in most states and be able to pull up a lot of information about an individual are they registered with a particular political party you know even sometimes things like income and stuff like that i mean it's amazing what you can get and then you have to think about i want to use this data in a positive way to determine more about the community i serve but if i'm taking data from those existing sources first of all do i know that people gave those people explicit permission to gather that information and make it public and was it with full permission of people you know it's the difference between opting in and opting out did people have to opt in to have their information gathered meaning that they had to make a choice and say yes it's okay for this particular organization to take my data and use it or did they have to opt out meaning it was already decided that they were sharing their information and they could opt out and say no thank you those are the kinds of things i would like to know before i use somebody else's data even if it was a state or federal or local government agency even if it was an extremely benign non-profit organization you know and sometimes you have to chastise other people and say this is great you have all this information how did you gather it and could you show me where people gave you permission for this and then a lot of what we do is interviewing right we talk to people in focus groups we have conversations with people about all sorts of things sometimes people tell you stuff they might tell you about an illness in the family they might tell you that a spouse or someone in their family has lost their job might find out something going on that's confidential to the family now in general terms we might say you know we have seen according to local statistics from the county courthouse we have noticed that there's been an uptick in bankruptcies and there's been an uptick in who who has filed for bankruptcy so i think it's okay to say boy 15 more people are filing for bankruptcy this year than last year in our county how does that what does that tell us about the economics of the county but on the other hand we're not going to provide information that basically lets neighbors guess oh my goodness that pat wagner she and her husband went bankrupt 14 times wow that was interesting so people have to respect that and you have to teach that to your staff make that part of the ethics of library privacy and confidentiality and make sure that whoever is doing any kind of formal interviews on behalf of your library understands that as well so several things we hope will happen first and foremost is the fact that you want to partner with the people in your library you don't want to be making decisions over people's lives about how you're going to spend tax money and what you're going to do for them while you're sitting basically at someone's kitchen table drinking adult beverages making decisions with the people for whom you're making the decisions never consulted about what they might like what they want i remember a librarian in kansas told me that they had gotten a grant to do outreach services to the hispanic community and one of the things they decided to do was to have evening programs that were programs for kind of like an adult child story hour where they would read in spanish and english young adult adult stories appropriate for families and they'd have a meal and so on and it was to provide free entertainment for people and it was also to provide a way for people to practice their language skills and it was aimed at the second and third generation migrant worker community in that part of kansas well the first three or four times they did the program nobody showed up and the director was very puzzled but she said we're going to keep going and doing it and she said you know i should have done this at the beginning but she went and talked to some people in the community and they said well among our people a lot of the adults or even young adults in the family have more than one job the person with the job gets to use the car we only have one car in our family so it's lovely that you're doing these evening programs but we don't have transportation that's why and she said the director said if i had bothered to have some folks from that community involved in the planning and programming we would have solved that from the beginning as it was what they did was they moved the program to a place where there was ready access to public transportation and they also talked about carpooling and everything and once they solved that problem slowly but surely the numbers went up and it became a very popular program but that was kind of embarrassing for her she told me i'm never going to do that again finding more ways to be able to interact with your community outside the library walls and i think the pandemic is forcing that on a lot of people to realize we have to be outside rather than inside and regardless of what the rules are in your part of the country because i know we have people outside of wisconsin who are watching the program today everyone has to make decisions for themselves make on local practice how to deal with rules regarding masks and social distancing and so on nonetheless nonetheless how much of what we're doing is under that umbrella of we just do this in the library verse or for the library versus look at all the partnerships that we have basically to start looking at programming and i still run into this a little bit where people do programming based on what staff likes to do this happened in the panhandle of nebraska a few years ago where again it was an evaluation of a failing program and why so many uh so few of the young people were coming to after school young adult programming and finally they got someone on the staff i know this sounds a little hokey who had the guts to ask the kids why aren't you coming in and the kids said well basically the programming is for quote the old ladies on the staff and has nothing to do with us it's what they think a kid from 1945 would want so the new person who was awesome their new youth librarian put together a program where they had a youth panel who would collect ideas and give advice and she of course oversaw everything they did and when i was visiting last time they decided to put on their own world's fair because they had so many people from different countries living in that community and everybody they had this great thing with booths and food and uh crafts and things like that they also charged a little bit of money a dollar or two the kids were insistent you have to charge even a dollar or two to make it worthwhile and um people were invited to bring a friend well the first time they did the old programming they had three to five kids show up the next time when they were doing the new style program they had 15 20 30 40. uh by the time they were putting together this little world's fair they had 50 or 60 or 70 kids showing up you know this stuff isn't really brain surgery when you start really thinki g that our job is to be immersed in the lives of the people we serve and yes that's going to change what our library looks like but it's not either or it doesn't mean that we throw out all the traditional services but people are in need and they're in need more and more every day and libraries have to decide where they are and then um the hard decisions of what we're going to stop doing completely this is going to be heartbreaking for some people who have done a darn good job for years offering programming and services and even how the collection is developed and that's going to change and you can't do everything for everyone so i tell people that that's the hardest part of becoming more customer centered is what you won't have the time energy attention and resources for anymore so what are we going to talk we're going to talk about what this idea of library engagement is we're going to talk about what community organizers know i went to one of those hippie colleges in vermont in the late 60s and early 70s and was taught community organizing and what it means and got involved with that as far as helping people make decisions over their lives about what they wanted what they cared about i know it's gotten a big rap bad rap but you know the principles are something a lot of people use in a positive way so i'm going to talk about some of the mistakes that we're taught not to make when we're trying to do outreach and engage in the communities we serve then we're going to talk about the heart of what we'll be discussing today which is research and the idea that we're preparing for market research to really know our customers 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year it's not once a year kinds of questions that we can ask people directly or indirectly and identifying groups of people cohort basically says that it's a group of people who share certain things like all people over 85 all women who are stay-at-home moms who have um two children under the age of five all women and men who own businesses together all people who own one dog two dogs three dogs four or more dogs they or they don't know because they haven't counted today so these are cohorts and cohorts translate into target audiences to get very specific about what can we do for this particular group of people and then the question is what can your library do and we're going to sort of go through some ideas we're going to leave time at the end for questions and so if you have questions or comments jamie and i will be checking in uh and seeing if there's any questions and comments usually i wait till the end because most of the time uh there are questions that will be answered but jamie if if she sees something she thinks is pressing she knows that she can interrupt me and we can go from there okay first of all introduction to library engagement okay it starts with this idea and we talked about this in last week's program about marketing is awareness change and response we become aware of our customers we change what we're doing and then we respond to them in publicity advocacy and such and we do it over and over again and we have to remember it's not one survey once a year please please it happens more than that the second group of things is that every encounter you have with the people in your community during this process if you're doing a formal initiative for example sending out surveys whatever it is it's not just about collecting statistics and numbers every single encounter that you have with people is building a relationship that stakeholders so we have to be aware how do we treat people during this process do we listen to them really interested in what they have to say do we feel defensive my rule of thumb is when you're doing market research you don't do advocacy you do you listen to what they're doing and you say thank you you don't correct them if they don't like the library you listen so you don't turn everything into a sales pitch i know that some people disagree with me on that but it's hard for me to believe that someone is really sincere about hearing my point of view when then i get some sort of sales pitch at the end i don't want the sales pitch thank you very much maybe there's a different and better place for the sales pitch or to be done in a very modest way like thank you so much for your time and here's a brochure for the library and thank you for your your input because we're going to do this this and this with us all right so remember there's a human being in front of you it's not just about numbers on a piece of paper also and a lot of times when i'm doing this program at a public meeting people say what is that one best way what is the one way that i can get information because this takes so much time and energy and i just want to ask people once and get over it and not have to ask them for a year i don't know the one way what i really believe is that there's lots of different ways that suit different people and that you're doing things all the time and trying new things and from all this different kind of information you're putting something together now think about when you go to a good doctor a good doctor doesn't just take your blood pressure they just don't sample blood they don't have you just excuse my french pee in a cup they do lots of different things and lots of different tests even if you're just going in for your annual physical they'll listen to your heart they'll listen to your lungs they'll look at the reflex they'll examine your skin they'll look in your eyes a lot of different things because so many disorders have not one or two or three symptoms for five or six or seven symptoms and wouldn't you be suspicious of a doctor who never took your blood pressure only drew blood or only drew blood and never listened to your harder lungs the same thing is true in market research think of it as you're looking at the health of the organization and you have to do it a lot of different ways now this has to do with how we conduct ourselves in public when we're trying to do that 24 7 market research and it's as simple as that when you walk into a room and say there's an event in your your community maybe it's a fundraising supper you know pancake breakfast maybe it's a meeting of one of the social clubs like the optimists or the elks maybe it's out of county fair maybe that's out of a convention whatever it is you're walking in with a group of strangers and you're looking around and you see people you know and people you don't know and if you're representing the library it's easy to just hang out in a corner with the people you know why not use that as an opportunity to connect with other people and you're in a safe environment go up to a stranger and say hi nice that you're here my pat my name's pat wagner i work for the local library um what brings you here what are you about that's something i always do at conferences and conventions i get to meet lots of fascinating people that way and i take it upon myself to make them comfortable if you feel a little shy around people pretend that you're the person hosting the event you want other people to feel more comfortable that goes back to wisconsin nice it's true of other states i know but wisconsin has a special kind of niceness so when you're doing your library engagement programs formally or informally maybe start with the people you don't know start with the people out of sight start with the people who are different from you they're still even in small towns the wrong side of the tracks start with the people on the wrong side of the tracks in effect so what is that this is a i think a very uh accurate picture of a group of very competent intelligent community organizers so what is it that community organizers know what was i taught all those years back in vermont okay first of all taking action without doing research first and research might even just making some phone calls like if the lady in kansas had just made a couple phone calls she would have found oh it's a bad idea for us to run this at night because people don't have transportation and the particular site that we have there's no transportation at night we have to rethink this so don't be complacent particularly if you're in a small town don't be thinking that you know everybody in town and everything about them you may only know them in one aspect of being in town like we had a library district here in colorado that was very prosperous for a number of years and was hit really really really hard in the last recession but the people coming into the library were still well dressed and pleasant and happy and they seemed fine and it wasn't until the library started talking to social services that social services said do you know that now something like one-fourth of the people in this county are using food banks and you don't know because they go to um a different county outside but they've been telling us in interviews do you know that probably um one-fourth of the houses in our rich community are in foreclosure did you know that if you actually visit one of those houses that there's no furniture because they've sold all the furniture but they're keeping up appearances so never be complacent that you uh think you you know what's going on in the community and make sure that you have that think tank of people who are part of the group that you're trying to contact some people love statistics and we're in this crazy world where everything is about metrics metrics are great my husband who's a trained economist refuses to use the word metrics he said it's just numbers and then he says an adult word so we can't just rely on what we see on a map a map is not the territory meaning the abstractions we get from the statistics can be very telling but life is more complex and nuanced than that we want to make sure that we get to listen to people's stories firsthand and not have experts and professionals and specialists interpret for us what's going on for folks we want to be able to gather information from lots of different sources and i think what's most important and i know library people are good at this but just for the record uh sometimes we think that they should always come to us well wouldn't it be nice if we went to their events if we went to their meetings to their conferences went to restaurants in their part of town were proactive about offering services to them rather than thinking that oh they must be oh apathetic or indifferent because they don't come to our events and what's important to us as well sort of imposing what we think is right for them rather than thinking about what do we learn about what they need on their terms so in community organizing there's always this transition period where we don't start with our own agenda we say we are here first and foremost to listen and make connections and if people want us to take out the garbage we'll take out the garbage if they need someone to babysit we'll babysit if they need help with grant writing for their organization we will help them with grant writing for their organization first and foremost this is like you know gospel when you're talking about community organizing also we want to go in and let's say that we've decided that for our community we want to do um a food initiative now this just happened to me as part of a strategic planning process for a county government here in colorado well mentioned which and we had a community assessment meeting with community members but also heads of different non-profits and agencies i would say the whole county maybe 5 000 people maybe the town maybe had 1400 people not a big city and at one point a gentleman who was a community activist about food desert issues for poor people who lived in the county stood up and started raging at some of the city officials who were there about they didn't pay attention to the needs the food needs of people i have to say the politicians in the room and the appointed officials much more polite than i would have been but i was there just to make sure nobody hit anybody you know it's like okay and response and oh this woman i mean she's in my pantheon of heroes she stood up and said first of all to the gentleman thank you for your concern we have the same concerns i'm guessing that you don't know that a year ago the city got a grant for x amount of money to deal with the food desert issues in our county we have a food bank we have a food truck that comes up once a week with fresh fruits and vegetables and so on we have a sponsoring thing where everybody gets a 50 set of coupons if you want to call that they can come and buy the food in effect for free and we put a note under every single door of every single trailer park house and everything in the entire county and we've been working on this ever since well and she didn't gloat or anything and the man said i had no idea and someone else chimed in so nice they said you know there's so many different things even in our small town happening it's easy to overlook that oh and by the way he lived out of the county so he didn't get the piece of paper under his door and i run into that so many times but i always tell people before you get on your high horse and think that something isn't being done let's find out what is being done and see if we can support their efforts rather than take things away from them and again ignoring existing concerns even if they seem petty to you if people see you working to solve problems quickly it's a way of building again trust and respect for other folks disrespecting existing leadership even if you don't agree with them and discounting what it is they know or don't know uh we demean people because their english skills aren't maybe as good as ours are they don't speak as well they're not as educated as well you that's all stuff to be very aware of when you're trying to involve an engagement again coming back to decision making this is an obsession of mine if you're trying to help a group of adults or even young people you get those adults that you want to help into a decision-making position so you're not just asking for advice that's a good step but you really make them in a position where they can vote and don't say well we're the ones who have i have the degree i know more than you i don't want to hear that coming out of the lips of any library person at all from now till the end of time please and i've heard people say that and not allowing time for other people to think and speak about what's going on kind of having blinders on about your community and who's there first and foremost communication tell people who you are what you're doing how you're doing it praise other people give credit to other people don't make people have to guess do everything in your power to do what you do transparently take criticisms even minor criticism serious seriously and do your best to say yes even if it's a little issue do your best to say yes thank you for the feedback and then communicate when you've responded to people big thing you give credit give credit give credit not sharing resources with people right kind of hoarding hoarding isn't a good thing and when you do make mistakes and we all make mistakes publicly apologize as quickly as possible and fix it as quickly as you can make fixing mistakes a priority in what you do even with limited resources so how do we prepare for all this good stuff that we're doing 24 7 well first of all you want to make sure everyone's on board and everyone understands that from now on they're part of the library engagement community they're part of marketing and market research they're part of engaging customers and it's in every single job description even with people in the back room that you represent the library you care about it and you have to be pretty tough if you hear people cynically undermining what you're trying to do and it happens and i've i just was involved with a situation in the library last year in southeastern part of the united states where we found out to our horror that it turned out the assistant director didn't like the direction the library was going in outreach and was in private meetings making that uh very clear not just to people outside the library but to employees as well there were some di cussions about that i was not privy to them thank you very much but it shouldn't be like the five people on the committee and everybody else doesn't have to pay attention it's something everyone thinks so it's becomes part of the life blood of the library thinking about connecting with people you serve so when we talk about these more formal initiatives there's there's three ideas first of all as i've just mentioned it's what everybody does every day being interested in who comes into the library interested in your community outside so it's what you do years ago when nancy bolt was the state librarian of colorado they would have their staff meeting at the state library and she would assign people every week to attend at least one meeting during working hours her goal was that worked very well that when anything significant was happening in schools in economics and meetings public forums whatever there was someone from the library there even if they only got on the podium and spoke for five minutes she said people know the state library and our library community because we show up so it's not necessarily just what happens in the library but outside as well and then what are the things we can be doing as part of what's ongoing for example if we have a program of some kind that we're doing we shouldn't um just have people come in and people leave we should have maybe a few minutes where people are mixing and talking together maybe have someone from the library going around and asking questions oh how did you come to to be here anything we send out in any promotion part of the uh promotion should be and when you register or sign up if that's possible what brought you here how did you hear about it right um to to have people who are there representing the library communicating with people during the program and before as well and then the standalone initiatives is when you say you know what we need a county-wide survey we need to set up some formal focus groups we need to set up something in the library when people come into the library they have a way of polling and telling us what they like and what they don't like and like anything else doing this kind of market research for library engagement is a project it's a project just like any other project and what are the rules of running a project we have to know who's the point person who's responsible for getting it done what are the written goals not just that we complete the survey but what do we actually hope to accomplish um see we're doing a survey on the needs of job hunters by the time we're done and finished with the services and programs a year or two or three later can we go to people and find out you know what they actually were able to find more and better jobs because of the program than not having it so we don't want to get caught up in just what we call the activity trap of just doing stuff without think what the ultimate outcome is we want to keep our eyes on the goal do we have a timeline about what needs to be done in what period of time and how do we check that it's being done what's the allotted staff time what are the budgets and resources we have and is there follow-through and evaluation so you can see there's a lot of stuff that's going on even with a simple initiative and it's almost always that we underestimate how much time money attention and staff time it takes to do anything and this stuff can be pretty overwhelming i've i've seen people literally abandon a marketing initiative after all the information was taken in because they were just burned out this idea that it's sufficient to gather statistics is a little foolish and i can understand why sometimes a library board trustee or someone in the community who's experienced with this might push back and say you know this is a total waste of time yeah you're going to gather all these statistics and put together a report we don't need another white paper we need action so we have to think about the fact that gathering all that information is the smallest component of getting something done it's necessary but it's not an end in itself it's a means and sometimes it is better to bring in people who haven't been there before no this is not the pat wagner early retirement speech you have great people in wisconsin and other parts of the country but maybe there's someone in your community who isn't closely tied to the library and maybe that's a good thing that they can look at what's going on with fresh eyes and maybe see things other people don't not because they're smarter but because everyone else is too close to the situation so what are some questions to ask now the next two pieces we're going through have a lot of small type and a lot of information and we invite you to get copies of the slides and the black and white handout if possible but to be able to review these questions but we don't we we would have to have a program two or three times as long but i wanted to make sure you have that information that you could use as a takeaway later so before we do we have to be a little humble all research methods can fail because they're limited by many things by our expectations by time and money how people like to communicate stuff uh by being only a sample because we haven't interviewed in depth every single person on the planet but also there is always a gap between people what people say in a formal interview on a survey and how they actually behave so we want to think of this as a snapshot to give us information but it's not like a scientific survey there's no such thing in my opinion as science when we're talking about sociology it's a way of learning about things but it really isn't like being in a laboratory with test tubes pouring chemicals and looking at chemical reactions but we can get very very useful information not perfect but very useful information and in asking about what's the best way to do it we have formal versus informal we have ways that people get information just talking to someone on the street or in a grocery store where you say whoa that's something that's a clue about something going on we should investigate further again qualitative which is about describing things versus numbers notice i use the n-word numbers uh structured interviews where you have a list of formal questions versus an open-ended interview where it's like well tell me what's on your mind what's important to you and then again the importance of people in their stories versus statistics so we're we're trying to find a balance over time in in one round we might not get to every way of doing things but over time we might say let's look at what we can do this year versus next year versus next year as well lots of different ways and i've already talked about some of these surveys interviews focus groups maps and databases like obviously all the wonderful databases out there from the government and other people standards and interviews particularly if you have for example people in your region or state federal agencies government agencies or businesses doing what i would consider very robust sorts of interviews and data and again ethically if it's something that you can sh they can share with you that will be a great source you don't have to do everything yourself from scratch so here are some of the questions you might say what are what do you know about your customers some of this you can just pull off of your library card records where do they live in the zip codes in your area what neighborhoods what precincts what is it that they do that they have an obligation to do are they a stay-at-home caregiver who is taking care of an elderly person plus running a small business who are they responsible for i think this is a real pressing question um in the pandemic even more so than before who are they trying to take care of what kind of help do they need are they in school online hybrid going in person k through 16 k through 22. what are they doing on this uh what kind of government support do they need and this is a place that you can get anonymous statistics about what percentage of uh families are how would you say can take different kinds of customer support i was working with a wealthy suburb uh suburban library in the philadelphia area last year and they were talking about how wealthy their community was well it's wealthy for people who live there and have homes and jobs and investment not so much for the working class and they were pretty horrified to find out the percentage of families 25 of the families were eligible for school lunches and through no phony manipulation of the data they just weren't paying attention to who lived in their community what do they like to do for fun what's fun for them these days how do they get food that's a more and more important issue how do they get clothing household goods and so on by the way a little statistic from colorado in denver county the request for help with food from food pantries and food banks since march has increased by 300 percent and no we don't have 300 percent more people living in the city and county of denver how do they get around um english speaking at home 25 of the people who live in denver do not speak english at home how much disposable income do they have if any are they slipping into poverty uh how nostalgic are they do are they planning for the future are they just in kind of survival mode of different kinds and one of the things to be aware of is to be aware of what we call aggregated data or someone will come up with a statistic for example i did a project recently for some libraries in florida about the digital divide and one thing i discovered was that the national statistics would show a particular county is doing very very well like 89 percent of the households have adequate wi-fi but if you sort of started going into the different cities and communities you found out those statistics were widely different and that there were still parts of that same county that was being reported as doing pretty good where it was closer to like 15 or 20 percent so we'd lose a lot of information by just looking at metadata and big figures beware of that beware of the big fat numbers that people will say well it's okay because we have information to know that 75 percent of the people in our community are gainfully employed but if you went by precinct by neighborhood by block by zip code you might find something different so now we can talk a little bit about the cohorts and these are like story snapshots someone once told me it's like we're doing the backstory for actors in a tv show or we're trying to tell you just a little bit about people or they said it's a little bit about like playing the people watching game where you pretend you know something about them so think of these as stories and all of these are real examples from community assessment programs that i've been involved with in small and medium-sized libraries in recent years maybe there's a group of people who they're frail elderly not able to get along without assistance but what you find is that because of the demographics of their particular family that they all grew up together and guess what you have frail elderly sick people taking care of other frail elderly sick people or they're a caretaker for someone with a cognitive challenge like the person is autistic they have a son who's autistic but now the son is 60 and mom's 80 and um i've seen this in families and that's different than when the kid was in school you know 40 years ago that single mom it's usually a mom or a single dad they have teenage children and they might also be taking care of grandchildren as well there's a high school student who's desperately trying to take those ap classes but they have really bad wi-fi at home and they need that extra help again i come back to food because it's a it's a trend that's that's growing in libraries in terms of serving the food desert issues and even in towns where you think people have access to food and so that's their big issue people who like the example i used with that suburban rich county middle class families with kids who are about to lose their home because there's been a loss of work and they can't get the basic necessities of life inexpensively and that's what's there on they're a retired couple with independent income they're doing okay they want to start a new business they're they're interested still in finance and investments i just ran into this because a few weeks ago i was doing a community assessment program and helping with the strategic plan for a one of our lovely communities here in colorado sort of a isolated mountain community where you've got tourists and you've got ranching and farming you don't have a lot of industry or manufacturing and a whole bunch of people who've retired there were very interested in the library providing more cultural events of different kinds the people who are the activists and the causes that we have every single kind of cause in the world worthy causes and they want a place that they can promote those causes and do good in the world and how do they do it if the library isn't open because that's where they used to meet and that's on their mind tours we still have tours coming through and particularly in parts of the country people say it's amazing how many people i serve every day who are coming in to do genealogy and how important there are people who have slowly slipped away they might be elderly but they might be in their you know 40s or 50s they've completely lost their social network they're not able to go and see people which was really important to them maybe it's an immigrant we still have relatively new americans in areas and typically it's probably the husband if it's a family who works outside the home and the mother is isolated i know one suburban library that this became one of their major issues because they found they had this whole influx over several years of well-educated people from other countries coming in for well-paying high-tech jobs but what people weren't paying attention to was the families uh particularly the wives were mostly at home the kids were in school uh integrating that way but the the mothers didn't have something to do and they they develop programming just for that particular demographic people who all they care about are their grandchildren and are i have so many friends who are devastated because they can't go and see their grandchildren some are anyway and they want to find ways to engage them they are heart sick over not being able to visit their grandchildren we still have that stereotypical divorced parent who's trying to find things to do that aren't involving a bar and they want to find things to do that maybe they can involve their kid with and it's all about the pandemic i'll tell you one of my favorite ones it wasn't divorce is a few years ago when military libraries started to become a place where kids could come to the library and connect via electronics and this is before we had all the great devices we do now and the parent could do their homework together the parent would get the homework beforehand and they would station anywhere in the world and they could have a half hour homework session with their kids they do this with prisons as well to do this college graduate who is working online for their degree and feels very very isolated small business owner worried about how people are are coming to work for them and really don't have those basic workplace skills and what to do about it people have wi-fi but computer literacy is a lot more than just having good bandwidth and they really aren't still using the computer and their library the way that they should special needs families where they've lost most of their support network for their kid because it was at the school people desperately job hunting people who have some sort of job during the day but the government services they need close at four or five o'clock how do they get what it is they need their daycare providers and there's still daycare providers out there saying since i can't take the kid to story hour i need more and more to help kids and the husband's retired the wife is still working because it's easier for her to get a job and they don't have enough money what can the library do for them so what can your library do on this what i tell people is that the short way to do it is to find out through interview talking to people casual encounters all the things we talked about what are four typical problems they're trying to solve and to ask yourself what would happen if we made any one of these part of the job of the library we want to think about things like what's the better future that our library users want what are their goals it's it's really hard when you're listening to people talk for people not to be stuck in the past or say well this is all i have today rather than getting them talking about the future what i can do next what are their biggest concerns what do they what do they need to happen in the future so all of these kinds of questions um can inform you and all i can say is take the little things seriously so we talk about library engagement what are the trends that i see libraries without walls i've mentioned before hands-on learning of all kinds it's not just maker spaces i visited a library last year in south dakota and it was part of a community assessment program we were doing with with the um actually it was this year boy end of the year with the south dakota state library and i able to spend time in a library where food was the issue for their small rural community they built a kitchen in the new library and they have a demonstration kitchen as nice as anything you'd see on the food network the place is packed all the time because they're teaching people how to eat inexpensively and healthy and everybody's coming to those meetings it's a great time at the library is a hub for creation not just a hub for information it's a hub for creation and for services of all kinds and all kinds of partnerships as well so next step a next step what would be one thing that you could do and at this point i'm going to turn things back over to jamie and see if we had any questions or comments that came in um yeah one question came in and and that is how can small libraries gather data about the digital divide oh um first of all you can start looking at the formal statistics that are out there and i mean literally if you type in digital divide computers and so on you can take a look at the big surveys the second thing is if you talk to various organizations and i'm and we look at three different categories government agencies public service agencies you know elected appointed officials uh non-profits and charities of different kinds let's include the school districts all this stuff too in businesses start talking about what they have learned and what they have found out particularly the school districts i think have done a really good job of identifying what people know and what people don't know and then you can say all right if we have to go do something door-to-door if we have to do a mailing what's the best and safest way to do that you can also look at statistics um having to do with who are the main providers existing of digital of of digital information in your community to get an idea of like well here's three providers people are using uh what do they say about how many people are going there so i guess the thing is to start with the people who are already gathering that information and decide if through online if through any ways people are communicating not online like churches for example different organizations what should we know and if you live in a community where churches are are a predominant part of the social structure i would go and say to the churches during your your distancing or even in-person services this is a question we think that's really important so again it's lots of different ways that we can do this good question thank you and that was the only one so far that's okay people are probably stunned at this point or i hope they're feeling really smug jamie and they say oh we know all this stuff we know we're smart wouldn't that be nice right so if if libraries aren't if people and are not thinking that um we're what do you recommend as far as a next step step if people are listening in and maybe feeling a little bit overwhelmed at everything that you're like i would say i would say a good first step is that the social service agencies in your county are probably on top of a lot of stuff that's going on right now and they should be your new best friends because oftentimes they're kind of the canary in the mine who can let you know what's going on if you are on good terms which is not always true but if you're in good terms with your local sheriff's department and police department they see and hear stuff they may tell you some things that might surprise you about what's going on as well sure sure um let's see i'm not seeing any other questions come in at this point um i guess any any final thoughts before what what do you you talked about some of the mistakes at the beginning that um a lot of us typically make what what do you find is the most common when it comes to uh library work and these kind of mistakes when it comes to assumptions that we make yeah i want to make sure i'm hearing you correctly assumptions make the basic one is that other people are like us that other people have you know if we're basically middle class college people running our libraries that everybody else has the same values the same concerns the same interests at us and that was always the major sin and learning about community organizing as respecting differences and don't make assumptions don't make assumptions okay okay that is good to know um well we are just about out of time and i didn't see any other questions um come in so oh there was another one um sorry about that um i didn't see that okay um my library has never done their own research data strategic plan where would you suggest starting that journey okay i'm going to have to look at that first we're losing a little bandwidth here for some reason and i'm going to i hope not do anything horrible but i'm going to see if i can click and no i didn't could you say the question again slower i want to make sure that i really really understand it please my library has never done their own research data or strategic planning so where would you suggest starting that journey okay i think that if you if you've never done your own research you probably have people in the community who are already uh you might say you're silent supporters people who really like the library who are great to work with and stuff and i always say well then practice violating the rule i said before about reaching out to strangers start with some people you know and say you know what we're going to start with a focus group of some people that we know and talk to them first and see if we can run like a virtual uh kind of focus group or something like that and maybe start with 10 people who we know and like who are in positions of authority power status whatever and interview them and start with them and then every time you interview somebody say can you give me the name of someone else i can talk to and start reaching out virally that way and it's basically to build your confidence more than anything else you don't want to stop there but to make it more comfortable if you've never done this kind of thing before great