Library Advocacy Stories: Michael Lambert (Part 2 of 2)

This is the second part of a two-part interview conducted with Michael Lambert, City Librarian, San Francisco Public Library. It was originally published on the California Library Association website as part of the work I’m doing as Library Advocacy Training Project Manager for the Association.

Q:  What key issues do you believe need to be addressed in training sessions for California library staff—at all levels—interested in becoming strong advocates for libraries and the communities they serve?

Michael Lambert

A:  The basics

• What is library advocacy? Why is it important?
• What is the difference between advocacy and lobbying?
• Political activities—Do’s and Don’ts
• The Power of Storytelling and gathering stories to tell your library’s story about impact, outcomes
  • Less about utilization data—more about how libraries make a transformational impact on people’s lives
    • An example: Jamie LaRue, former library director [Douglas County Libraries, Colorado], gave a great advocacy training for NCLA [North Carolina Library Advocacy] a decade ago that got to this point (https://nclibraryadvocacy.org/about-us/jamie-larue/)

Importance of building a strong partnership with your local library support group; San Francisco has a model public/private partnership within our municipal government that has been highlighted by our Office of the Controller.

• Requires investment of staffing capacity and time, but it’s worth it
• Regular meetings, attend Board meetings, invite participation in Library Commission meetings, special events
• Formal MOU

Q:  What formats do you believe work best for advocacy training for California library staff at all levels?

A:  The California Library Association has some excellent sessions at our annual conference and offers opportunities for staff to be inspired and engaged. Beyond CLA Annual, I think the current environment has demonstrated the utility and accessibility of the virtual environment, making it easier for a broader cross section of our library workers to participate and learn and grow. EveryLibrary’s ongoing newsletters and training offerings are excellent.

California Public Library Advocates have done a great job hosting regional advocacy training opportunities for members of library boards and commissions, Friends, Foundations as well as other library supporters and advocates.

Q:  What are we not currently doing that we should be doing to support library staff interested in becoming strong advocates for libraries and the communities they serve?

A:  As a library administrator, fulfilling our mission with excellent service delivery is the top priority. There are many strategic priorities that go into library operations, and San Francisco Public Library has an ongoing commitment to organizational excellence. Employee engagement and organizational development are key focus areas within our Racial Equity Action Plan, but I think there is an opportunity to tap into the latent community organizing ability of our staff to learn how to become even stronger advocates for libraries and the communities we serve. Ultimately, if we are able to provide more opportunities for growth and professional development on this front, we’ll be more successful in advancing racial equity and social justice.

Q:  You’re very active in a variety of social media platforms. What—if any—role do you see social media playing in your advocacy efforts?

A:  At the most basic level, telling the library’s story and sharing factual information about library programs and services.

On a personal level, I leverage social media to foster stronger connections with elected officials and community leaders. I recommend library directors engage with their local political leaders in every way possible, including social media; follow them and like their posts and/or comment to have a conversation. This is a great way to stay in tune with local priorities and the pulse of the community. You can invite them to your library events and subsequently post photos to give them a shout-out for their support.

Q: Your Facebook account offers a wonderful balance of posts that relate to work and posts and relate to your personal life. Any tips to advocates on how to maintain that sort of balance without veering into posts/topics that can come back to haunt them?

A:  Good question! One guiding principle I try to remember is: “would I want to see this post on the front page of the SF Chronicle?” My social media presence includes personal accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. I enjoy promoting and sharing the incredible work my SFPL staff are doing, and it’s easy to share such posts. My social media presence also comes in handy for recruitment and making folks aware of job opportunities within the City and County of San Francisco. It’s not uncommon for me to post my fellow department heads’ recruitments on LinkedIn to demonstrate my support for them and our City and County family. Overall I’d say my feed is similar to many other people with posts about my kid, what I’m eating, what I’m doing, etc.

Q:  Drawing upon your extensive experience as an advocate for libraries, what would you suggest individuals can do to effectively serve as advocates for libraries throughout California?

A:  Pay your dues—support your professional association—California Library Association; American Library Association

Attend CLA, get involved.

Support EveryLibrary—the only political action committee devoted to libraries

• Read their books, e.g., Before the Ballot
• Follow them on social media [Facebook and Twitter]
• Taken advantage of their training
• Support them financially if you can

Volunteer your time to local library initiatives

Support your local Friends of organization

It’s pretty basic—we need to support library advocacy with our treasure or time or both.

N.B. — Paul’s work as a consultant/project manager with the California Library Association is part of a grant-funded project to develop and coordinate a statewide political advocacy training program for library workers and supporters throughout California.

Changing the World With Patrick Sweeney (Part 2 of 2)

This is the second  of a two-part interview conducted with Patrick Sweeney, Political Director for EveryLibrary, for my book Change the World Using Social Media (Rowman & Littlefield; to be published in 2020). The interview was conducted online using a shared Google Doc, and has been lightly edited.

On the theme we were pursuing earlier: it seems pretty clear that EveryLibrary sees part of its work as the work of training/educating prospective supporters. How do you train your own trainers (e.g., board members, volunteers, other supporters involved in reaching out to prospective supporters) to serve effectively as supporter trainers?

That’s largely a personality issue. People who want to be trainers will be—and if they want to be, then we’ll take the time to teach them how. It’s really hard to teach people to be trainers if their heart isn’t in being a trainer. It’s much easier and more efficient, in my experience, to hire for personality and then teach skills. I can teach anyone to do the work, but if they don’t want to do it, or if they have a personality that doesn’t engage like that, then I can’t teach someone to change their personality.

Are you doing those trainings face to face, online, both, or in some way that I’m just not putting out there through this question?

Training to do the work of the organization or the work of advocating for libraries in general?

Was thinking specifically about the advocacy side of the process…

Sure, so we do a ton of speaking, workshops, webinars, etc. every year. We don’t do enough “onboarding” of people who want to get involved, and we’ve had complaints about that from the community. But, we are doing so much so quickly that it’s hard to onboard someone. We have about a dozen really active volunteers that do a lot of work for us and for libraries, and it’s admittedly one of our weak points that we don’t have hundreds. We’re trying to change more into the networked change model of organizational development, but that’s a big curve and we just don’t have the capacity to make that switch this second. But we’re really close to being able to do a lot of advocacy training and onboarding of board members, volunteers, etc.

We are using Facebook to identify volunteers and find the kinds of people who want to be engaged at a much deeper level. So, we have volunteer sign-up forms and everything. We also organize volunteer days and other events for volunteers to get involved, but we’ve gotten mixed results with that. Still, the only people showed up were people who had more personal relationships to us beyond just Facebook ads or posts or whatever.

Anything else you want to offer in terms of tips about Facebook?

A million things…but one of the biggest things that we use are all the deep data tools that Facebook allows to help us create really significantly data-driven ads. So, we can run ads about donating to just people who are known donors to causes that are similar to libraries, and we can target them by a bunch of consumer index models. So, people who are donors, who have kids, who like libraries, who make 50,000-100,000 a year, and are in their thirties, can get an ad that is specific to them and their beliefs and Facebook gives us a ton of data about those people. For example, I can see that these people are mostly made up of “Tenured Proprietor” and those kinds of people are made up of “households are large, upper-middle income families located in cities and surrounding areas. Activities, media and spending all reflect priorities of home and children.” This helps us craft ads about libraries and donating to libraries around those interests. Of course, we can also see what their top “likes” are on Facebook and other issues that they care about, and [then] tailor ads just for them. Connecting the value of librarianship to their already held beliefs is how we radicalize them about libraries. We aren’t changing their mind about libraries; our goal instead is to connect libraries to their already held beliefs and then, by doing that, we are raising the value of libraries to them.

N.B. — Paul is currently writing Change the World Using Social Media, scheduled for publication by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020. This is the twenty-first in a continuing series of excerpts from and interviews for the manuscript in progress.

Changing the World With Patrick Sweeney (Part 1 of 2)

This is the first of a two-part interview conducted with Patrick Sweeney, Political Director for EveryLibrary, for my book Change the World Using Social Media (Rowman & Littlefield; to be published in 2020). The interview was conducted online using a shared Google Doc, and has been lightly edited.

What’s one positive example of how Facebook provided good results for those EveryLibrary serves?

We used Facebook to drive our petition to fight against the closure of libraries in Mary Esther, Florida. The town board was going to close the library so they could hire another sheriff, and the Sheriff’s Department was pushing really hard for them to do it. It meant more money for police, and the complete loss of the library.

So, we worked with the folks on the ground in Mary Esther to put a petition together. We used our large network on Facebook and our email to make this a national issue. Small-time local politicians often hate it when their decisions become negative national news. So, we ran a ton of dark ads in Mary Esther and the surrounding area as well as national organic ads, and they got their email blown up by the response. Having that large network on Facebook who are already familiarized with our work and the threats to libraries that already existed meant that people were prepped and ready to take action like sending emails to the town council.

There’s a very sweet passage in that EveryLibrary posting:

“This note of thanks doesn’t just belong to us, but it also belongs to each of you who have stood up for libraries in the United States through your donations (it costs less than coffee to support libraries), signatures on petitions, and pledges to support libraries.“

It implies partnership/collaboration/cooperation/humility (i.e., it’s not all about us). Do you routinely draw people in with that sort of invitation to engage in your social media outreach efforts?

We do. But it’s because we spent a lot of time cultivating our audiences and educating them about the issues. We spend between $50-$100 in Facebook network ads to our highly specified audiences to educate them and rally them to become ready to take action for libraries. Basically, we’re radicalizing Americans about libraries because only radical or ardent supporters of anything will take action. In fact, something like five to seven percent of an educated audience will take action on any given issue, so we spend a lot of time and money educating larger audiences and networks about the issues around librarianship.

Looking at the mechanical side of that first: roughly how much do you spend each year on Facebook network ads, and what percentage of your overall budget (approximately) is that?

We have a budget of $36,000 for media ad buys through Facebook. Then we try to add some to that. It’s about one-third of our budget. But because of the way we structure our campaigns, we also use them to fundraise—which means we make a significant portion of that money back each year and typically we make about 5-10 percent on our social media and advocacy strategy overall. So, we spend $36,000, but we make around $40,000-50,000 through them and with our email list.

On the theme of cultivating/radicalizing your audience to spur audience members to action: what steps would you recommend others take to achieve the positive results you’ve achieved?

The thing to remember is that it’s a really long process. Social media ads that ask for donations just don’t work. You can’t run an ad that says, “give us $10” and expect to get back more than you spend. It either doesn’t work, or I don’t know how to write those ads in a way that draws in donations. So, about one-half to three-fourths of our spend is just about communicating with our audience about who we are and what we do and why libraries are important. We also use it to open dialogues with audiences of people so it’s not a one-sided conversation. The other one-half to one-fourth is on direct action, such as signing petitions, joining coalitions, etc. And it’s those actions that yield our donations.
“It’s not a one-side conversation”: Care to offer some brief thoughts on the importance of avoiding social media as a broadcast medium while ignoring the “social” side of it?

Well, it is a broadcast medium, really. But, there are still ways to build conversation into those broadcasts. So, we run petitions, people can message us on Facebook, we reply to comments on our posts, we respond to emails, and have places where people can directly talk to use—we address a lot of issues that come up there. But our most powerful dialogs are not in Facebook. We use Facebook as part of a holistic communication strategy. So, we organize events and fundraisers where people can have direct access to us or have dialogs with us IRL. Because those are really the conversations with the highest ROI.

[Thanks for adding that comment about the most powerful dialogs not being on Facebook; can’t emphasize that enough in a book that focuses on social media as part of an overall activists’ tool kit.]

Our biggest donors and library supporters are really the people who have learned about us on Facebook—our broadcasts—and then contacted us or had a dialog with us in some way.

Facebook as a “gateway drug” to social engagement!

LOL, yes. This is your brain on Facebook. Any questions?

N.B. — Paul is currently writing Change the World Using Social Media, scheduled for publication by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020. This is the twentieth in a continuing series of excerpts from and interviews for the manuscript in progress.

EntreEd Forum 2018: EveryLibrary, Entrepreneurship, and Makerspaces (Part 2 of 3)

I have never before tried to turn a conference session space into a makerspace, nor have I ever been part of conference that, essentially, turned into a makerspace. But that’s what magically and seamlessly happened here just outside of Pittsburgh this weekend during the 2018 EntreEd Forum, organized through EntreEd (the National Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education)—an organization dedicated to “providing advocacy, leadership, networking, technical assistance, and resources nationally for [entrepreneurship] students and teachers.”

EveryLibrary Founder/Executive Director John Chrastka, teacher/librarian/Foundry Makerspace Fellow Heather Lister, and I were here with support from EveryLibrary to facilitate a 45-minute session on the topic of “Entrepreneurship, Schools, & Library Makerspaces.” John, Heather, and I—with encouragement and plenty of enthusiasm from EntreEd Executive Director Gene Coulson and The EdVenture Group Senior Program Manager Jennifer Wotring—designed a highly-interactive session meant to help participants increase their awareness of the possibilities for incorporating makerspaces into their ongoing efforts to help learners develop entrepreneurial skills that will serve them well as they enter our quickly-evolving work environment.

There was nothing upfront to hint that the hotel conference room we were using was about to become a makerspace. And, frankly, the three of us facilitating the session did not walk into that room with the intention of creating a makerspace where we could help colleagues better understand how makerspaces and entrepreneurship can quickly and easily be interwoven. But after we provided initial reminders that makerspaces do not have to be high-cost endeavors—a theme that ran through many conversations here this weekend—and are not necessarily as much about 3D printers and other high-tech tools as they are about creating spaces where we learn by creating, we turned the conference room into a no-cost, low-tech, highly productive makerspace through three simple actions you can easily replicate:

*Declaring the room a makerspace

*Asking session participants—our co-learners, co-creators, co-conspirators in learning—to quickly rearrange their chairs so they would all see, interact with, and collaborate with each other for the remainder of the session

*Proposing the idea that what we would make together was a rudimentary plan for how each of them could apply makerspace concepts to their own schools as soon as they returned home

The transformation was immediate. Our co-creators took a few minutes sharing, with everyone else in the room, experiences they had with makerspaces; some of the questions they had about makerspaces; and ideas for how little they have needed or would need to create a makerspace to meet their learners’ needs. Among the resources Heather, John, and I added to the makerspace were slides showing how makerspaces support entrepreneurship—including images taken a day earlier of students at the EntreEd 2018 Forum Student Entrepreneurship Showcase displaying their own wares that were at least partially created through school and school-library makerspaces (with strong support from their teachers and school librarians). And with less than 10 minutes remaining in the session, we went around the temporary makerspace to give our co-conspirators in learning an opportunity to tell us what they would do as a result of having been part of the session—in essence giving them the opportunity to put the finishing touches on the rudimentary plans of action they were collaboratively creating in that makerspace.

This story could have easily ended at that moment, but the EntreEd Forum organizers had previously planned the conference activity that inadvertently made the entire conference, from my point of view, a makerspace: an afternoon of activities designed to help these teacher-maker-innovators prepare pitches designed to gain funding for projects that would allow them to more effectively foster entrepreneurship among the learners they serve—a topic to be more fully explored in the next in this three-part set of reflections on the 2018 EntreEd Forum.

John.

Looking  back on the set of experiences I have had here at the conference, I realize there is one other not-yet-acknowledged makerspace: the virtual one (phone calls and email exchanges) that allowed John, Gene, Jennifer and me to create the structure for the session, and the extension of that makerspace into the Google Drive presentation deck that Heather, John, and I created (online and asynchronously, not face to face) for use during the session—a wonderful reminder that, like so many words in our vocabulary, “makerspace” is one that continues to evolve in ways we are just beginning to explore and limited only the limits of our—and your—imaginations. (For more information about EveryLibrary’s efforts to foster entrepreneurship, please visit the organization’s “Entrepreneurs” site on Medium.)

N.B. – This is the second of three posts inspired by attendance at the2018 EntreEd Forum, near Pittsburgh. Next: Encouraging Teachers of Entrepreneurship to Work as Entrepreneurs

ALA Midwinter Meeting 2017: The Stuff You Don’t Plan For

Anyone familiar with the richly rewarding experience of attending an association’s conference knows that the most precious gems often are those we don’t anticipate.

We fall into a business deal we didn’t even know existed. We see someone we didn’t even know was there and, as a result, rekindle a relationship. We learn about an innovation that directly and positively affects the work we do. We discover and quickly act upon opportunities to better serve the onsite and online communities we absolutely adore.

And that, to absolutely nobody’s surprise, is what has been happening for some of us here in Atlanta since the American Library Association (ALA) 2017 Midwinter Conference formally opened yesterday. I know, from the numerous intensively action-oriented conversations I had throughout the day yesterday and today and well into the evening hours, that there were abundant enticing opportunities—expected and unexpected—to pursue. Several colleagues and I, as a result of chance encounters, continued the conversations (inspired by our EveryLibrary co-conspirators) designed to help us identify and take positive, concrete, results-generating action in response to opportunities to build productive, meaningful collaborations between libraries/library staff members and other stakeholders in our extended, multi-faceted, tapestry-like onsite-online communities. These were and are not pipe-dream “wouldn’t it be nice” discussions; each of them ended with commitments to taking small-scale individual as well as collaborative steps that, when combined with similar steps within our extended communities, will lead to community collaborations with potentially far-reaching impacts. (The 2017 EveryLibrary Agenda, on the organization’s “Leaving Our Silos — Coalition Work in 2017” page, is a seminal online document that offers an opportunity to become engaged and is a wonderful call to action for those within the library world as well as to those who currently are not; friends and colleagues can expect to be hearing plenty from me about what this offers us and those we serve.)

But it gets even more personal. A wonderfully serendipitous encounter in the ALA Store resulted in another sale of the book Lori Reed and I co-wrote a few years ago (Workplace Learning & Leadership) and an impromptu, tongue-in-cheek book-signing for the buyer of that book. Which then unexpectedly led to a conversation about potential involvement in another results-oriented training-teaching-learning project scheduled to happen during the second half of this year. And, as if this were all being choreographed for the muse of publication, I then found myself involved in a conversation about writing a new book—a conversation that ended with a tentative agreement to pursue the project as soon as we can take care of all the elements that are part of codifying a formal contract leading to publication of a book.

The day continued at this frenetic, almost dream-like level well into the evening. More discussions. More confirmed opportunities for positive engagement with members of my ALA professional family. More reminders that, even in the most troubled of times, we never are really alone. And a reminder that the aforementioned precious gems often arrive when they are most needed.

For, in the midst of all this positive engagement, I was also fully engaged in that most horrible, inevitable rites of passage: the impending loss of a loved one.

The news that my lovely, vibrant, dynamic, inspirational mother—my lifelong parent, mentor, friend, confidante, and fellow chocoholic—is in the final days or even hours of life on the other side of the country was not unexpected. (A sign of how much I rely on her: after initially receiving the news that she might be in her last 72 hours of her life, I quickly ran through the short list of people I could call for comfort, immediately thought of her, and then found myself laughing as the words “Oh, wait, she already knows about this” ran through my mind.) She has been suffering from congestive heart failure for several months now, and the options for providing her with comfort and any acceptable quality of life have been dwindling rapidly during the past two weeks. Receiving “the call” from home shortly after I arrived in Atlanta was a nightmare emerging into a darkening day: she was back in a hospital emergency room, where my father and others were onsite to be with her during what a Franciscan friar I know once referred to as “the most sacred of times.” The subsequent calls involving arrangements for hospice care quickly followed. And then the news this morning, just before all the conversations and activities I’ve described in this post took place, that the hospice plan had been abandoned because treatment that might have offered her another 72 hours of comfort were failing. We were quickly reaching the point where we were counting hours rather than days.

When you have two parents who have led wonderfully blessed lives for 80 or 90 years, you’re always aware that each day could be the last. You go out of your way, as I have for more than a decade, to thank them every time—every damned time—you talk to them and let them know in very specific terms how grateful you are for all that they have given you. And yet “the call” is always as shocking as you know it’s going to be. Always overwhelming. And yet somehow manageable because you viscerally understand that, at that horrible and devastating moment, you are right where you were meant to be. Like here, in Atlanta, among some of the best friends, colleagues, and confidantes I have. Caring. Understanding. Sympathetic. And capable of shining sparkling-gem light where only darkness would otherwise seem to reign.

So I’ve had a day of precious gems that included wonderful stories from friends. Plenty of cross-country conversations that had me right there with my family even though we remain physically nearly 2,500 miles apart. Time spent working with wonderfully sympathetic and responsive United Airlines representatives arranging for an earlier-than-expected return to California. Positive paid and volunteer opportunities that I will be pursuing for months, if not years. Just as my mother and father always encouraged me to do. And as I prepare to try to catch a bit of sleep, I relish the bittersweet words a member of my ALA family shared during a conversation earlier today: It’s always the stuff you don’t plan for that has the greatest impact—for better or for worse.

[Deepest gratitude to my former writing coach/mentor Margo Perin, who always insisted that the best writing was that which was most difficult, honest, and drawn directly from the heart. This piece would not exist if she had not led me, nearly 20 years ago, through the process of working through a dark night.]

Addendum: In loving memory of Josephine V. Signorelli, August 5, 1925 – January 22, 2017. She lived and passed with grace.

ALA Midwinter Meeting 2017: The Transformative, Action-Oriented Conversations Continue Here

“The conversation starts here…” is a long-standing tagline for American Library Association conferences such as the one beginning this week here in Atlanta. But I would suggest the reality is much deeper: The conversations continue playfully, creatively, thoughtfully, and productively from conference to conference and are valuable as much for their inspiration as for the positive transformations they produce.

Some begin (or resume) when we unexpectedly meet up in shuttles on the way to airports across the country. Others happen as we run into cherished colleagues in check-in lines at our hotels. Many take place in the wonderful Networking Uncommons meeting area that ALA staff so diligently and generously maintains from conference to conference, while others seem to leap to life on their own from conference hallway to conference hallway, restaurant to restaurant, coffee shop to coffee shop, and online through a variety of platforms including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn—this really is a first-rate example of early 21^st-century blended conference (seamless interactions between colleagues onsite and online) practices and explorations. (ALA staff members Mary Mackay and many others reach out consistently to all Association members to remind those who are “left behind” that they can participate through online platforms, and many of us onsite maintain an online presence to draw our offsite colleagues into the action. It’s just the way trainer-teacher-learner-doers are made—and library staff members are among the best learning facilitators I know.

My ALA 2017 Midwinter Meeting onsite conversations began less than an hour after I reached Atlanta—three hours later than expected because of a much-delayed cross-country flight—last night. Two cherished colleagues were kind enough to wait until nearly 10 pm so we could have dinner together, catch up a bit, and dive into a topic that I’m sure will be pursued assiduously over the next several days: what each of us individually and collectively can do over the next four years to be sure that libraries and library staff members across the country remain positive players in the communities we serve by facilitating conversations; providing safe meeting places for all members of our communities regardless of their political views, backgrounds, and myriad other elements that could potentially divide them/us rather than provide common ground to explore solutions to the challenges we face; and respond to anyone who needs what libraries and library staff members provide.

The library directors, staff members, and consultants I know did not wait long after the 2016 presidential election concluded to initiate this very conversation; our colleagues in the EveryLibrary political action committee had, within 24 hours, created a private forum on Facebook that attracted over 200 library directors, staff members, and consultants to pursue the topic. One-on-one and group conversations developed face to face and online across the country to explore what the transfer of power would mean to those served by libraries across the United States.

Some of the initial rudimentary ideas explored in that forum (e.g., collecting and disseminating library-users’ stories about the emotionally rich and deeply moving ways in which libraries and library staff members positively impact their lives; promoting the availability of multi-faceted resources, from a variety of points of view, that are available to anyone who wants to draw upon them; promoting libraries onsite and online as relatively safe places for people willing to share ideas and listen to those that might be the most comfortable of ideas for them to explore; and providing adaptable examples for trainer-teacher-learner-doers in industries outside of our own) were literally on the table last night.

That deeply-rewarding and inspirational exchange of ideas continued for me throughout the day today as I met with colleagues I had planned to meet. They extended into chance encounters that I could not have possibly anticipated—but that are a staple of the meet-ups and explorations familiar to those of us who have been shaping ALA conferences (and so many others, including those organized by ATD and NMC) for many years simply through the combined actions of showing up, listening, and asking “so what are we gonna do about that?”

And they will, no doubt, gain momentum and produce positive results far beyond the physical and virtual walls of #alamw17. Because that’s the sort of life libraries, librarians, and others involved in lifelong learning foster. With your collaboration.