Workshopping an Effective Library Communication Strategy

Tim Spring, Academic Services Librarian at Birkbeck, shares his personal reflections and takeaways following a communications workshop he attended as part of the BLESS group.

Back in July, the Bloomsbury Library, E-Systems & Services Group (BLESS) ran a workshop focusing on developing a communication strategy for libraries. Sarah had invited Philip Pothen, a communications consultant for Higher Education, to come and run this session for us.

I came into this session as a member of Birkbeck's former Communication and Marketing Group for the Library but I have to confess, my experiences left me feeling quite cynical about ‘Comms’. I never had much interest in the strategic or structural idea behind it all – more of a ‘get it done’ type than a ‘develop a strategy’ type. After all, it’s just communicating, how hard can it be? I do it all the time!

Well, it turns out, there’s a lot more to think about than I realised.

We had a mix of colleagues from different institutions in attendance, including Birkbeck, SOAS, and the Tavistock & Portman NHS Trust. I think it’s fair to say that most of us in attendance didn’t have much experience in this area but were keen to learn some ideas about how we could improve or develop our comms strategies.

A lot of ground was covered in a very short time, and we definitely could have gone for much longer but here are some of the key ideas that came up.

What encompasses a comms strategy?

We put together a list of words and ideas trying to define what is communication and some of its key characteristics, and what is the wider context of the library (why does it exist, what are we there to do)? Some of the ideas that came from this included:

·        Communication is about making a connection with our users.

·        Communication we disseminate should be trustworthy and values driven

·        Communication is a two-way street. Who is receiving information and how? Why?

·        A library service is often at the heart of an institution, and is a significant factor in successful outcomes, whether that be student attainment, academic research, etc.

During this discussion, Philip made an interesting point that often libraries are not as confident as other departments when it comes to communicating about our impact and services, which is certainly true from my experience! How can we use an effective comms strategy to improve this?

Understanding our audience – who are they? What do want to say? How do we reach them?

For this section we split into small groups and discussed who our audiences are. Unsurprisingly, we came back and had a mammoth list including examples like undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers, lecturers, professional staff, students with disabilities, healthcare professionals, international students, senior management, etc etc.

Some topics for further thought that also came up included:

·        What kind of communication do we need for different audiences?

·        What do we call our audience – Members? Users? Something else?

·        How can we build partnerships with stakeholders to advocate for the library?

·        Do we need to make more efforts to be visible in places where our audience are at the expense of other areas?

 With such a vast range of stakeholders, how do we decide what level of communication might be needed? One idea Philip gave us was to complete a stakeholder mapping exercise:

By Zirguezi - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30927010

Let’s take the University Vice-Chancellor as an example. Her ‘Power’ would be very high up the Y-Axis, but ‘Interest’ might be somewhat low-to-middling. Communication to these users might be in the form of an annual report. A lecturer might be somewhere in the middle of the chart. Maybe they could receive some sort of termly/monthly update, regular support through emails etc. The list goes on, but this sounded like a great exercise to help identify who our audience is, but also how we might want to communicate with them.

Blue Sky Thinking!

The final exercise we had time for was a bit more light-hearted and idealistic focusing on ‘blue sky thinking’. Imagine we didn’t have any resource constraints – what would we do to improve our communications? You won’t be surprised that most ideas involved more money…

·        Hire specialist staff to work on library communications.

·        Pay students (generously) to take part in surveys, focus groups, etc. to identify where we could improve services.

·        Mandatory library induction for staff and students as part of corporate induction.

·        Various brochures, leaflets, bookmarks, etc. to promote the library at events and high-quality digital marketing. Professional images and graphics, etc.

Whilst these ideas aren’t likely to suddenly happen in the imminent future, it was a pleasant exercise to end on, and who knows? If we ever find ourselves in a situation where we can afford to try any of these, at least we already have some ideas in mind!

We wrapped things up shortly after and even though I’ve tried to summarise what we went over, there was just so much content, I’ve missed a lot out! Overall, it was a very productive session and I thought Philip did a great job guiding a group of ‘amateurs’ in this area and we all came away with something useful.

Now for the actual hard part – implementing all of these ideas!