In May, ICfL held a Community Building Summit with a handful of libraries from across the state and lead by Pat Wagner of Pattern Research, Inc.  Participating libraries brought a team of people including at least one community member and one trustee.  Each team created a plan integrating the community partner and trustee, designed to build a foundation for working together and building more community programs and events.  It was so inspiring to see some of the ideas being brought to life by the groups, and I have a lot of take aways to think about for my own library programming.  But the session was so much more than that.

Pat Wagner is brilliant.  She’s got  so much knowledge relevant to libraries, and this session covered crucial topics and tips for effective strategic planning and marketing.  My favorite activity was creating a person designed to be your target audience.  It’s simple, really.  You create the person you’re selling your services to (including a name!), and when you think of a program or resource, you ask yourself, “Would Sally like this?”   Brilliant.  This is a great way to hone in on developing services for your library that will appeal to your target audience.  This, and many more tidbits were shared with the group over the two days in Boise.

There’s stuff online, of course, and I encourage you to check it out!  Hopefully you’ll find some awesome things that will help you get a handle on planning and marketing, which directly relates to community building exercises.

Click here to see the resources posted by ICfL – http://libraries.idaho.gov/community