April 10 Blog Post

Lowman, S. S., & Bixby, M. D. (2011). Working With Friends Groups:

Enhancing Participation Through Cultivation and Planning.

Lowman looks at recent and projected budget cuts and described collaboration with Friends groups as a partial answer to minimizing financial damage.  This seems largely up to the friends groups, though I’m sure it never hurts to try to improve your relationship with them and help come up with ideas for fundraising.  For instance, MCPL made $4,000+ from one friends book last year, while many smaller libraries can expect only a few thousand dollars a year.  I’m curious as to how much is luck of the draw and how much library directors can do to increase profits.  I was also interested in all the different ways friends groups can provide a link to partnering with other community members,  beyond just booksales.  Some of the ideas were guest lectures, galas, library tours.

One thing that confused me was the friends “board”.  Is the board for this organization separate from the board members for the library?  How much can the director interact and lead this group?

I was left considering how much community type and friends members tastes and socioeconomic status could alter a friends group.  Having a gala, for instance, might not be as effective in some communities as a hoedown.  I was also wondering how these groups are initially formed.

Leonhardt, T. (2011). Key Donor Cultivation: Building for the Future.

Leonhardt discussed fundraising and essentially “donor hunting” in an academic library.  I thought he made an interesting point about selling both yourself and your institution as a trustworthy investment.  To be quite honest, I don’t like the idea of so much business schmoozing, but I guess it is unavoidable in any upper level position.  While this author gave what seemed like good suggestions for developing board member relationships and getting donations, I was also left with the feeling that he was a bit new to this and would probably need to read more from someone with more experience.

Goodman, J. (2008). We Would If We Could, But It Is Not In The Budget:

Goodman presents an interesting study of community partners for libraries in Australia.  The first example was the partnership of an education group (UWS) with the libraries to help promote tutoring and education.  They even created join marketing.  Another example is a babies program that teamed with the maternal section of a local healthcare unit, and applied for a grant together.  This brought up the idea of mutual benefit.  It is certainly wonderful when two organizations have similar goals, and on donates their time to the other, but I would assume most community partners want more than just shared marketing.  Mutually beneficial grants are one answer to that question.  It made me wonder what other benefits libraries can offer partnering organizations aside from publicity and a public area for presentations.  Do most do it for the good press? The friends sales of their products?

The end of this article essentially tells libraries to be willing to gamble their time and energy, and be open to new directions.  This is good in theory, but I think when staff are already on low budgets and working twice as much because of hiring freezes, it will be harder to convince them to put in more hours on grants and community outreach that doesn’t seem immediately fruitful, not that they shouldn’t try.