Prior to enrolling in my MSLIS degree program, there were so many aspects of the Librarian’s job that I had never considered or been aware of. I had never considered the complexity of collection development, the inevitability of book challenges, how much the social-emotional needs of the students would affect what I do, etc.

I had definitely not considered how important Marketing & Branding skills would be.  As an avid library user myself, I had not realized that Librarians actually have to go to pretty great lengths of advocacy and marketing to bring people in, obtain adequate support, and even to educate people on exactly what we do and why it is valuable.

Now, seven years after I began this journey, I look back and shake my head at my younger self.  Clearly I entered this profession with basically no idea about the realities of the job itself.  All I knew was that I wanted a job where I could put my love for research skills to use.

Luckily my MSLIS program knocked off some of my rose colored glasses and prepared me adequately for all of these unexpected Librarian roles and duties. In my 4 years at my HS, I’ve put considerable time and effort into advocating for, marketing, and branding my library program.

These efforts have been successful in the following ways:

• Increase in student library resource use (of physical & digital resources)
• Increase in # of students visiting library each day
• Drastic increases each year in # of classroom-collaborations
• Circulation of books has increased 30%-250% each year
• Administration support of library program is high
• Community support of library program is high
• Successfully earned 2 grants and 1 large donation
• Library transformed into heart of the school

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General Advice for Marketing & Branding

Be Vocal & Visible

To have your library program succeed, you must be highly visible and highly vocal. Pretty much all the time.  Otherwise everyone forgets about you and the library, the great resources you have available, the awesome events you have planned, and your ability to collaborate with teachers.  The old stereotype of the quiet and shy Librarian hiding behind the circulation desk, or of the book dragon librarian whose main priority is to guard and protect the collection from all comers just doesn’t really fly in the modern age. Especially in school libraries.

Sadly, Librarians will often encounter some Board members or Administrators who don’t automatically see the value in you or your program, and who will be putting the library at the top of the list for budget and staff cuts whenever cuts become necessary.  The only possible way to fight back against this is to consistently be loud with your advocacy and marketing. Be constantly reminding your community of the library’s value and what it has been doing that has been positively impacting students.  The library should be the heart of the school, and the librarian is the brain that keeps the heart beating. But no one is going to know or accept that without seeing proof. And if they don’t know how important the library is, how much work the librarian does, and how that work impacts student’s lives and learning — well then they simply won’t see why the library needs proper funding, support, and staffing. They will not understand these things unless you are blatantly telling them. Just remember the cheerleader’s motto: “Be Aggressive, Be Be Aggressive!”

Make it a Priority

Just as with everything else in life, there are always more duties than time to accomplish said duties. And this tends to be even worse for Librarians, as we generally wear more hats and fill more roles than most. Deciding how to prioritize our time can be complicated.  Marketing and branding your program is undeniably time-consuming. It is, however, worth prioritizing.  Your library can have the most awesome staff, the best top-notch resources, and the most beautiful space in the school.  But if no one knows these things, it doesn’t do any good.  If teachers don’t know what you can do, they won’t think to bring you in to collaborate. If students don’t know what resources you have, they won’t know to use them. If admin doesn’t understand how much behind the scenes work goes into what you do, they will keep adding more hats to your head, thinking “well there’s not much going on in the library, she can handle this additional duty.”  Marketing and branding are critical components of the school library program and must be considered a priority.  We can’t really waste our time complaining about how no one really understands how valuable librarians and libraries are. Instead we need to use that time to change people’s minds.  This is the reality of the profession at this time.  I’m extremely glad that the professors in my MSLIS program made this clear to me, so I knew what I was getting into when I pursued this career.  Advocacy is a huge part of the job.

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Specific Examples

I do a lot of Marketing and Branding through the year. I use a variety of methods including traditional, verbal, and digital story-telling methods.  I’ll walk through some of my methods below!

Digital Storytelling

I use social media for a lot of my advocacy, marketing, and community building. Tik Tok has really gotten the students excited, and I guess they have been sharing the videos with their parents and teachers because I’ve been getting TONS of positive feedback from parents, administrators, and teachers about the Tik Tok videos.

The most difficult part of using social media as a way of advocating for your program is just getting people to follow it initially.  Once you get them following you, though, it is an awesome method for disseminating info on why your program is critical and successful.  You can get more specific info on my social media use on these two blog posts: Getting Students to Follow Your Insta and Amping Up my Social Media Game.

When posting on Instagram, I pretty much post about EVERYTHING positive thing I can think of. I post about new resources (making sure to share photos of students using the resources, not just the resources themselves). I post about when I do PD sessions.  I post about when we’ve earned grants. I post about when the library has been featured in the newspapers or yearbooks. Brag, Brag, Brag!! There is no room for shyness or humility here :).

Verbal and Face-to-Face

The best way of marketing and advocating for your program is verbally and in face-to-face situations. You really SHOULD always have a 30 second “elevator speech” ready to go at all times, in case you run into an administrator or stakeholder unexpectedly. Positive news and information about your program should be ready for sharing at a moments notice.

Attending Meetings and Speaking Out

One way to do this is by attending various department meetings, and monthly faculty meetings. Attend as many of these as you possibly can, and try to speak up at as many as you can to relay information about library news, events, resources, recent successful collaborations, future collaboration ideas, etc.  Anything I can think of to make sure myself and the library are visible and vocal, as often as possible.

“Good News Pop-Ins”

Another strategy to incorporate is to do what I think of as “Good News Pop-ins” with your administrators. Get in the habit of popping into their offices to chat for a minute or two. The purpose of which is to just share something positive about the library program. You want your administrators to associate you with positivity, good news, and hard work. So pop in and say “hi and how are you” and then when they ask how you are, take that opportunity to say something like “Great, we just had an awesome media lit collaboration with 11th grade government,” or “Busy! We’ve been doing awesome non-fiction book buffet’s with 12th grade AP English,” or “Excited! I just got accepted to present at a conference this year!” etcetera etcetera.  I always feel like whenever people in a school ask each other “how are you” the answer tends to be of the complaint-variety. I like to take the opposite tack and make sure I always share good news or something positive when I am asked that question.

Face-to-Face Admin Meetings

I recommend doing sit-down meetings with your principal a few times each year. Discuss things like what has been successful this year, what you hope to accomplish in coming months or years, and what resources you need to make those goals reality.  In particular I have found it is very helpful to bring statistics and budget info to these meetings, to help your administration understand the real costs and impacts of the a successful library program. You may find that when you show data of circ, data of collection age, & the costs of databases and books you can advocate for more adequate funding since without this info it may be difficult for admins to fully see the need for the funding.

Your principal, for example, probably has no idea that research databases and technologies cost what they do and take up as much of the budget as they do (nor that they increase by 3-5% each year), or how expensive library processing supplies, makerspace supplies, or even books are.

One piece of advice I have for when you do face-to-face meetings, is to always do the “Happy Sandwich” method. Meaning to always start the meeting by sharing good news/success stories, then do the concerns/needs portion, and finally always end the meeting with more positivity/good news. I think administrators are so used to people only meeting with them when they have complaints or grievances, so I think its great when we can make sure all of our interaction start and end with positive information.  That way people come to associate meeting with us to be a largely positive experience.  Everyone likes to get good news.

Yearly School Library Month Celebration

One of my favorite advocacy and marketing methods to organize is my annual staff party each April for School Library Month. I purchase snacks, create a powerpiont with stats, photos, testimonials, etc. Print out a bunch of fact sheets. I do a few “did you knows” at the faculty meeting the week before to get teachers interest.  I do fun things like have my makerspace stuff out for teachers to engage with, offer giveaways, etc.  I invite admin and district admin too. Last year our Superintendent came and stayed for the entire 45 minutes! I was able to give her a tour and show off the library a little bit.  — see this blog post for more detailed info on the way I celebrate School Library Month!

Saying yes to opportunities:

One more habit to get into is to saying “yes” to various advocacy opportunities as they come up. For instance, saying “yes” when the district asks teachers to submit articles for the monthly newsletters to parents, agreeing to present at board meetings or PTA meetings, offering to give PD sessions, etc.

I have found that offering PD sessions for teachers has been one of the best ways for increasing collaboration requests. Once teachers see what kind of lessons I can do, what type of resources we have, etc I’ve found that the amount of collaboration requests I get tends to skyrocket.  I’ve done a bunch of PDs on Media Literacy, Research Skills, Social Media, etc.

Traditional

Finally, there are the traditional marketing methods such as:

• Newsletters (always embed them into body of email, ppl do not often open attachments or click links)
• Brochures to have out at Back to School Nights
• Custom Bookmarks
• Handouts
• Posters

You can see some of my physical marketing posters, handouts, newsletter, etc below! Some of these documents are emailed out, others are made into posters and laminated for each teacher to put in their classrooms, others I enlarge and put on the library doors, or hang in the hallways, etc.

Newsletters: (click on images to view full size, links will not be clickable)