Column Editor:  Kathleen McEvoy  (Senior Policy Fellow, The EveryLibrary Institute) 

Against the Grain V37#3

In the course of my work at the EveryLibrary Institute, I have occasion to directly lobby legislators on behalf of libraries, speak to library supporters, and present to library professionals at conferences.  In each scenario, I have learned that advocacy starts with understanding.  When I speak about advocacy, I speak about people, place, and platform as an opportunity-driven approach to library advocacy.  Understanding where those opportunities are on college campuses and within university communities starts with people.

People

• Who has influence over the library?  The budget?  Your involvement in decision making?  

• Who are your natural supporters?  Your advocates?  Potential partners?

• How can you root your messages in terms of the benefits to those people?

• Where do their constituencies, needs, interests, or mission and your supporters, users, or natural partners overlap?

Once you understand the people in your advocacy equation, you can better understand their needs and how to fill them by understanding place.

Place

• What are their jurisdictions?  (What is the environment in which they operate?  What is their ecosystem, their community?)

• What is happening in those jurisdictions that impact their constituencies and their stakeholders and decision making?  (Are there outside influences, internal pressures, programs, fundraising efforts, budget constraints, administrative mandates or goals?)

Place provides the context that informs what your allies and potential allies do and where and it is where their committees of jurisdiction lie.  The platform.

Platform

• What are the interests and “committees of jurisdiction” of those stakeholders, supporters, and potential allies?  (e.g., Departments, Committees, Associations, Boards)

• What are their responsibilities?  (Constituents/Staffing/Labor Force, Budgeting, Grants, Decision or Rule Making?)

• Where do they feel pressure?

• What is the work of their staff?

• Who and what do your allies and potential allies care about?

• Who and what do their staff care about?

Addressing people, place, and platform begins well before there is a crisis or an issue to address.  It begins with the relationships you foster to build support for the library, its budgets, its staff, and its initiatives.  Relationships begin when you say yes.  When you accept invitations to meetings, to serve on committees, and workshop ideas, or when you say yes to a request for help.  When you find interested parties, understand which departments need your assistance, would benefit from your expertise, represent an influential research division, or bring significant funding into an institution.  In doing so, you are beginning the work of both expanding your influence and influencing decision makers. 

These decision makers may not be limited to the campus community.  Colleges and universities are an important part of their community, communities where donors and potential donors reside and do business.  Board members may come from the alumni community.  The alumni community comes from the student body.  What are you doing to strengthen the ties with current students who may become future donors and board members?  Relationship building is both strategic and smart.  It allows library professionals to showcase their resources, staff, and value to the stakeholders who may be able to influence at crucial times or open up new opportunities for library professionals and advocates.

How Can You Speak to People, Place, and Platform?

Whether you are a librarian, a content or technology provider, a researcher, or an advocate, you are likely to speak the language of libraries.  This shorthand, this trade talk, this vernacular comes easily when you are speaking to your cohorts, to fellow travelers, to colleagues.  However, in the world of advocacy, those are not the people you need to influence.  Thinking about people, place, and platform allows any advocate to start from neutral, understand the audience, and learn which messages will resonate with an individual.  An administrator has different priorities and needs than her staff.  The head of a department has different stressors than an associate professor.  Running a university and running a research lab are not the same. 

Are you speaking Library-ese or are you using the language of administrators?  Staffers?  Department Heads?  Faculty?  Researcher?  Students?  Alumni?  Members of the community?  My 20-plus year involvement in the library business means I thought nothing about talking about “full-text access” or “access to the full text” and if I wasn’t speaking to a library professional or a content and technology provider, I would get a noticeable blank stare.  That shorthand, the trade talk, meant nothing to people for whom saying, “you can read the articles,” would make immediate sense.  Avoiding library trade talk while also understanding and picking up on the language of those with whom you are seeking better relationships can break down barriers and demonstrate your interest in what is important to them.  Hearing their stories, understanding their concerns, also allows you to make connections to your own concerns and find common ground.

If you’ve committed to people, place, and platform, you don’t have to abandon all your library basics.  Does your outreach include intake?  Are you conducting advocacy-related reference interviews?  Are you showing up, asking questions and making connections to business relationships and alliances?  What do stakeholders and staffers need to know about issues they may not understand are core to libraries?  (e.g., How the library budget impacts departments and disciplines) Are you comfortable having conversations with the people who control the library purse strings?  Can you make your case in a language and style that suits their needs? 

An academic library serves the needs of multiple stakeholders.  Those holding the purse strings, those bringing money and influence into the institution, those trying to run the university all have information needs that the library should be meeting.  If the library can inform these decision makers and their staff, it can become an indispensable resource.  Are you making yourself, your staff, and your library indispensable?  By using your library expertise and showcasing its resources, library professionals can bring the library directly to stakeholders.  By understanding strategic plans, local or current concerns, regional or institution-specific interests, library professionals can use library resources to alert stakeholders to news, research, reports, competitive analysis, whatever that reference interview uncovers. 

Keyword searches tailormade for stakeholders or staffers means each search, each alert, each email, is an iteration of your library on the phone or desktop of the people who can make a huge difference in your lives and careers.  Using your expertise and resources can provide your institutional community with access to invaluable information while centering the library and its collection.  By providing timely information from vetted resources using technology designed to deliver customized information updates, you both expand awareness and timeliness of information sharing and showcase the power of libraries and information access.

Claiming Your Own People, Place, and Platforms

Understanding the difference makers and making yourselves indispensable are just a part of opportunity-based advocacy.  The relationship building can’t be one-sided;  you also need to be able to directly make the case for libraries.  Telling the story about your library, your staff, and your resources involves being able to speak to impact and raise awareness.  It means understanding the business implications of decisions and it often requires being about to speak to the unintended consequences of proposed plans. 

Library advocacy can be informed by understanding different motivating factors.  In the 2008 book, “The Political Brain, The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation,” Drew Weston wrote about understanding what people care about and different types of motivational drivers and supporter types.  

Motivations

• Compassionately Engaged

Populations and people

• Pride of Place

Interesting, thriving, and prosperous

• The Data Shows It

Data about outcomes as lens 

• Concerned or Fearful

Focused on filling gaps

Supporter Types

• Relational Supporters

“Know” libraries and librarians

• Ideological Supporters

Aligned with what librarians do

• Aversion Supporters

Would like to avoid bad outcomes based on
principles or ideals

• Access Supporters

Motivated by feedback, praise, or gratitude

Using an Example of Data-driven Motivation and an Aversion Supporter Type

It is essential to be able to speak to the business implications of issues and concerns more than the emotional messages.  While library professionals are accustomed to collaborating and looking for ways to share collections and knowledge, remember that colleges and universities are inherently competitive institutions.  They compete for administrators and faculty, researchers and research dollars, as well as students.  What does the data show about how much money departments at your institution, colleges and universities in your state, and even athletic rivals budget for the library, student retention, and student success per student?  Is there data to help you assist faculty, researchers, and department heads to benchmark themselves against others seeking increasingly competitive grants and research dollars.  Are you able to depoliticize the language surrounding the library, research, or particular disciplines and provide data, research, and analysis?  It starts with understanding your audience, their motivations, and how they best receive information.  That awareness begins with relationships.  The pick list of motivations and supporter types provides an array of opportunities to shape an argument, presentation, or request for information.  

An advocate speaking to a legislator or legislative staffer needs to point out the potential fallout issues in a bill and suggest alternative language.  Library professionals need to use their understanding of library holdings, procedures, policies, and the profession to speak clearly about what already exists that may be unknown to administrators or supporters, what library professionals do, and areas of expertise that may not come to mind when non-librarians think about a library.  Data privacy can inform data stewardship and student privacy.  Copyright protection and digital rights management can inform information access and artificial intelligence.  Subject headings and keywords can inform grant restrictions and research biases.  Aligning library needs with institutional or administrative business initiatives — student retention, student success, and institutional benchmarking — helps to showcase the library and provide library professionals with opportunities to demonstrate their wide-ranging set of skills.  The depth of the library profession is worth defining and specifying.  Leave no doubt about the array of skills library professionals possess.