Lethbridge Public Library's "Have a Seat" Campaign

Lethbridge Public Library did a really good community engagement campaign called "Have a Seat".  It was good for two reasons:

First, they came up with a great way to talk to the community.  They got a red leather chair and they took it around to community events, the local pool, wherever they could find people, and invited the public to sit down and consider one question: "How do you fit a community into a library?"  I love this!  The chair is a vivid, symbol of the campaign that catches attention and invites people to engage. Once they are seated, they are in a posture that naturally invites lingering and contemplation.

The question is really good too.  I love how they limited it to one open ended question rather than a survey.  The question is open ended but it is also somewhat complex, requiring some thought to understand; and it is subtly leading, suggesting that fitting the community into the library is the issue at hand.

They talked 700 people.  They took a different approach with "community builders," sitting them in the chair and interviewing them (asking a series of questions).  Very thoughtful way of extending the visual metaphor of the chair into different types of engagement.

The second thing they did really well was analyzing and compiling the results.  You don't get any quantitative information with one open ended question, so how do you crunch the data? They identified what they called "story themes", common refrains which surfaced over and over again, and they gave them compelling names.  There were six of them:

• We Love the Library!
• People Want More of the Good Stuff (less of the not so good)
• Well…I Didn’t Know That!
• By the Way I’m Having Just a Little Trouble Using the eResources
• Since My Life is Filled to the Max (it makes a difference to me that the Library is close to where I live or work)
• It’s Important that the Library be a Community Hub (a place to learn, discuss, interact, have fun and sometimes expand who we are).

The Trouble with PLA Service Responses

I do a lot of community needs assessment using the PLA's Strategic Planning for Results process.  It has a lot of strengths (focused on community needs, etc.) but some weaknesses too.

SP4R includes "service responses", a list of 18 services which libraries can deliver in response to community needs.  The service responses have their uses; for starters, they are a good summary of the wide range of things that a modern public library can do.  Also, they focus on the benefit that the community receives from the service, as opposed to the activity of the library.  For example:

"Residents will have someone to answer their questions on a wide array of topics."  

See how that is focused on residents, and not on the library?  This is the right way to describe services when you are talking to the public.  It  is good advocacy language. 

There are however two problems with service responses.  First, they can lead to a loss of context when collecting public input.  For example, lets say the community tells you there is a teenage graffiti epidemic, and determines that an appropriate service response to that would be 

"Express Creativity: Create and Share Content.  (Residents will have the services and support they need to express themselves by creating original print, video, audio or visual content.)"

The idea being that the little hoodlums can come be creative in the library rather than on garage doors.

The problem arises when down the line, someone receives this public input and starts deciding what the library will do to implement that service response.  If they don't have all the information, they might decide to do a seniors' painting program.  Which would be fine, except it misses the reason why the service response was picked in the first place.

This is an artificial sort of example, but the point is that when you move from 1) community need to 2) these very broad and general service responses and then 3) into a specific library activity there may be a disconnect between #1 and #3.  Really.  I've seen it happen.

The second problem with the service responses is what I call "takeout menu syndrome."  If you let your community representatives pick service responses, they are liable to pick the ones that sound good to them for whatever reason.  No matter how much you tell them to pick based on community needs, they will tend to like one or the other, just because it sounds good to them.  And they will pick that one, as if it was moo goo gai pan and they were hungry.  Mmm, moo goo gai pan.

How to avoid these problems?  I do show community groups the service responses, as part of my effort to show them the range of things that libraries can do.  I do not ask them to pick service responses.  When it comes time to talk about what the library should do (that is step 3, after we have identified community needs and discussed all the things that public libraries can do), I simply ask them to pick the community needs that the library should respond to and to say whatever they want about what exactly the library should do in response.  After that it is up to the library to refine and polish that input and to reference Service Responses if they so choose.