CONVINCING THE DECISION MAKERS
MOST PEOPLE READING this book will have to get approval from someone before they can implement the ideas presented. It doesn’t matter how good an idea is if you’re not able to convince the decision makers within your organization to allow you to pursue it. Decision makers need to be able to understand the nature of the idea you’re proposing, the value it can have for patrons, and the cost-benefit to the library.
For many libraries, the approval process will be the most challenging part of implementing the strategies mentioned in this book. Decision makers may be intimidated by technology, unfamiliar with social media, or consider marketing a waste of library resources.
The details presented in this book are specific to the Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library. However, the concepts themselves are universal. If you build a more user-friendly website, your patrons are more likely to use it. If you develop a successful social media presence, you can reach out to an ever-growing segment of your community every day. If you create compelling promotional material to market your library, you’ll increase community awareness of the library, and thereby increase usage of library services.
The previous chapters are not only instructional tools on how to execute the various strategies, but also informational tools to assist you in explaining the strategies to decision makers. In this chapter, we’ll cover some approaches to help navigate the approval process and create advocates out of skeptics.
Second only to knowing what you’re talking about, knowing your audience is the most important part of getting approval from your decision makers.
During my hiring process at CCJPL, I had to take a personality profile test. Phyllis and David explained that it didn’t impact their hiring decision. They used the personality profile for communication purposes. It was called the DiSC Personality Profile System and was administered by Jim Corter, with Corter Consulting.
Based on the answers given, a person is “scored” in four categories:
▪ Dominance: Places priority on the bottom line, results, strength, and confidence
▪ Influence: Places priority on convincing others, building individual relationships, and big ideas
▪ Steadiness: Places priority on team and consensus building, stability, and cooperation
▪ Conscientiousness: Places priority on accuracy, detail, and quality
The area in which the person “scores” the highest is considered their dominant personality type. I turned out to be an “I.” I’ve always had an outgoing personality, so this was of little surprise. What was surprising to me, early on, was the way library staff referred to each other in casual conversation.
On any given day, you’re likely to hear someone on staff referring to another staff member by their letter; “he’s an ‘I,’” “she’s an ‘S,’” “you know there’s going to be a fight if we have more than one ‘D’ on this committee.” It’s become part of the culture of our organization and plays a significant role in how we interact with each other.
For instance, I know if I have a project that involves our Children’s Department, I’ll need to work with Kay Taylor, our youth services manager. Kay has a predominantly “S” personality, so I’ll want to make sure to provide her with plenty of information and adequate time for her to process it. She’s likely going to want to think it through thoroughly and consult with her staff to get their input. For Kay to support an idea, she needs time to become comfortable with it and know that her team is comfortable with it.
Our director, David, on the other hand, is an “I.” When we get together to discuss something, I know that David is going to think about the big picture. Particularly in the early stages of discussion, he’s going to be more focused on the overall impact an idea can have, and less concerned with the details. If we’re not careful, he and I can start out talking about something as mundane as the location of a public printer, and within an hour, we’re liable to be discussing how we should redesign half the library.
I don’t want to imply that we only see each other as letters at the library. We’re all human, with a wide range of emotions, moods, motivations, and ideas. But having a general awareness of people’s personalities does help guide you when you’re looking to effectively communicate.
LET’S GET TO KNOW EACH OTHER
More than likely, your library doesn’t do personality profiling. It’s not all that common in the industry. However, you probably do know your coworkers, supervisors, and library administration pretty well. Libraries are generally pretty close-knit. You know some of the things they like and don’t like, what their expectations are, when they’re in a good mood, and when it’s better to discuss something tomorrow. To one degree or another, you know them personally.
If you think about the people you’ve worked with for any significant time, you probably have a pretty good idea of their dominant personality types. Considering their personality will help you cater your approach when attempting to get their buy-in.
But what about those decision makers you don’t know? How do you approach a library board or city officials you’ve never met?
A lot can be learned from the questions they ask. Are they inquiring about costs, budgets, and resources? Or are they wanting to know more about the impact your idea will have on the community? Their questions are often telling you about their motivations. And their motivations are telling you about their personality. Communicating in a way that is comfortable for decision makers will help win them over at a personal level. You have an opportunity to give them their reasons to say yes, not just your reasons.
I’ve found that the two most effective ways to share ideas with decision makers are to either tell a story about what the idea can do for the community, or to show the financial value of implementing the idea for the library. It’s a matter of knowing which approach to take with which decision makers, and for which projects.
Telling a story is extremely effective when talking about technology with laypeople. Helping people understand complicated technologies is challenging. It’s easier to get approval from decision makers if you focus on what the project does, rather than how you’ll approach it.
Decision makers are usually more interested in the impact of technology projects, not their detailed functions and features. They don’t necessarily care about the steps you took to design the website so it would adhere to the three-click rule. But they are thrilled that even elderly patrons can easily download books and music at home without confusion. We know this is largely because of the three-click rule, but decision makers are interested in the outcome, not the mechanics.
Board members might be inspired by the idea of day care providers using the library’s website to play Happy Talk stories for children at nap times. It paints a picture in decision makers’ heads of children lying down on mats, drifting off to sleep, listening to stories provided by the library. That’s something they’ll want to be part of. It’s something they can support, and their support gives them a sense of ownership. It’s a story they can share with their friends. They’re not interested in the conversion of cassette tapes to MP3s or the code behind the embedded media player on the site. There’s nothing sweet or inspirational about all that.
The library-in-your-pocket story we used with our board when seeking approval for our mobile website is another good example of using a story to move decision makers to “yes.” It’s easy for them to visualize a woman downloading an e-book from the library while she’s standing in the middle of a bookstore. They can appreciate how the library saved her money she would have otherwise spent.
Telling a story allows decision makers to picture an idea in action. It cuts through all of the complexities of how something works and gets to the essence of why it will be beneficial to our patrons. It’s a lot easier to convince decision makers to spend thousands of dollars on a project that expands the library’s reach into the homes and lives of our patrons, than it is to convince them to spend thousands of dollars on a new website.
Since it’s likely that decision makers won’t understand the technical nature of a project, make sure to frame your request for support in a way that appeals to them emotionally. Let them feel like they are contributing to the betterment of the library and the community. Don’t make them feel like they’re spending money on complicated technologies they don’t understand.
Telling a story helps overcome the challenges of understanding technology by shifting focus onto the results rather than the technology itself. Getting approval for marketing and promotional efforts, on the other hand, will likely require a more financially minded approach.
Many decision makers in the library industry look at marketing as a waste of library funds. It doesn’t have a tangible benefit to patrons like services, materials, and programming do, so they feel they shouldn’t spend money on it. That might have been somewhat true twenty years ago, before the Internet, social media, and instant access to practically everything. Now, that view is shortsighted.
In order for us to enter the consciousness of the people of our communities, we have to be where they are with content they will respond to. We can’t just sit in our buildings and wait for them to show up. We have to make them curious about the library. We have to let them know what we have to offer and how it can benefit them. We have to give them a reason to want to use the library. And we have to be creative in our approach in order to accomplish these things.
For some decision makers, the very mention of the word marketing, for instance, might mean immediate rejection. For this reason, when discussing these ideas with them, try to avoid using words that might have negative connotations. Don’t talk about advertising, or promoting, or even marketing. Talk to them about public awareness and outreach.
People are more comfortable with “making the public aware” than they are with “advertising.” After all, one of our goals as institutions is to make our communities more aware of our services. We can’t say one of our goals is advertising. We’re trying to get decision makers to say “yes” to something they want to do.
Once you’ve framed the discussion palatably, focus on showing them how many people your idea has the potential to reach. In the billboard example we used in chapter 6, I discussed how to break down the cost of the billboard based on the amount of traffic passing by it daily:
At CCJPL, the average drive-by traffic for one of our billboard locations is 25,000 people a day. Over the course of a year, that billboard will have been seen approximately 9,125,000 times. Each of our billboards costs $3,000 annually. That’s $8.22 a day. At that rate, the library is spending $0.0003 per exposure opportunity.
You’ll want to present your numbers in a particular order. In the example, I first presented the number of people who pass by the billboard on a daily basis, 25,000. Most people don’t realize how many vehicles pass by any particular location every day. This is likely to be surprising to your decision makers. Next, I extrapolated that over an entire year. That’s 9,125,000 people, an astounding number. With those kinds of numbers in their heads, the $3,000 cost seems rather small. Once that’s broken down to $8.22 per day, it really looks inexpensive. Breaking it down even further, to $0.0003 per vehicle, it almost seems as though we’re getting it for free. Decision makers appreciate and respond well to numerical evidence, which can immediately illustrate a project’s value and ease their minds as they consider your idea.
Another challenging example is Facebook advertising. Some decision makers may not even have Facebook accounts and therefore be completely unfamiliar with how Facebook works. To them, it may just seem like some silly game on the Internet. Others may be active on Facebook but have no understanding of how the advertising process works. Worse yet, they may even consider the ads an annoyance.
You’ll have to first do some explaining about what a Facebook ad is and how it works, which was covered in chapter 4. You’ll still want to discuss your idea in terms of public awareness. You aren’t advertising on Facebook. You’re utilizing social media to increase public awareness of the library. Again, you’re trying to make them comfortable with a new concept.
Even so, you’re still going to have to talk about a Facebook ad, and call it such, because that’s what it is. However, you might use an analogy to help decision makers become more comfortable with the concept.
Consider comparing your Facebook ad to posters you might hang up around town. Explain to your decision makers that it’s the same concept, just on a different platform. People log onto Facebook, just like they go into restaurants and convenience stores. The posters you hang up around town are meant to catch people’s attention and make them aware of events or services at the library. A Facebook ad does the same thing. As with the stories discussed in the previous section, you’re making decision makers aware of what a Facebook ad does, rather than focusing on what it is.
Use the Freegal example from chapter 4 to show the value of a Facebook ad:
A $50 Facebook ad will reach about 10,000 people. Free music is a pretty great offer, but we’ll be conservative and say that 2 percent of the people who saw the ad went to our website and downloaded music (remember, 2.9 percent clicked on the ad to learn more about the concerts). That’s 200 people.
Each of those people gets to download three songs. So, that’s 600 songs downloaded. The average cost to download a song from iTunes, Amazon, or elsewhere is basically $1.00.
By running a $50 ad for a week, your library has saved your community $600. That’s a substantial return on investment.
But that’s just one week. What happens if those same people download their three songs for an entire year? That’s 31,200 songs, or $31,200 in savings, from a $50 ad.
That’s how the ad shows an ROI for the community. They are able to get the music for free from the library, rather than paying for it. Now let’s look at how the ad shows an ROI for the library.
Freegal’s contract requires the library to pay a flat rate annually and this was a good thing for the library. For this example, we’ll say that our contract is $10,000 a year.
We’ll also say we haven’t done a great job of promoting the service and we’re averaging about 10,000 downloads per year. (You may be doing better. This is an example. Just bear with me). So, we’re basically paying the same price per song, $1.00, as our patrons would be paying if they bought the songs from iTunes. That’s not being a very effective resource for our community. There’s no value there.
Now let’s factor in those 31,200 songs we got for our $50 ad. That would give us a total of 41,200 songs, while our contract is still $10,000. That works out to $0.24 per song, while increasing the value, the ROI, of our Freegal contract by over 300 percent. That’s being a very effective resource for our community. Not bad, Facebook.
I’m well aware that I’ve made a lot of assumptions in this argument, and the numbers there aren’t really attainable. But that’s part of the beauty of the argument.
It doesn’t matter if the boss tries to tell you not everyone is going to download all their songs every week, or not all 200 people who went to the website would have a library card, or not everyone who downloaded music would have otherwise bought it.
It’s impossible for them to strip away enough value to say it isn’t worth it to run the $50 ad. We’re trying to help them do the right thing. We shouldn’t really have to sell the idea to them. It’s just math.
Using Facebook advertising as a public awareness tool can increase value in virtually any service we offer. Our ROI is value-based. We aren’t a business. We’re never going to show a profit. We measure our return on investment based on utilization. The more people who use our services, the more valuable those services become, both socially and financially.
All this talk about using the right words and or talking about costs in a certain way might seem sort of manipulative. But that isn’t the case at all. You aren’t doing anything conniving by choosing your words carefully or presenting your numbers in a particular way. It isn’t that you’re trying to put something over on your decision makers. It’s not a trick. All you’re doing is helping them understand the right thing to do in a way that’s comfortable for them.
DEAR DECISION MAKER
I’ve had the privilege of working under extraordinary leadership during my time at CCJPL. Both Phyllis Burkett and David Eckert have been forward-thinking and adventurous directors, willing to try new things and always looking for ways to make our library better.
David maintains an open-door policy with everyone on staff. Anyone, with any idea, is welcome to come to him. He may say “yes” and he may say “no,” but he will only do so after he fully understands the idea.
We’re fortunate to also have a board that is just as forward-thinking as our administration. They were willing to believe in a vision early on and gave us an opportunity to take the library in a new, digital direction. Once they were able to see the results of our endeavors, they went from giving hesitant approval to becoming motivated advocates.
This isn’t to say we never get told “no” by administration or the board. But they are always willing to listen and make the best-informed decision they can for the good of our library and community.
I can’t tell you what sorts of ideas your team might bring to you or whether you should approve them or not. But I implore you to listen to them and genuinely consider their ideas before making a decision.
There are such things as bad ideas. Trust me. I have had my share of them. But if your staff is coming to you with strategies from this book, please give them your utmost consideration. The strategies in this book aren’t radical. They are fundamental practices that are needed in any library looking to remain relevant and grow their audience in today’s environment.
Once you’ve given your staff approval to move forward with one of these projects, also give them room to learn as they go. They’re going to make mistakes along the way. Be constructive and continue to support them.
For instance, if you’ve approved the Facebook strategies from chapter 3, and a staff member puts up an evening post that inadvertently “crosses the line” and receives some negative comments from patrons, keep that in perspective. It’s just one post and you can always take it down. Social media is short-attention-span theater. If your staff posts a warm and fuzzy picture the next night, all will be forgiven and forgotten.
What you don’t want to do is have a knee-jerk reaction and decide you need to implement some draconian social media policy stating that only things directly related to the library can be posted. It not only kills the confidence of your staff, it also destroys the very mechanics that make the Facebook strategies successful.
Being a good leader means allowing your staff to fail with confidence. Provide an environment where they aren’t beaten over the head when they make mistakes, but are instead picked back up, brushed back off, and encouraged to get out there and try again. Foster a culture of creativity.
By no means am I trying to tell you how to do your job. I’m in no way qualified to do that. What I am doing is asking you to give these strategies a chance. I’ve done my best to explain how they work and why they work. The very worst thing that can happen is you’ll wind up having more people using the library.
NOTE: Because of the importance of understanding how to work with decision makers to get approval for your initiatives, I asked Carson Block, of Carson Block Consulting, to contribute his insights on the subject. Carson travels the country, working with library leaders to develop technology and management strategies for their organizations. His contribution can be found in appendix C.