Swinging 236 Votes – Can Libraries Do It? OCLC Library Funding Report
Jenny Levine of the ShiftedLibrarian library blog has a posting on OCLC’s report called From Awareness to Funding: a study of library support in America:
“You really need to read the whole thing for yourself, but there are some key points I want to highlight here.
1. Most residents don’t understand that their public library is funded by local taxes. This isn’t a big shock, but it is critically important in the report’s conclusion that voters believe libraries are adequately funded and that if they need money, it will “come from somewhere” so they don’t feel an urgency to vote in favor of funding requests.
2. “Super supporters” are a library’s best bet for “definitely” voting yes, but even their support is latent and they have an underlying fear that the library is becoming less relevant. Any funding campaign has to activate their love for the library and focus on support, not usage, because it turns out that library users don’t vote for the library. It seems counter-intuitive, but trying to get the vote out among your users is the wrong strategy. Instead, “super” and “probable” supporters use the library less but support it financially because of their belief in the power of the library based on their own childhood memories or personal transformational experiences.
3. Residents who vote to increase taxes to support the library believe in its power to transform peoples’ lives, not because they value the information services we provide. In fact, the more we try to hang our hat in the information space, the more irrelevant we will become in the eyes of those voters. “The research indicates that transformation, not information, drives financial support.” (p.4-12)
4. Any support campaign, whether local or national, would have to focus on increasing funding for libraries, not on getting people to use our services more or making them more aware of the variety of services we offer. Doing that just continues to play into our own misconception that library users vote yes with their wallets when it comes to ballot initiatives, and the statistics show that’s just not true.
In the end, the report hypothesizes that in a town of 50,000 people, a library would need to swing 236 votes from the “probable supporters” group in order to pass a referendum. On the one hand, that sounds relatively easy, but the key is to activate the latent passion for the library in probable and super supporters who are community activists so that they will visibly support the initiative and recruit others to the cause based on that passion.”
Here’s the link for the OCLC report:
http://www.oclc.org/us/en/reports/funding/fullreport.pdf
Here’s the link to the rest of Jenny’s posting:
Posted by Rich
