Meeting Report: Marketing libraries
Marketing Libraries: Is it good for your health?
SHINe Study Day held on the 28th of February 2007 at the Abbey Business Centre, Glasgow
On the 28th of February, I attended a SHINe Study day at Abbey Business Centre on marketing for libraries. The day aimed to educate people working within health libraries about some basic marketing principles, and showed how marketing can be put into practice in a variety of contexts, for example in public libraries, academic libraries, and within the NHS. The title of the study day posed the question: ‘marketing for health libraries, is it good for your health?’, and with my inexperience of marketing giving me a distinctly unhealthy feeling, my initial response was ‘no!’ However, I was keen to be proven wrong by the various speakers at the day’s event.
The first speaker was Professor Alan Wilson from the University of Strathclyde business school. Alan gave an extremely interesting talk on ‘marketing for health libraries’, and explained how to develop services for a particular market, how to identify and target key user groups, how to communicate and promote a service, and how to deliver a user-oriented service. He stressed the importance of seeing the library service through the eyes of the user and broke the user experience into the following stages to help you do this:
- Requesting the service
- Delivery of the service
- Packaging/presentation of the service
- Providing feedback
The second speaker was Jane Milne, Team Leader of Sighthill and Ratho Libraries, and she talked about ‘Marketing to reluctant users and raising your profile’. Jane discussed the award-winning success of the Sighthill and Ratho Libraries team in turning the library service around by engaging reluctant users. She talked about how they encouraged reluctant users to feel a sense of ownership of the library by involving them in choices about the library service and finding out what services and resources they actually wanted. This has benefited the library by increasing the number of people who appropriately use the library and it has also benefited the community as antisocial behaviour has declined and the number of young people seeking employment and education has increased. Jane’s talk was really inspiring as it showed that it is possible to reach the most reluctant of reluctant users, and demonstrated how libraries can positively impact upon the lives of their users.
Gillian Anderson, Librarian for the UHI Millennium Institute, spoke next about ‘Marketing library services the UHI way’. Gillian gave some background information about the challenges faced by the Institute, which offers access to higher education courses to people scattered throughout the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, ranging from Inverness to Shetland. Gillian stressed the importance of marketing the Library service to users, and how marketing can be an opportunity to ‘reach users, be relevant, raise profile, prove value’.
Finally, Annalena Winslow from the GGCHB Communications team focused upon ‘corporate identity’ in her talk. Annalena discussed how a service or company could market itself within a wider corporate identity. She also emphasised the importance of consistency in the brand when producing marketing materials, and the importance of targeting the right people with the right materials. She highlighted the opportunities of online branding and of reaching out to non-clinical staff within the NHS.
Overall, I really enjoyed this study day. I was impressed by the interesting insights and experiences of the speakers, and feel better equipped and much more positive about marketing a library service in the future. So, is marketing within health libraries good for your health? Well, it won’t cure a cold or reduce those fine lines, but it will give you a healthy glow to know you have reached out to target users, and it will ensure that your library service thrives.
Edith Mackenzie
Assistant Librarian,
Glasgow Royal Infirmary/ Western Infirmary
Tel: 0141 211 5975/ 0141 211 1856
Email: edith.mackenzie@northglasgow.scot.nhs.uk