Marketing and Signage

Great post about libraries and marketing on "The 'M' Word" blog, sharing about a talk given by Wayne Disher, director of Hemet Public Library in Hemet, Calif. It focuses on the mixed messages libraries send, often unintentionally, through intimidatingly prohibitive policies, appearance and general attitudes.

Basically, libraries are saying, "Welcome! Everyone come in; we have information galore and we're here to serve you for free - just ask!" at the same time as they're posting NO CELL PHONES and NO FOOD and turning a library card application into a process as convoluted as a visa request (okay, maybe not that complicated). Some of these policies are necessary, of course, but you can always tweak the 'sell' in order to make things more palatable for patrons -- instead of saying NO CELL PHONES, you could put a sign with "Please take your cell phone conversations to the Cell Phone Lounge."* Heck, throw in some free coffee dispensers there, too.^

One point I loved was Disher's explanation that having to paste signs saying NO/DON'T ______ usually indicates a problem somewhere else -- if you keep telling people this bin is NOT FOR TRASH, RECYCLING ONLY, maybe you need to put out more trash bins...

Overall, a great reminder about the importance of presentation and attitude when it comes to serving patrons; not to mention that libraries aren't really 'free' to them -- they have invested time and effort to get here, so we should really be operating on a 'paying service' model as much as we can.


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*This brings up a few tricky issues when it comes to serving multilingual populations, of course (a picture of an x-ed out cell phone translates a lot easier).

^Of course, I know it's always easier to talk about these things than actually implement them -- the next thing you'll get is patrons complaining about cold free coffee.