Library Marketing Valuation Toolkit

Every year, public libraries across the United States produce, market, and host thousands of readings, book clubs, literary festivals, comic cons, and other experiential events that directly connect their local patrons to books and authors—new and old. Some libraries work in partnership with publishers and/or local booksellers, while others work directly with individual authors.

Panorama Project’s Library Marketing Valuation Toolkit identifies best practices for producing and marketing a variety of author and book-related events at public libraries—in physical and virtual formats, and offers customizable templates librarians can use to measure and communicate the monetary value of the various marketing tactics they employ.

The Toolkit is comprised of three key components:

• The Directory of Best Practices For Public Library Events, compiled by a volunteer committee of experienced public librarians, offers an overview of the best practices librarians across the country have used to produce, market, and host successful events of all types.

• The Library Marketing Valuation Calculator enables librarians to identify and plug in specific costs for relevant physical and digital marketing channels from local and regional media platforms to demonstrate the marketing value of their own platforms. This equivalent value can then be reported to publishers alongside registration and attendance figures for author/book-related events, in a context they're familiar with.

• The Library Media Kit Template offers a customizable format to communicate the various aspects of a library’s platform—community demographics, materials budget, circulation trends, and marketing channels—making it easy for publishers to evaluate them in the same context as traditional marketing channels.

Librarians who regularly measure the impact of their marketing efforts are not only able to demonstrate the direct impact on an individual author and/or book’s visibility and circulation, there’s often a ripple effect for the author’s backlist, as well as similar titles in their collection.

One of the best ways to communicate the tangible value of a library’s platform is to align its reach and performance with publishers’ other channels and see how it compares.

In this #ALAVirtual20 session, Panorama Project lead Guy LeCharles Gonzalez shows how public libraries can effectively track, measure, and contextualize the full monetary value of their marketing efforts for publishers and authors. The presentation includes key insights from the Library Events & Book Sales Survey, and a preview of the Library Marketing Valuation Toolkit.