Ryan Spellman: I'll go ahead and start letting people in. So thank you both again, and good luck.
Julie Edwards: Hello, everyone, and welcome.
Julie Edwards: I see some of you starting to join us. We'll get started in a few minutes here. But if you would like, feel free to head over to the chat box on zoom and say, Hi! And let us know where you're from. We do publish the chat on our blog after, because with a room full of librarians, there's always so much good information that goes back and forth in the chat. You do not have to use it or participate in the chat at all. If you don't want to.
Julie Edwards: but it's there. If you would like to say, Hi.
Julie Edwards: Hello! New York and and Arkansas. Welcome.
Julie Edwards: welcome, welcome!
Julie Edwards: So happy to see everyone joining. Hi, Oklahoma City. North Carolina, Minnesota, Wisconsin, hey? North Dakota.
Julie Edwards: Louisiana.
Julie Edwards: Charlottesville, Virginia, hey? Cheyenne, hey? Manitoba, There's our Canadian Colleagues
Julie Edwards: DC more Canadians Hello
Julie Edwards: from the mountains of Virginia. That sounds nice. North Carolina, Tennessee, Pennsylvania. I think I've said this, for some of you have been in webinars with me before. I'm shooting for the webinar one day where we get all 50 States, and then all the Canadian provinces. That would be just amazing. We've come close, but so great to see everyone joining. Hi, Kentucky. Hey! South Florida! Hope! All of those of you in the southern part of the country are not just sweltering in the triple digits.
Julie Edwards: I have a friend who is down in Texas, and it was 105. Hello, Trinidad and Tobago. Oh, thanks for joining us so happy to see you.
Julie Edwards: hey. Delaware? Lots of Canadians, hey, Oklahoma!
Julie Edwards: So nice to see so many of you joining us today.
Julie Edwards: Welcome, welcome! We'll get started here in just a bit. Give everybody a little bit more time to come in.
Julie Edwards: and then we'll get going.
Julie Edwards: And with that my clock just changed, so we will keep this going. Welcome, welcome, welcome! Everybody will officially get started here. You would think that I would know my
Julie Edwards: my script
Julie Edwards: without my notes, but I don't. So here we go. I am Julie Edwards. I am a librarian and instructional designer with niche Academy. Thank you all for joining us at this webinar on Staff led strategic planning a roadmap to success.
Julie Edwards: We'll get started here in just a minute. But I'll do our standard webinar housekeeping first I'll start with introducing Niche Academy. We're an easy to use all in one learning platform to help libraries create and deliver effective training and measure learner success.
Julie Edwards: So our platform is the perfect tool. If you are looking to increase your eresource usage, move your programming, including story times online and deliver and track staff development.
Julie Edwards: If you're interested in finding out more about what we do chatting with a member of our team, hearing what your colleagues and other libraries have to say, I'll drop a link to our website in the chat, and you can check us out.
Julie Edwards: So this webinar today we are recording this, and I will make the recording, the slides, the Chat Transcript and the Audio transcript available. In a few days you will get an email directly from me with all of that information, and it will also be posted on our blog, so you can look for it. There. That means you can just sit back and absorb the presentation. You don't have to worry about taking a bunch of notes, cause you'll have access to everything after the webinar
Julie Edwards: if you would like to turn on closed captioning. You can do that at the bottom of your zoom screen. I see so many of you in the chat. It's so nice to see you all here. Please continue to chat with each other, and share ideas and experiences in the chat, but if you have a question for the presenters, please use the question and answer box in zoom. Things do get lost in the chat, and we are already
Julie Edwards: close to 200 people in the room and growing. And so, if you want to make sure that I see your question, please put it in the QA. Box, and I'll do my best to moderate that at the end of the Webinar
Julie Edwards: this Webinar series is a part of our commitment to solving bigger problems together and providing continuing education in the library world. I am so thrilled that you have joined us today. I always try to pick these webinar topics based on things I wish I had known when I was a practicing librarian. Strategic planning is way up there on that list. So I'm really excited. For today's webinar.
Julie Edwards: We do have more upcoming webinars. I'll put the link to those in the chat box.
Julie Edwards: And now I am happy to introduce our presenters. Katie Matthews and Ryan Spellman. Katie is the senior Director of Administration at Ohio University libraries in Athens, Ohio. She holds degrees in business, administration, economics, library and information, science and higher Education administration.
Julie Edwards: Ryan is a Library support specialist in the User Services department at Ohio University Libraries, Alden Library. He has a masters of library and information science from Kent State University, and a bachelor of science in communication from Ohio University. He has experience in academic libraries and in public libraries, and I am absolutely thrilled to have them both with us today, Katie and Ryan, I will turn it over to you.
Katy Mathuews: Great, thank you, Julie. Ryan, can you give me the thumbs up that my audio is still working. Okay, cool. I can also hear you. Thank you so much for that introduction and welcome and hello to everyone from all over the world. So it's it's good to have you here, so I will just say a few more things in way of introduction.
Katy Mathuews: I am Katie Matthews, of course. And I have been working in higher education and academic libraries for about 20 years. I also have experience. Serving on a Public Library Board, for the Sciota County Public Library in Portsmouth, Ohio.
Ryan also I think, as Julie mentioned, has spent a significant amount of time in public libraries before joining us here at Ohio University libraries. So we have a mix of experience, and just to for my school library people. I helped our school librarian, Mr. Howard shelf books
when I was in third, fourth, and fifth grade. So we've we've between us. We've touched a couple of different types of libraries. So we're gonna open our presentation by just giving a little bit of a background.
Katy Mathuews: In April of 2020, we were tasked so like, let that sink. In April of 2020 we were tasked with leading a staff, led strategic planning process, Ryan and I. So we had a relatively new Dean at the time, who was interested in refreshing our strategic plan.
and was supportive of a staff, led approach. So Ryan and I were invited to Co. Chair the initiative, and then with a lot of support. We were kind of set free to do the thing, and so we had a lot of thoughts like.
Katy Mathuews: Oh, no! How are we gonna do this? How are we gonna pull this off? Though I had a bit of background, in business administration and whatnot, and had some familiarity with strategic planning. I needed a refresher. Many of our colleagues needed to learn from the ground up. And so what this presentation is is sort of a collection. A review and overview.
Katy Mathuews: We can only scratch the surface in an hour on everything that we learned. But we're hoping that you will walk away from this webinar with, you know, sort of a checklist, or at least a roadmap forward. If you are thinking of navigating your own process, whether as a staff led approach, or even if you're a single person or a manager just trying to create your own plan on your own.
Katy Mathuews: I think you will still find this webinar helpful.
Katy Mathuews: so let me just situate us a little bit, as we often do in the academic library world. Ryan and I are at the Ohio University libraries. We work at the main campus in Athens, Ohio, all of our most of our regional campuses, at least all of them are in southeastern Appalachian, Ohio.
Katy Mathuews: so that kind of situates us. It's a relatively rural area. With small urban cities. And urb by urban. I'm talking small town urban in southeastern Ohio.
So here in Athens we have the Vernon R. Aldon Library that you can see in the upper left corner of the slide. We have an annexe facility with high density storage and a regional depository. We have a music and dance library, and then we have regional canvases. And Chillicothe.
Katy Mathuews: and we have our Eastern campus. Lancaster Southern is in Ironton, Ohio, and Zanesville, Ohio. And so I will turn it over to Ryan.
Ryan Spellman: Yeah, thanks, Katie.
Ryan Spellman: So before we get fully started on this. We want to give a shout out to many, many, many of our colleagues. And that's what's awesome about a staff lead endeavor when you're all working together is you learn so much from each other. As Katie mentioned.
Ryan Spellman: We did this over the span of 9 months and during 2020, which, of course, was the pandemic, and it was pretty rough working through it. But I was. I was glad that we had it to focus our energies on but we came into this process like Katie said, with mixed levels of experience. And we were exploring the literature. There was a lot of good stuff to learn, but we really learned the most from our colleagues, from all the people you see listed here, and so many others that aren't listed
Ryan Spellman: They really gave us
Ryan Spellman: a lot of energy, and they really kept it going.
Ryan Spellman: just watching them. Work was so inspiring, and once the process was over, Katie and I were still so interested in it, and we were still wanting to learn more. And that's kind of what led us to continue our research. And that is what makes us so happy to be here today talking to folks like you about strategic planning.
Ryan Spellman: Really, it's
Ryan Spellman: having these conversations and getting your questions, even if it's questions that we might not be able to answer. That's going to really promote us to keep exploring and keep learning more and developing our knowledge in this field which we've become so interested in
Ryan Spellman: speaking of at the end of our presentation, you're going to see our contact information. If you'd like to chat with us more, ask us any more in depth, questions that don't get addressed in the QA. Session at the end of our presentation. Please feel free to reach out to us over email. And we'll get back to you as we can.
Ryan Spellman: So what we're gonna do here in the spirit of establishing a roadmap for strategic planning is we're breaking it down into 3 key considerations. And these are considerations that Katie and I feel should be on everybody's roadmap to a successful strategic planning process.
Ryan Spellman: And, as Katie mentioned, strategic planning is very, very deep, and there's only so much that we can cover. So we did have to kind of, you know. Zoom out a little bit, and touch on these a little little lightly, but hopefully, we'll be able to cover some more ground once we get to the QA. Session, so be sure to keep putting your questions in there for Julie?
Ryan Spellman: So first, we're gonna cover some pre-project planning considerations. Here. We're looking at the staff led approach, talking about that, talking about what that means benefits, drawbacks, things like that.
Ryan Spellman: Then we're gonna dip into understanding strategic plans. And here Katie is, gonna spend some time with you on breaking apart the anatomy of a strategic plan. And what makes a strategic plan.
Ryan Spellman: And then we're gonna talk about coordinating the work and coordinating the work is something I like to look at as being like a smooth transition from pre project planning into actually creating the plan. And then we're gonna move on into creating the plan where you get into more of the meat of the process. So that's gonna be covering research and data analysis and writing the actual strategic plan. And then following all this.
Ryan Spellman: we're going to discuss implementing the plan. And we're also going to talk about the importance of communicating strategically throughout and beyond the whole planning process.
Ryan Spellman: And at this point I'm gonna turn it back over to my colleague, Katie and She will talk about the Cephlet approach a little bit.
Katy Mathuews: Great thanks, Ryan. So there are many ways. You can tackle a strategic planning process.
Katy Mathuews: of course we have participated in the staff led approach. But you could also, for example, hire a consultant you could have library leadership, you know. I've been in situations where leadership felt it best to create the strategic plan themselves, and then share out
Katy Mathuews: to colleagues or any combination of any other approach you can think of. But we're focusing on the staff led approach. And so we wanted to kind of define what that is a bit, and then talk about some of the benefits and some of the challenges
Katy Mathuews: of the staff led approach. And so Staff led. As I mentioned, library leadership and a staff led approach is very supportive of sort of distributing the power and the authority among all library staff. So it's not a top down approach at all. It's a very grassroots approach and all library staff are invited to participate.
Katy Mathuews: Whether that's serving on a committee or a working group, or providing feedback as needed. There are all kinds of ways you can involve all staff. So whether you're a big institution or a small institution, or just, you know, you trying to, you know, get through and and create the whole thing yourself.
Katy Mathuews: So the benefit of a staff let approach is that is often very a very collaborative approach. And so collaboration is great because it helps develop sort of that team building like instead of having team exercises. It's kind of baked in like team building just happens
Katy Mathuews: because you're all working together towards a common big goal. And so there's a lot of camaraderie, a lot of trust that builds throughout the process, really strengthening working relationships and learning how to best work well with each other. You know, learning how to support each other, learning how to gauge when you know I don't have so much to give today. So can someone else step up and and take the lead and that type of thing. And so
it's a very team building experience.
Katy Mathuews: and it also is very and a very empowering experience. And so, as I mentioned, the empowerment comes in. You know.
Katy Mathuews: power is distributed. Anyone can participate. Anyone, no matter who you are in the organization, can take a leadership role in the staff letter approach or can participate. It's also empowering because it helps develop skills. So
a lot of us had to learn about what strategic planning was, you know, in the first place, and then we had to learn, many of us a lot of the skills that we used along the way to do research to write the plan, you know, to build communication strategies. So there are a lot of skills that are built along the way.
Katy Mathuews: It also creates connection. So I don't just mean connection with each other in that collaborative team building perspective. But also it helps create a connection to the plan itself. And so if you do much reading about strategic planning, one of the woes that people talk about as well. The danger is, you are going to write a plan, and you're gonna
Katy Mathuews: just put it on the shelf to collect dust. Well, the beauty of a staff letter approach. When you get everyone involved
Katy Mathuews: is it builds you know, people become invested in the success of the plan, and it becomes, you know, you talk about it so much, developing it and building it and writing it, that it just becomes second nature that it is part of your day to day work. And so when you create the plan, you become invested in the success of the plan. And so that is one benefit
Katy Mathuews: can also be very cost effective, you know. Consultants can be expensive. So you can save money, and I know library folks are very much used to like. Let's do more with less, and we don't have many resources, so let's make it work. So the staff led. Approach is cost effective. Cause everyone just kind of chips. And let me
Katy Mathuews: caveat that by set by saying financially cost effective because one challenge is, it does require investment, resource, investment of resources, otherwise like time. So it took a lot of time for us to work through our strategic planning process. We all those folks you saw listed on our slide that shouted out our colleagues. We were all for 9 months in meetings with each other at least several hours a week.
Katy Mathuews: working together in different capacities, spending time separately, doing assignments and coming back to talk with the group. So it is an investment of time. So it's not like you don't need any resources. You do need the time and the willingness to invest
Katy Mathuews: and then also, if you do have to take time to build skills. That's also adds to the time investment. So professional development, learning skills, learning, you know, different approaches can also take time.
Katy Mathuews: And then, lastly, it can be, sometimes a bit difficult to stay objective and be honest. So typically in strategic planning, you talk about strengths, you talk about your weaknesses, and sometimes it's really hard to take an honest look at all of that. And so you know, perhaps a consultant could be helpful in that regard. But if you
Katy Mathuews: are just truly going it alone, like we did doing it ourselves. That's something to keep in mind as well, sometimes it's often challenging to stay objective. And so, Ryan, let's go to the next slide, please.
Katy Mathuews: And so, jumping right in
Katy Mathuews: we're gonna walk you through the anatomy of a strategic plan. Cause strategic plan sometimes sounds scary. You know, II teach economics, and the word economics strikes fear and people, and I think a strategic plan kind of does the same thing like, oh, no. What are we gonna do? This is so daunting. But it's really not. So we're just gonna start with the anatomy of a strategic plan.
Katy Mathuews: And, as you can see, there are just 4 little puzzle pieces, and sometimes not even 4. And so
Katy Mathuews: the first thing we need to understand are these components. And and typically when you look at a strategic plan, there's some grounding statement that sort of leads into a more actionable part of the plan. So what typically you will see is a grounding or some conceptual language or some contextual language, and that's where the vision values and or mission statement comes in.
Katy Mathuews: Now, some plans have all 3 of these statements, some plans. Just have one or 2 sometimes you'll just see a mission statement, and that's all good. It really is what is best for you and your library, and what you feel best communicates your intentions so just quickly. A vision statement is very future oriented. It's usually very broad
Katy Mathuews: and typically is very aspirational, describes your aspirations like what you aspire to do. And so, for example, just in a very short statement, your library may be committed to student success, or you may be committed to developing lifelong literacy and lifelong reading practices and that type of thing. And so it's just the vision, like, what is the broad thing that you aspire to do when you look out into your future.
Katy Mathuews: and then there can be a value statement and a value statement. Often when you see that it might be a little statement. But there may be some bullet points as well, listing different values because a value statement talks about your beliefs, your ethics, your ideals? So usually talking about characteristics or specific things that you believe deeply and very often I see this as like a list of things sometimes defined, sometimes not
Katy Mathuews: but, for example, you may list. You know you value equity and inclusion.
Katy Mathuews: You about value, the freedom to read or the freedom to access information you value service to the community. Things like that. So it's it's really very can be tailored to your specific libraries values.
Katy Mathuews: And then the mission statement kind of takes the vision and values and push them one step closer to action. And typically a mission statement will define who your stakeholders are, and how you strive to best serve your stakeholders. It's usually still fairly broad view.
Katy Mathuews: For example, if you're coming from the academic library world. For example, a mission statement. This is a very general generic mission statement. The library will connect students, faculty and staff to innovative and creative resources to support teaching and learning.
Katy Mathuews: So in that statement, I said, who are the stakeholders? Who are we serving, and what are we doing? We're connecting you with innovative and creative resources to support your teaching and your learning. So it kind of defines the the broad action.
Katy Mathuews: So those are kind of some grounding statements. They provide some context, for your goals and initiatives, and so goals and initiatives. Are often a list of things, sometimes narrative. At length, sometimes concise with bullet points. Just depends on your style. But the goals and initiatives are specific, actionable items. It's the
tangible work that you're going to do to implement your vision values and mission, and often those are framed in a measurable
Katy Mathuews: terms. And so perhaps one of your goals to support your your value. Of equity and inclusion is, you will analyze your collection for authors from marginalized populations with the goal to increase your holdings by 10,
Katy Mathuews: and so we'll talk more about the actionable and measurable piece, the goals and initiative piece later in the presentation. But first I'm going to pass it back to Ryan to talk to you about how we on in our process coordinated the work.
Ryan Spellman: Thanks, Katie, and I do have to say I am terrified of economics as a communications undergrad, Major. I know I don't have
Ryan Spellman: so like. He just said I'm gonna talk a little bit about coordinating the work.
Ryan Spellman: And this diagram that you see here is representative of sort of how we structured things.
Ryan Spellman: And coordinating the work, as I said earlier is when you're kind of crossing that divide from pre planning into actually doing the work cause. When you coordinate, it's like time to put it out into the universe. So you you wanna make sure that you put a lot of time into coordinating things so that you can build a strong foundation for the strategic planning process to rely on and grow from.
Ryan Spellman: So looking at this diagram, it can look complicated at first, but it's actually quite simple. So we have at the top. There's a core committee and that was how Katie and I did. Our first structure was with this core committee and you can. The core committee would have a chair or 2 chairs that are kind of overseeing the whole process. You know the the glue, holding it all together, mostly coordinating, not participating too much in the actual subcommittees.
Ryan Spellman: And then there are members that are serving on the core committee, and these members are chairs of various working groups. It doesn't have to be these working groups. You see here, we feel like the structure is pretty adaptable to different library types and needs, you could have more, you could have less and these members
Ryan Spellman: are given the power to kind of build their subgroups and make the subcommittee work happen based on the charge that they're given. and you'll see the feedback loops. The feedback loops are really important. So we have the chairs of the core committee are ex officio members of the subcommittees, right? So that means that they are there. Just kind of sitting in on all of the meetings, but not really taking much participation and decision making. You know they're there to answer quick questions that might install the subcommittees work while they wait on an answer from one of the chairs of the core committee.
Ryan Spellman: They are there to raise awareness about overlap, about things that are happening in other subcommittees that need to be addressed in this committee, where they might be able to team up or help each other out
Ryan Spellman: like conducting a survey. Or maybe one committee could ask some questions of a focus group that would help provide data for something the other committee is doing, and then likewise they can pass things right back up into the Core Committee for discussion amongst the chairs of the subcommittees. Something else that you can do with this
Ryan Spellman: is stagger your timeline. This is another important part of
Ryan Spellman: the
Ryan Spellman: strategic planning process and coordinating the work is building a good timeline for people to rely on and refer to. So they know where they're at, where they need to be, and you can also coordinate this so that
Ryan Spellman: subcommittees are finishing and then teaming up and working together as they work toward other deadlines. So in this example here, this is similar to how we set it up.
Ryan Spellman: Environmental scanning was given the first deadline right? They finished, and then, where they were working parallel with stakeholder research, they were able to overlap with that committee and then work with that committee to help them with data analysis or generating ideas for focus groups, things like that. And then all the whole time the plan drafting subcommittee is working in parallel with them. And this is maximizing output.
Ryan Spellman: And you just keep kind of lumping people together. So you have more and more staff power. As the strategic planning process gets more and more complex, and in the end, you know everybody's coming together to talk about the reports on findings and to submit them to stakeholders, internal and external
Ryan Spellman: and II can't stress enough how important that this coordination is, and there's a lot more to coordinate. But again, we're just kind of like scratching the surface. These are the things that we think are most important that you wanna be thinking about. If you're going into a staff led
Ryan Spellman: strategic planning process. As we continue on in our presentation, we're going to talk about environmental scanning and stakeholder research, which are 2 major factors that no matter where you look, it's you're gonna see that come up about strategic planning. And then we're gonna talk about writing the plan and assessing the plan. And then communication strategies.
Ryan Spellman: So continuing on. We're going to talk just kind of briefly about environmental scanning and stakeholder research.
Ryan Spellman: with and
Ryan Spellman: environmental scanning stakeholder research. They are unique enough, and they have different needs enough that they can work separately and parallel at the same time. But there is significant overlap between these 2 work functions. So environmental scanning.
Ryan Spellman: When you're doing that, you are looking at current and future states
Ryan Spellman: of your organization and the landscape that you, your organization finds itself within. And there are a lot of ways that you can do this. You can do annotated bibliographies of a common literature for your library type and just kind of extract, important little snippets of information.
Ryan Spellman: That are kind of projecting. Either you know what's what might be to come or what is already happening.
Ryan Spellman: You can also look at statistics. So things from your parent organization like, if you're an academic library, you could look at enrollment statistics and budget predictions. If you are in an academic or public library or special library, you know you you could look at anonymized reference transaction information cause. You can get a lot of information from the questions that your stakeholders are asking.
Ryan Spellman: You can also look at other peer institutions, you know. Maybe your organization has a list of peer institutions that you can use to help you with this. Or there's other ways that you can find that out just by looking at. You know the population size that they serve their budget programs. They offer and things like that and look at their strategic plans, you know, see what their goals and initiatives are, especially if you find strategic plans that are recent, recently made.
Ryan Spellman: And then we kind of come to the end of this where the overlap happens, and that's when you start considering the classic swot analysis, or a for analysis Katie and I are more fans of the sore analysis. But so the sore analysis is when you're really looking at your internal
Ryan Spellman: stakeholders, and you're taking time to let them give input on their
Ryan Spellman: strengths and opportunities that they see and the weaknesses. If you're doing the swot analysis
Ryan Spellman: and this this overlap because the environmental scanning also needs data from the internal stakeholders. And this is a really good opportunity for these to
Ryan Spellman: subcommittee working groups to overlap and work together. And
Ryan Spellman: that I'm I'm gonna go ahead and toss this on to Katie now. And Katie is gonna talk a little bit more about the actual like analysis of the data that you will get from this type of work.
and you can.
Ryan Spellman: Yeah.
Ryan Spellman: So, Katie.
Ryan Spellman: Acadian.
Katy Mathuews: Sorry I was muted. I talked to myself all through that muted phase, remember to turn your mic back on. And here I did not.
Ryan Spellman: So thank you, Ryan. If you want to stay back on that previous slide. That's okay, too. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about
Katy Mathuews: the environmental scanning and the stakeholder research. So as rain was introducing the kind of the first thing you need to do is gain an understanding of your situation and your environment. And so that's looking around you in the library profession. If you're a public library. What's going on in your community? What's going on in your state?
Katy Mathuews: You know just what's going on around you? What are the challenges that you're facing. What are the opportunities that exist? and then stakeholders kind of takes that conversation to the people. So while in environmental scanning, you may be reading a lot of articles. Books, news, that type of thing and stakeholder research. You start talking to folks.
Katy Mathuews: And so who are your stakeholders? You have to define, you know who are your stakeholders. So for us it was all of the colleagues that we work within the library, but also everyone we work with outside of the library. So for us, at an academic library, it was students. It was faculty. It was community members, community partners. And so we had focus groups. We had interviews. We.
Katy Mathuews: In the process of having these conversations. We took notes. We had transcripts we used reference chat transcripts. So written narrative. And I've already scared you with economics. I'm not gonna scare you with qualitative or quantitative methods. But if you email me later, I can and will
Katy Mathuews: So when you have a lot of this written material, whether it's articles, whether it's transcripts from interviews and focus groups, whatnot you can go through. And and
Katy Mathuews: sometimes it's the groups themselves that did the research. We had a third group that focused on actually writing the plan. And so they participated in helping glean themes from all of this research that we dug up from environmental scanning and our stakeholder conversations. We actually did some coding. So if you're familiar with qualitative analysis, you can go through in very methodical ways
Katy Mathuews: to understand the frequent and main themes that come up in your text? And we also just had informal conversations like, what do we think the vibe is here? What do we think are the main themes. What categories do we think these themes fall into? And we had that conversation with our various working groups? We share that information out with all staff to get feedback.
We, you know you can even if you're familiar with quantitative stuff qualitative stuff. Excuse me.
Katy Mathuews: you may be familiar with member checking. And that's where you share your analysis with the folks you interacted with. So stakeholders in our case, and and check our understanding like this is what we think the themes are.
Katy Mathuews: Is this your same understanding? Are we kind of picking up what you're laying down? Kind of thing? And so from all of these conversations and methods. You begin to gain an understanding of the main themes. And so these themes can be
Katy Mathuews: the needs. You know that your stakeholders highlighted, you know we really would love, you know, more books from diverse authors. We would really love more comfortable space. You know, you begin to recognize needs that you can then frame your strategic plan around to best support your stakeholders. And so, Ryan, if you wanna switch to the next slide
Katy Mathuews: when you are ready and you have that analysis completed, and you kind of understand how you can best meet your stakeholder needs you can begin writing the plan itself.
Katy Mathuews: and I'm sorry if you hear background noise. There is power washing currently happening at our library, and they just decided to show up at my window. So
Katy Mathuews: you start actually writing the plan once you have the main themes, and so there would different ways. You can approach this you can. Each member of the team who's working to actually write the plan can break off and each write a certain section of the plan and come back together.
Katy Mathuews: One member, can write the whole plan and bring it back for feedback to the committee or any any way in between. You can all work together collaboratively all at once. If you want to, if that's your style.
Katy Mathuews: and bring all the drafts together when there's a draft that you feel confident is your final ish draft. You can share with all library staff and get further feedback, and you know, do some iterative revision and that type of thing. Until, you know, we just had a lot of conversations with all staff. And we sort of.
Katy Mathuews: you know, gauged everyone's input incorporated revisions as we could. And then, when everyone was happy, we were finished and we had a plan.
Katy Mathuews: but just like a little note on that like
Katy Mathuews: it was lovely working with all of our colleagues. It always is and doing. The research part is very, you know, sort of well defined. Sometimes we have to find articles we have to understand. You know, what the big news stories are, you know. That's kind of clear cut. But when you start writing with people sometimes.
Katy Mathuews: It can be challenging. Sometimes it's challenging to hear feedback on what you've written. Sometimes. You know, it's it's hard to know how to give feedback in respectful ways and and feelings can often get involved. And so
Katy Mathuews: you know, to sort of take a little tangent here. Ryan and I both think it's very important to sort of check in with yourselves along the way. And just sort of think about okay. What? What triggers. Me. You know what? What type of criticism triggers me? Am I staying grounded, and am I staying okay with myself? Am I being respectful to others? And this may have been, you know, 2020, just a sign of the times we were in, but something else Ryan and I always did
with our core committees
Katy Mathuews: was at the beginning of a meeting. We would ask, how you are doing, how is everyone doing? And everyone answered honestly, and that helped us gain empathy for each other. It helped us
Katy Mathuews: w learn and understand how and when we could jump up and support others when we had the capacity to do so. And so, this concept kind of fits nicely and with Ryan's next topic. So, Ryan, I will pass that back to you.
Ryan Spellman: Okay.
Ryan Spellman: yeah. And I think that asking how people are doing is something, even though, you know, maybe we're not in that full pandemic anymore. But it's never a bad idea.
Ryan Spellman: So communicating throughout and beyond the planning process. Although that we have the slide at the end. It is something that you're gonna need to keep in mind through the entire strategic planning process. Communication is very important. If you recall the committee structure illustration that we shared. There's all these feedback loops that are built in, and communication
Ryan Spellman: really works well with that, especially communicating about communications. So what I mean about communicating about communications is that you want to have an agreement
Ryan Spellman: that if anybody wants to communicate about, you know, to external or internal stakeholders about anything regarding the strategic planning process. They should bring it up to everybody else. And the reason is, it's very easy to fatigue your audience
Ryan Spellman: with strategic planning messages. So you wanna look for opportunities that you can combine messages together. You also might run into situations where you have 2 different groups that are doing a similar sort of activity. And if they communicate those out at the same time, or even just like a few days apart.
Ryan Spellman: people are gonna get really confused about what's what you know, which one that they want to participate with and or think through the same thing. Even so, communicating about communications is very important. And that is how you are going to be strategic about your communications.
Ryan Spellman: You also want to make sure that you broaden your channels.
Ryan Spellman: So what I mean by channels? Is all these different platforms that we communicate across? You don't wanna assume that everybody is going to get information about your strategic planning through the only like
Ryan Spellman: one social media outlet. Maybe that you're a fan of, you know, like not everybody's wanna get everything from Facebook. You wanna spread it out as much as you can and not just use social media either. People are still checking email. Flyers are good. If you're trying to solicit participation and surveys or there's ways that you can put little, you know, table tents in your library just to get your stakeholders attention! That something's going on that we want to hear their feedback.
Ryan Spellman: And you also want to make sure that you are tailoring your content for these channels.
Ryan Spellman: So you can't compose a nice email, you know, and then copy and paste that into a social media post and copy and paste that onto a poster. You you're gonna have to really think about the medium that you're using to communicate and tailor it to that medium. There's a lot of different considerations to make with email, just crafting a subject line can really take some time. And you have to kind of put some thought into it. You know, how are you gonna grab somebody. So they actually open and read that email.
Ryan Spellman: You also do not want to stamp on accessibility.
Ryan Spellman: Just a real basic example that comes to mind on this would be like printing your Powerpoint slides. I don't know if anybody's ever heard of that before, but if you print your Powerpoint slides, and you have anything that you can't read on them. You need to change your contrast. That's a good way to make sure that all the key information. You know the non decorative graphics are really popping, and that everybody is going to be able to see them to the maximum, and it makes it better for everybody. You know that whole universal design principle.
Ryan Spellman: And the last thing that I wanted to touch on here is gratitude, and how gratitude falls into communicating strategically. It's always great to say, Thank you.
Ryan Spellman: But if you add some substance to that, thank you, it it really bolsters it, and it can really like mean a lot more to the person that you're expressing your gratitude to. So, for example, you have some great data that you got from some of your stakeholders. It's good to thank them. But while you're thanking them, say, we have some great information, we're really looking forward to going over this and learning what we can do in the future, to
Ryan Spellman: to provide better services to you and keep an eye out for the launch celebration of our new strategic plan. If you plan to do one of those.
Ryan Spellman: it's gratitude is an opportunity to share information. And I feel like doing little things like that really shows people the value that you have and the work that they're contributing.
Ryan Spellman: And I'm gonna pass it back over to Katie now. And
Ryan Spellman: Katie's gonna talk a little bit about implementing and assessing initiatives.
Katy Mathuews: Yeah, so that was a a great transition from. So once you've written the plan, you know, Ryan was talking about often you will need to design a plan. So sometimes you create flashy brochures to pass out to stakeholders. You design a website. You know all of these things all of these ways to package and share out your plan, so that folks are aware
Katy Mathuews: that you are taking active steps to serve them. And then sort of the second step of that is the assessment piece. So once you've written the plan.
Katy Mathuews: It's it's time now to not just talk the talk, but walk the walk so you have to do the thing. And just to throw one more phrase in. Don't just talk about it be about it. So typically what you do? I mentioned the goals and initiatives that you plan that you're going to do. Typically they're measurable.
You want to be able to communicate back. And so a lot of libraries will do like an annual report or an annual update, and they will share the progress that they have made on their strategic plan.
Katy Mathuews: And so that's why your to do. List your initiatives, your goals. You wanna set those up as actionable as possible and as measurable as possible, so that you can clearly communicate like, Hey, you know what we did increase the number of holdings of authors from marginalized backgrounds like we increased by not just 10, but 50%
Katy Mathuews: And so you can show that impact. So it's not just we did the thing. It's the impact that that thing had on the folks you are serving and building that sort of language, and that narrative is really helpful if you are advocating for your library, and I think all of us, at some point
Katy Mathuews: find ourselves in a role of advocating for the library whether that's for additional resources from a parent institution or you know, from local funding sources, or voters. You know the Public Library folks. I know often you are talking directly to voters, for you know, initiatives for funding.
Katy Mathuews: and so being able to assess and measure what you've done is not only good, so that you know you were successful, but also so you can put that feather in your cap and show it off to folks when you're advocating for yourself. So Ryan, if you wanna click to the next slide that just felt like so much in a a short period of time.
Katy Mathuews: And it was our goal here today was just sort of to to run through it, you know, show you the roadmap so that it at least, you know. Okay, environmental scan stakeholder research. Now we gotta write it, you know, here's assessing, communicating, you kinda know, the different directions you may need to explore. And so we hope that was helpful.
Katy Mathuews: Though it was sort of the very sort of whiplash version. I guess if we're gonna stick with the the traveling theme. Though hopefully, not hopefully. It didn't hurt
Katy Mathuews: but the good news is, and I did bury the delete at the beginning. We did write a book about all of this. And so if you're interested into in drilling down into the detail, we go into much more detail in our book. Creating
Katy Mathuews: a staff ledge strategic plan, a practical guide for libraries. And so I know a lot of libraries. Have this book now, so maybe you can get it at your local library. But we 200 pages of super good information.
Katy Mathuews: If you wanna dig down into any additional topic as well. Email us reach out. We're always happy to hear from folks and to learn from folks and to share if there any of our work can help pay off for other folks. We really love that so feel free to reach out to us. And then also, at this point, we would love to answer questions. I see several came through.
Katy Mathuews: And so, Julie, if you want to go ahead and throw some questions at us, we'll be happy to try to answer.
Julie Edwards: Thank you. Boom. Both Ryan and Katie. I really appreciate this. We have had some really really thoughtful questions. Come in, so we'll get to as many of them as possible. I will say that the ryan and Katie's publisher always offers a discount on books. For people who present for niche. So keep an eye on your email because there'll be information about that from the publisher. But we want to use this time for questions. So
Julie Edwards: how someone is asking.
Julie Edwards: how could the staff led approach be balanced with a majority part-time staff that already has limited time and hours? I think a lot of libraries find themselves in that position.
Katy Mathuews: Ryan, you want me to jump in.
Ryan Spellman: Yeah, yeah, once you go and jump in on this one first, and I'll add in, if I have anything I want to think. Yeah, I feel like we can empathize with that, though most of us were full time employees. We were doing this during the very early months of the pandemic.
Katy Mathuews: And so we were, though we were working full time, we were trying to rethink everything that we were doing. We all worked totally remotely for several months, and then only a few folks went back on Site after a while, so I do feel like our time was very pressed in that regard, and the only thing I can think of immediately to respond to this question is, we just took our time.
Katy Mathuews: you know, like we were sort of driving the bus. Our leadership was very understanding of the constraints that we were working within. So I think if you have the
Katy Mathuews: the ability to define your timeline and stay flexible with your timeline, I think, is maybe one way at least, that we experience that I think those in a part time situation could help balance the work, because it is extra work on top of you know, many of us are already overextended.
Katy Mathuews: So
Katy Mathuews: that's what I would, I would say. Give yourself plenty of time. And, Ryan, I don't know if you have anything else to add to that.
Ryan Spellman: Yeah, I mean, we had to actually adjust our workloads a little bit and have other people take on
Ryan Spellman: certain things that we're in our regular routine, you know. II know I had to put a couple of things aside. To make time for it, I think, thinking back on public libraries.
Ryan Spellman: my advice would be to consider volunteers.
Ryan Spellman: and if you have a friends, group there's a lot of work that volunteers could do to help you with this, and maybe have one of the part time. Staff be a chair of the group, you know, and then the group just gets their like assignments. Right? They have their homework, they go home, bring it in. You have a short, you know, half hour meeting.
Ryan Spellman: You know, if that's at all feasible. That might be a good approach to
Ryan Spellman: I. But I love that. Yeah, yeah, we really do. We? We understand the the time restraints. II think all libraries are experiencing that. Yeah, I love the idea of getting your stakeholders involved in the process. We didn't do that. But if you're at a library where you can really tap into your stakeholder groups. I mean, that only helps build a connection and strengthen relationships with them if they are also
Katy Mathuews: participating.
Ryan Spellman: Yeah, it was a great question. Thank you.
Julie Edwards: Yeah, thank you. Thanks for the answer. And you both anticipated actually a couple of other questions that are related. How long did this process take you? And then, once a plan is written, how long?
Julie Edwards: What should its expiration date be?
Ryan Spellman: that's something that you want to decide
Ryan Spellman: early on in the strategic planning process, so that people know how far out they're having to look.
Ryan Spellman: I think, like deciding, you know, is it going to be 3 Year Plan? That's that's what ours was. Ours was a 3 year plan. This is a 5 year plan. I don't know that I see plans going much beyond that. I wanna let Katie talk to that cause. Katie looked at a lot of examples as well.
Ryan Spellman: But
Ryan Spellman: yeah, you definitely want to decide that early on, you know. Think about it and decide how long you want this plan to last.
Ryan Spellman: And it's good for there to be some sort of a expiration date, I guess. Just so, you know, when you're gonna have to start the process again.
Katy Mathuews: Yeah. And so it it took us 9 months to write our plan. And then it was a 3 year plan. There was a trend for a long time that most organizations, not just libraries, wrote strategic plans for 5 years.
Katy Mathuews: So 5 years was kind of the gold standard. But then it kind of became 3 years. So we did a 3 year plan and I'll just add some extra information here. It's okay to be flexible on that, too. Like, even after you've published a 3 year plan. So, for example, our library is going through some changes, and we're in the last year of our 3 Year plan.
Katy Mathuews: And so we're having some leadership changes that type of thing. And those new leaders may want to have a role in our next strategic plan. And so one thing that we are considering is extending our strategic plan for an additional year, just sort of renewing it
Katy Mathuews: for an additional year to help, you know, get us through this very specific time of change in our organization. So don't think that if you define a 3 year plan or a 5 year plan that you would necessarily have to stick with that there are ways that you can be flexible by extending or just doing a light refresh of your plan, and not entirely writing a new one from the ground up. But yeah, just to repeat, it did take us 9 whole months to do our whole process.
Julie Edwards: That's great. Thank you. And I love this, that this mention of flexibility I've heard of numerous libraries who finish their strategic plan right? As Covid started, and then basically have to throw the whole thing out the window.
Julie Edwards: so more good questions. How much of your structure the 3 working groups you mentioned. Did you plan from the get go versus evolve as it went?
Yeah.
Ryan Spellman: I, Katie, I feel like we had it pretty planned out from the get go. It was a really kind of it was an intense 9 months, so I can't really remember 100. But I know, we we're both pretty organization oriented.
Ryan Spellman: So we were organizing things like our our document structure. And you know how our committees are going to work, and all sorts of different things like that.
Ryan Spellman: so yeah, that that was pretty well planned out, though.
Katy Mathuews: Yeah, Ryan and I spent so the very first thing that happened was library leadership tasked Ryan and I to be co-chairs of the whole process, and they sort of left it to us to design the process. So for the first month or so, it was really just me and Ryan learning and talking about what we wanted the process to look like, and we're both pretty organized and pretty planning oriented people. So
when we invited our colleagues in to participate and collaborate with us, we wanted to invite them into a pretty organized structure, so that
Katy Mathuews: they wouldn't feel disoriented. You know, we wanted to have that defined structure there. We wanted to be ready to help them learn about strategic planning and the process. So
Katy Mathuews: we our approach, was I. We pretty much planned it from the beginning, and stuck with it all the way through. We made our working groups to match the major to do list items. So you had to research
Katy Mathuews: via environmental scanning and stakeholder research. And then you had to write it. And so those were our 3 working groups. And that's what worked for us. But certainly I could see it working very well for other libraries where you're more adaptable and organic and let it play out. I think it really just depends on your style and your your preferences of the folks at your institution.
Ryan Spellman: Yeah, one just quick thing, I'll add, there is, II think, organizing it like that allows more autonomy in the end
Ryan Spellman: and autonomy, and without it getting off track. So that was kind of our thinking. Going into it. We wanted to not not necessarily like rigidly control everything, but set up, you know, a really strong framework, so that we knew people would kind of stay on task.
Katy Mathuews: Yeah, I really liked that, Ryan. It really did set folks up so. The beauty of our approach was that Ryan and I were co-chairs, but we took a step back, and we let other people take on leadership roles within the project. And and that organized structure for us, Ryan, you're so right. It really empowered and set people up to act independently and and do that work and and take those leadership roles.
Ryan Spellman: Yeah.
Julie Edwards: that actually leads directly into a follow up question, which is where the ex officio chairs, more like facilitators or guides for the group. Could you explain their role a little more?
Ryan Spellman: Yeah, I kinda lost my notes a little bit when I was talking about that. So
Ryan Spellman: yeah, yeah, we that was katie and I were the ex officio's. And what what we actually did was we were kind of and this is why I think it would be nice to have co-chairs, or why it is nice to have co-chairs of the Core Committee, because Katie and I were dividing our time like. So Katie would go to one subcommittee meeting. I'll go to another, and we would always touch base after.
Ryan Spellman: And so but yeah, more more like advisors. I honestly had many of those meetings where I didn't really say much of anything at all unless questions were asked on me. I was mostly there if they needed me, you know. And that's it. It just keeps things moving. It's easy to get hung up on a simple question. That's just a yes or no.
Ryan Spellman: And that's more what we were there for. Yeah. The clarifying questions of you know what leadership was expecting, what the process sort of needed.
Katy Mathuews: And I had a thought, and it has escaped me.
Katy Mathuews: Oh, yes, it was very much grounded in the team leadership approach. So if this was your question, you may be interested in reading about team leadership if you haven't already. But it's very much where sort of
Katy Mathuews: the folks and Ryan and my role as ex officio on the subcommittees, we we're really there to support more than to lead, because it was our time to step back and let other people take leadership roles. And so we were just kind of there to answer procedural questions or offer. Whatever support we sent the group was needing, or the group asked for
Katy Mathuews: so hopefully. That answers the question.
Julie Edwards: that's great. Thank you.
Julie Edwards: Someone's asking, even if you are going to hire a consultant, what are some best practices for? Including staff and making sure that staff voices are heard and included in the plan.
Katy Mathuews: I think. All along the way, having sessions where the staff can provide feedback.
Katy Mathuews: Ryan and I
Katy Mathuews: always gave updates at any all staff or departmental meetings. So we were meeting Ryan. Was it weekly or monthly? I can't remember the pandemic we met more frequently when we were all working remotely, but we always updated on the plan at certain points. We made a big deal to update about the plan and have a little celebration. As the different groups achieved different phases of their work, we were always sharing it out to all of our colleagues and inviting feedback
Katy Mathuews: either via conversation or from anonymous surveys.
Katy Mathuews: so that was one way to get everyone involved, even with a consultant. And hopefully the little bit of interaction I've had with consultants helping with things. Consultants were usually pretty good at
Katy Mathuews: you know, reaching out and getting feedback. And input from all staff cause. Really, that's who the consultant is serving.
Katy Mathuews: You know is the library staff. So those are a couple of ways that, I could see
Ryan Spellman: and showing what their feedback is doing
Ryan Spellman: is which which was kind of in what Katie was saying, but that to me is so important.
Ryan Spellman: Just showing the results of what they're doing. Yeah.
Julie Edwards: Any advice for getting management to buy into a staff-led model as opposed to working with a consultant?
Katy Mathuews: Yeah. So we were lucky in that. It was our library Dean's idea to do the staff plan. But what if you are staff and yeah, you're interested in that approach and getting folks on board.
Katy Mathuews: I think what I would do is just sort of advocate the benefits, you know, and if there are challenges that you are facing at your library. Just sort of talking about how a staff would approach may help address some of those challenges. So let us all work together. It's a very good team building experience. It helps build. What I didn't say is, it helps build a very authentic plan.
Katy Mathuews: When the staff are invited to create it like it. It helps ensure that as many voices as possible are included, and we can all see ourselves in the plan. So my approach would be to advocate the benefits of the Stafflet. Approach and we talked about that. You'll have this copy of the slides
afterwards, Ryan. I don't know if you have anything to add.
Ryan Spellman: No, I think you covered that pretty well. Yeah, that's really just just advocating for the benefits
Julie Edwards: mit Ctl and awesome, and we do have just 1 min left. I did see a question pop up that I jumped in on that. I want to just make sure, Ryan and Katie, that we get your perspective. Someone's asking.
Julie Edwards: what, honestly, is the purpose of is the process really necessary? Do we need strategic plans? What's the best way to make sure it's a living document, and not just to look like the library is doing the right thing.
Katy Mathuews: Yeah. So certainly a library could survive without a strategic plan. A strategic plan is beneficial because it gets us all on the same page. We understand what our organization is about, and we all have shared goals. And so, instead of us all like going in different directions, we're all S. Pointed in the same direction and making sure our work all supports that same goal. So it provides that unity and that collaboration. And I'm sorry. I think I forgot the second half of the question.
Katy Mathuews: how to make sure that it's like, do we need it? And how we? How do we make sure it's a living document? Yeah. So the staff led approach. Get everybody involved. That's how you make sure it doesn't just sit on the shelf and collect us, get staff involved, and then communicate it out as much as possible.
Ryan Spellman: and to follow that up, I would advise, you know, having measurable goals and initiatives when the plan launches. I think that's very important, and we build it into our personal goals. Every year, too, like we have to tie our personal goal to a strategic planning goal. So that's also another way.
Julie Edwards: Fantastic. We are right at the top of the hour, and I'm sorry to end this discussion because this has been fantastic. Ryan and Katie, thank you both so much for sharing both your process and your expertise all the research you've done on this topic.
Katy Mathuews: Thank you so much. Thank you to everyone for spending an hour with us.
Ryan Spellman: Yeah, yeah, thanks for all the great questions
Julie Edwards: you are getting. Some. Thank yous in the chat. I'm so thrilled to see that there are librarians and trustees in the chat here useful. So thank you all so much for attending. I will send out the recording. I will send out the slides and the chat and the audio transcripts as well. Those will all be available on our blog and I hope to see you all at the next webinar. Thanks again. Everyone have a great afternoon.
Ryan Spellman: Thank you. Thank you.