Course Schedule WEEK 1: Wednesday, May 16, 2018  Over the past 25 years Murray Nossel, Ph.D., has shared his listening and storytelling method with thousands of individuals in academic, corporate, organizational, and clinical settings. In this listening and storytelling session, he will share ideas for how to use storytelling to communicate with library users. Starting with the prompt “Why story? Why now?” he will demonstrate his step by step approach for creating powerful and meaningful messages.
 People love stories. These human moments are what engage us, connect us, and draw us in. In this session, you’ll hear ideas from Phillip Higgins for how to create a marketing strategy that moves away from promotion, and toward engagement. You’ll hear tried and tested techniques for learning about your users and understanding their needs, and approaching your marketing via storytelling versus promotion, thereby engaging your audience in an genuine way. This session will also cover establishing your library’s voice in the social media world, as well as why that voice is so key to establishing an authentic and memorable social media presence.
 You don’t need a huge budget to make your library heard. This creative session, Suzanne Smith Jablonski will take you through ways you can utilize other resources – such as time and staff – to design and execute a successful campaign. We’ll take a look at programs that have used out-of-the-box thinking to approach their marketing initiatives and hear about how libraries have paired tiny budgets with a little ingenuity and developed marketing campaigns that have resulted in dramatic growth. With unexpected ideas – like using sidewalk chalk or LEGOs – libraries have transformed their approaches to marketing. You’ll come away with loads of inspiration you can apply to building your very own marketing strategy using all the tools in your toolbox – even some you may not have known you had.
WEEK 2: Wednesday, May 30, 2018  As technology advances, so do your opportunities to market creatively. In this session, Cordelia Anderson will discuss ways you can amplify your library’s voice using fresh, tech-enabled ideas that will catch the eye of your users. Through popular social media channels, branding, media relations, and more, you’ll learn about practical ways you can spread your message and share your library’s story. This session will prepare you to unlock the marketing potential of new media that will draw interest and promote your library, and change the way you think of “marketing materials.”
 Learn to access the untapped marketing potential of partnerships. In this session, Geraldine Lin takes you through how to find and choose the right partner for your marketing campaign. You’ll learn how to decide what kind of partnership would be most beneficial for your audience and your story, and how to partner most effectively to get the results you want. You’ll also hear how the right partnership can help connect your services with the needs of your constituents and build awareness of what your library offers in your community.
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