Publication Date
10-16-2015
Document Type
Presentation
Abstract
Promoting a survey - it's all about getting people to click on it, right? Not always. This session will describe the promotion campaign we designed for the James Madison University Libraries' 2015 LibQUAL+ survey. Ultimately, this campaign was not just about the survey - it was about how we want our campus to feel about the Libraries.
Libraries commonly engage their user communities by gathering users' feedback. Analyzing and acting on user feedback can lead to the responsive design and (re)development of library services, spaces, and programs. Our campaign placed that value of "responsiveness" front and center, with two taglines: "Make Your Life Better. Take the Library Survey" and "Your Campus. Your Library. Have Your Say." To back up this bold claim that a library survey can improve one's life, many of our promotional materials highlighted changes the library had already made in response to previous user feedback. And to help our message of being "Your Library" resonate with our campus community, we worked closely with a student employee with the wording of these taglines and on the graphic design. This partnership with a student allowed us to pilot-test a new idea of a "street team" of library student employees, who will help design and execute promotional and outreach work in an effort to develop more meaningful and active engagement with our user community.
In this presentation, we will share some lessons we've learned from this survey promotion work and from our pilot test of this new "street team." Included will be an assessment of which promotion methods were most effective, and a brief report on the results collected by the survey. Increasing positive sentiment about the Libraries was the real goal of this campaign. We wanted everyone who saw the campaign, whether or not they clicked through to the survey, to feel that the library is "their library" and to feel empowered to share feedback, now or in the future. We'll discuss the creativity required in measuring that goal. This presentation will also touch on how engagement is a crucial part of a healthy assessment ecosystem that fortifies a cycle of measurement, results, action and engagement. Finally, session participants will be encouraged to reflect on and share how they are innovating in their promotion and outreach work, including survey promotion.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Shuyler, Kristen S.; Reed, Jonathan; and Vess, David, "Re-Thinking Survey Promotion: It's Not Just About the Numbers" (2015). Libraries. 146.
https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/letfspubs/146
Comments
Presentation delivered by Kristen Shuyler and Jon Reed at the Dartmouth Library's October Conference, Hanover, New Hampshire, October 16, 2015.