Marketing the Library with Comparative Statistics

Here's a slightly glib-but-true way of bringing together a number of truisms I've heard about comms over the years:

Combine the language of the head (statistics and figures) with the language of the heart (stories and experiences), using the language of the eye (colours and images).

If you do all of this when creating marketing materials, you have a very good chance of making an impact with your message. I find the 'stories' part the hardest to do - it can be cheesey or obvious if you try and crowbar them in - but where an opportunity presents itself stories work really well.

If you can't combine all three languages above, then combining two is still worth doing, which is what I did with a recent attempt to re-look at library usage stats. I created a couple of basic social media graphics and some presentations and pulled them together in a blogpost on my main site which you can read here. It ended up being tweeted nearly a thousand times, and has over 3k Facebook likes and shares. This is way in excess of what even a 'successful' post on my site would do normally.

I think there are two reasons for this (aside from librarians liking to share pro-library stuff online) - firstly it used the language of the eye and the links I tweeted included the ideally-sized-for-twitter graphic, below:

...and secondly that the figures were recontextualised so they became more engaging. The whole point of the post was to say yes library use is falling, but that shouldn't obscure the fact that use is still staggeringly high. So how do you make that point when the narrative is established as 'Library use drops from 288 million visits per year to 282 million?' You take the 282 million figure and explore what that really means. How many that is per month, per week, per day (per minute!) and how those smaller figures correspond to other activities.

I'm trying to incorparate the comparisons model into my day job more - it's an age old thing to do, and often very effective, so I don't know why I've not done it more previously. We can easily become numb to statistics, even impressive ones: they just start to wash over us. So you can engage your audience more by recontextualising the information.

If you can do so in a visually arresting way, much the better. If you can tell stories too, you've hit the jackpot.