





































Panel Discussions  151

Connecting with 
Stakeholders
Creative Marketing for Small Libraries
By Susan Ebertz, Wartburg Theological Seminary; Megan West, Private Academic Library 
Network of Indiana; and Karl Stutzman, Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary

ABSTR ACT Libraries with a small staff often lack budget and exper-
tise to create outreach and marketing plans for their libraries, resources, 
and services. Yet small libraries also have unique opportunities: they 
can more easily adapt to a changing landscape and benefit from syner-
gies across their various services. Karl Stutzman and Susan Ebertz, 
who manage small theological libraries, will share about their ongoing 
experiments with marketing and outreach. Special guest Megan West, 
Communications and Marketing Director at Private Academic Library 
Network of Indiana (PALNI), will share creative strategies and options 
for small libraries that are ready to up their marketing game. West has 
experience with communications and marketing in a variety of media 
through her work supporting the PALNI consortium. PALNI includes 
a number of small libraries and is working on an initiative to engage a 
variety of stakeholders at its supported libraries.

PART ONE

Welcome to our session this afternoon. I’m Karl Stutzman, library 
director at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indi-
ana. Presenting with me today are Susan Ebertz, library director at 
Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa, and Megan West, 
communications and marketing director at Private Academic Library 
Network of Indiana. 

In a digital age, libraries are more important than ever, but some 
folks falsely assume that libraries are becoming obsolete. Well-
equipped libraries are no longer an assumed need for institutions 



152  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

of higher education. We need to connect with a variety of stakehold-
ers—administrators, faculty, students, alumni—to tell the library’s 
story and convince them of the ways it serves them and provides a real 
return on the large investment in resources and staff. As a stereotypi-
cally modest and nerdy librarian, I’ve had to learn how to do some-
thing called “marketing.” Not only is it not my forte, I don’t have an 
overabundance of time and money for this “other duty as assigned.”

Our first speaker, Susan Ebertz, is an inspiration in her use of Face-
book and media to promote her library.

Susan Ebertz, Director for the Reu Memorial Library, 
Wartburg Theological Seminary
The only thing I remember from the marketing class I took many years 
ago is the four Ps of the marketing mix. I don’t know if it is current 
thinking. The four Ps are product, price, place, and promotion. I’m 
not going into the other three Ps. This is what we do with promotion.

During the semester, students working in the library are respon-
sible for posting on Facebook and Twitter in the evenings when they 
work. They post on Facebook according to our schedule that we have 
set up.

 •  Monday: library photo. Something in the library (e.g., picture of 
the sunset through one of the windows). Once a month, a picture 
of the display in the entrance. These remind students of the 
physical library.

 •  Tuesday: resource. Something from the Research Tools web 
page (has links to our online databases). Tell what it is and why 
someone would use it. Link to the resource.

 •  Wednesday: book recommendation. Find a book we own. Tell 
what the book is about and why someone should read it. Include 
a picture.

 •  Thursday: throwback photo. We have an archives of pictures 
taken in the library. Alumni and students love seeing pictures of 
themselves and friends. This is one of the most popular posts.

 •  Friday: service. Some service that we do for students e.g. mailing 
books to distance students. Sometimes they are not aware of our 
services, and this post reminds them.



Panel Discussions  153

 •  Saturday: new book. Highlight one of the books on the new book 
shelf with a picture and several sentences describing it. We have 
gotten comments from students about wanting to read a book 
highlighted in this way.

 • Sunday: library hours for the week.

Other posts are done at other times and include information about 
upcoming library events or a report on an event.

On Twitter, we follow a schedule similar to Facebook. Since we 
can’t schedule a tweet, we don’t tweet every day. I have thought about 
using Hootsuite (https://hootsuite.com/#) or something similar. But 
we haven’t done so yet.

We use email for the following notices:

 •  Information about new resources to faculty and students. These 
are short emails, but enough to tantalize them to learn more 
about them. Faculty and students hate long emails and don’t 
read them all. Bullet points are good.

 •  Current resources that students could use at a particular time in 
the semester. For example, reminding them about Zotero before 
their annotated bibliography is due.

 •   Events in the library. For example, announcing the used book 
sale several weeks ahead.

 • Library hours if they are changing.

We sometimes target our email to a particular student population 
or to faculty only. It doesn’t make sense to announce something to our 
distance students that only residential students can see or attend or 
care about.

We update the library web page regularly. The top portion includes 
library hours and upcoming events, depending on the time of year. 
There is a link to the library webpage from MyWTS. I show the students 
how to get to the library page from there.

After daily chapel, we have a time for announcements. We mainly 
use this for events or workshops. It helps if these announcements are 
funny to keep the students’ attention.

I am thinking about sending out a monthly newsletter using elink 
https://elink.io/ and pocket https://getpocket.com/. I think that this 
might be especially useful for linking to databases and resources.

https://elink.io/
https://getpocket.com/


154  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

PART TWO

As communications and marketing director for Private Academic 
Library Network of Indiana, Megan West has used her substantial 
skills with digital media and her marketing savvy to tell the story of 
a statewide consortium of small- to medium-sized academic librar-
ies, including a number of seminaries. I’ve experienced Megan as a 
“marketing person” who understands the realities of small libraries. 
We are bringing Megan in on a video conference connection.

Megan West, Digital Communications Manager, Private 
Academic Library Network of Indiana
I’ve divided my talk into three different sections based on some of the 
most common pain points when it comes to library marketing. 

 1. “I need more skilled labor!”

 2. “I need cost-effective print materials!”

 3. “I need more confidence!”

The first pain point I’m going to address is, “I need more skilled 
labor!” This could also be called utilizing inside and outside resources. 
If you are at a college or university, an important inside resource is 
marketing or design student workers or interns. For schools that offer 
degrees in business and/or design, this is one of the easiest ways to 
get cheap labor: do a call out for students who are learning the skills. 

However, they might be hard to find in a seminary that doesn’t 
offer those degrees. In those cases, I’d suggest as a first step work-
ing with outside institutions. Contact marketing and design faculty 
at the larger schools around you to ask for interns, set up projects 
in for-credit classes, or offer options for students to complete their 
required capstone projects. Faculty love the chance to bring real-
world work to their students, especially in 300-400-level courses. If 
you’re turned down for a class project, you can ask for star students 
that would be interested in an internship. Faculty who are interested 
in doing a class project can make it a competition between groups or 
individual students. 

First, decide what you need. Photography? Graphics? Video 
work? A marketing plan? That will inform which faculty members 
you contact. Class groups can present whole marketing plans to your 



Panel Discussions  155

staff. Or you could have the whole class put together content—videos 
and graphics, patron testimonials, usability testing, etc. When I was in 
school for marketing, one of my design classes brought in a business. 
They gave us all the information we needed to design something for 
them, and that was our last project that semester. The business gave 
me a $500 scholarship when I won the logo competition. It was cool for 
me as the student, because it was my first paid work as a designer, and 
my professor mentored me through the experience. An added benefit 
of working with design students is that students know student behav-
ior better than we do. They can act as a focus group that works for you.

When you can get help in these ways, it’s fabulous, but much of the 
time the designing of content and marketing will fall to you personally. 
A few tools that our librarians use and love offer a significant educa-
tors’ discount. Some examples of these tools include:

 •  Piktochart (piktochart.com): Piktochart offers a nonprofit 
and educational discount for pricing of only $40 a year, which 
gives you high resolution infographics made for print. The free 
version will be fuzzy and have branding from Piktochart. 

 •  Adobe Spark (https://spark.adobe.com/make/flyer-maker): I 
use Adobe products, but they have a steep learning curve and 
are costly. However, they just came out with something called 
“Adobe Spark” that is free for educators and super easy to use.

 •  Canva photo editor (https://www.canva.com/photo-editor/): This 
tool is great for social media posts.

I want to end this section by saying, don’t just look at what other 
libraries are doing for content and design. I intentionally look at 
designs outside of the library world and adapt them for my consor-
tium’s purposes. For example, I like to look at designs from Fortune 
500 companies, because they throw a ton of money at marketing. So, 
if I have a bunch of statistics I want to show, I’ll google “Verizon Info-
graphic” and I’ll steal their layout or look at how they illustrated year-
by-year comparisons, etc. 

Some of you are still saying, “Megan, I might have time to do it 
during the summer or school breaks, but most of the time, I’m drown-
ing.” LibrarianDesignShare.org is a great resource. It’s a place where 
librarians from all over submit their designs for free downloading 

piktochart.com
https://spark.adobe.com/make/flyer-maker
https://www.canva.com/photo-editor/


156  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

and adapting. Everything from posters to designs for the web can be 
found here. It’s great for general library needs, but you’ll want some-
thing more customized for items given to stakeholders.

The second pain point to address is, “I need cost-effective print 
materials!” This is where PALNI sees its biggest bang for the buck. I’ll 
cover materials first, and then print vendors that we like.

Some of our favorite items that we are going to expand on are our 
portable, pocket-size items for just-in-time outreach. We call these 
“what I do cards” and “service cards.”

 •  “What I do” cards are business cards that actually inform people 
what you do. No one outside the library knows what a Technical 
Services Director does. But the backside lists the most common 
tasks that the general public can understand. 

 •  These institutional repository cards are just one example of a 
service card. This is a kind of “elevator speech” for those that 
stink at elevator speeches. I suggest making one for each service 
and keeping them in a business card holder in your pocket or in 
your laptop case. The goal is to have just enough information to 
create awareness without too much information to overwhelm. 
Offer a link or contact information to go deeper.

Although tiny cards are great on the fly, our service one-sheeters 
and fact sheets work much better for presentations. These are always 
just one page long. The front is the same for all of the fact sheets; it 
describes our consortium in a nutshell. We get the front printed by a 
print shop and then run the backside through a personal inkjet printer 
to add whatever content is needed. The service one-sheeters contain 
summaries for each service: what it is, who to contact, and the main 
talking points. The stakeholder fact sheets contain PALNI facts in a 
nutshell like cost savings, key initiatives, and how the school benefits 
from being part of PALNI.

When making a one-sheeter for a specific stakeholder, it should be 
connected to what your stakeholder cares about. So, for example, your 
CFO might not care about your reference statistics, but they would be 
interested in hearing about your ILL shares that saved the library from 
buying over 100 books last month. 

For printing, online is generally going to be cheaper than local 
shops unless your marketing department has an exclusive agreement. 



Panel Discussions  157

Marketing departments have often made a deal with a local print shop; 
see if you can go through them for discounts. For online print vendors, 
here are three options I’ve used:

 •  Vistaprint (vistaprint.com) regularly runs 30-50% off sales 
(never pay full price!) and the quality is good enough, especially 
for large displays like banners. We’ve usually paid only $30 for 
our banners.

 •  Moo (moo.com) cards cost more but you can feel the quality. Our 
“What I do” cards were done through Moo, whereas the IR cards 
were produced by Vistaprint. 

 •  Smartpress (smartpress.com) is what we used for the PALNI 
annual report. I liked them and felt like it was good quality, but 
it was hard to visualize how it would turn out without feeling the 
different types of paper. Local print shops usually have samples 
to look at so you have a better idea what the end product will be. 
I would have made our annual report less shiny and skipped the 
UV coating had I seen it in person. 

The final pain point is, “I need more confidence!” This particularly 
relates to engaging with a variety of stakeholders. The first step in 
overcoming this is to know who they are. There are several strategies 
for knowing who they are:

 •  Have a stakeholder contact list with names and contact informa-
tion, organized by what you would contact them about.

 •  Develop personas for each stakeholder. Personas include infor-
mation about what that stakeholder does in their job, what they 
care about, what information they would be interested in hear-
ing about, what stresses them out and keeps them up at night. 
It’s about putting yourself in their shoes so you can talk about 
your services in a way they understand and care about.

The next step is to tailor your content to each set of stakeholders. I 
recommend deciding on a leading service or initiative that you want 
to champion for a year. Then choose two to three other services or 
initiatives that are second priority to discuss. Shape or spin your case 
for each of these services or initiatives to be of interest to a specific 
stakeholder. For example, say you want everyone to know about your 

vistaprint.com
moo.com
smartpress.com


158  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

ILL service. The CFO will care more about cost-savings of ILL, whereas 
the faculty will care about quick shipping of materials and long loan 
rates. You need to be able to talk about the same services in multiple 
ways that match the interests of your audience. Remember, librarians 
do so many things that it can overwhelm people quickly to talk about 
everything. Talk about a single service or project that would interest 
them. Include a list of other projects and services in a follow-up email 
or a “leave behind” information sheet.

I don’t recommend leading with your annual report. It’s too much 
information. Give them a bite of what’s important, give time to digest 
the bite, then let them discover the whole meal in a series of follow-
ups. Follow-ups are why “leave behinds” are key: they provide addi-
tional information and ways to contact you.

Now that you know who your stakeholders are and you’ve tailored 
your content, it’s time to get in front of them. The first step is to get 
out of your office. Create opportunities to talk with them, even if it’s 
not about the library. Join committees, offer to buy them lunch, etc. 
Fostering relationship will go a long way. Engaging stakeholders is a 
courtship, not an arranged marriage. One of our libraries has had a lot 
of success sponsoring coffee at their executive committee meetings in 
exchange for five minutes of their time to talk about a library service. 
Word of mouth marketing is the most successful marketing tactic. You 
can force this a bit by doing “planned word of mouth,” which is also 
called influencer marketing. This involves having someone else who 
has a lot of sway championing your cause. The influencer depends on 
your stakeholder: whose opinion does the stakeholder value?

 • For reaching faculty, try another faculty member or supervisor

 • For reaching patrons, use alumni or the campus mascot
 • To reach administrators, use alumni

One of the best word of mouth situations is when your campus 
marketing department covers your events. All administrators will 
likely see the stories the marketers run. Working with marketing 
departments can be tricky, however. Some marketing departments 
are overwhelmed with work, and the library just isn’t a priority. Some 
are jerks and will flat out ignore you. Still, you don’t know until you 
ask. Always ask if they will attend your event and take photos. If they 



Panel Discussions  159

are not able to, let them know that you’ll be happy to send them some 
photos after the event for a write-up. Then do the work for them.

If your campus marketers won’t cover your event:

 •  Provide good photos of the event, even if it’s just a few phone 
photos. Stories that include photos get posted far more often 
than stories that just contain text.

 •  Do the draft write-up of the story. It’s easier for them to edit a 
story than to write it from scratch.

 •  Include student quotes/testimonials. This always catches their 
attention.

 •  In my experience, marketing departments are always under a 
tight deadline and running way behind. If I submit a draft story 
with some photos, they usually trim it down a bit and happily 
post it.

With these strategies to address the three primary pain points, I 
hope you will be able to successfully market your library to a variety 
of stakeholders.


