Stephanie Hlywak
Stephanie Hlywak is director of communications and marketing for the American Library Association in Chicago.
What happens when you’re about to launch a public awareness campaign encouraging the public to visit libraries and a pandemic strikes? You pivot, like the American Library Association did. Four lessons they learned can help you do the same.
It’s a few weeks before your public awareness campaign launches: the theme is set, the merch is in the online store, social graphics are in the online toolkit, the honorary chairs have recorded their PSAs, and the media plan is nearly finished. Everything is going according to plan.
And then … coronavirus strikes.
When the communications and marketing team at the American Library Association (ALA) started planning for National Library Week (NLW) 2020 a year ago, we never imagined it would take place during a global pandemic. Public awareness campaigns typically have long lead times. In our case, our theme—“Find Your Place at the Library”—and call to action—"Visit your library to find your place”—became historical fiction even before we launched.
With COVID-19 rendering marketing campaigns irrelevant and thwarting public awareness initiatives, association professionals must be nimble. As you consider (or reconsider) your external relations plans in light of the pandemic, the team at ALA has four lessons to share from our experience.
Our first question wasn’t “how” we should celebrate NLW this year; it was “if” we should proceed. We were lucky to partner with colleagues in our Public Library Association division to include a question about NLW plans in a large survey in early April, but the results we got back confirmed that the only certainty was uncertainty. That same survey told us that up to 98 percent of public libraries were closed to patrons but were increasing their online offerings to continue to serve the needs of their communities. So, we made two gut decisions at once: We’d go ahead with NLW on the originally scheduled dates (April 19-25), and we would shift our focus to celebrating libraries’ digital innovations. But first, we needed to reconsider our collateral.
We got lucky that our original theme lent itself so well to a flipped script. Rather than “Find Your Place at the Library,” we pivoted to “Find the Library at Your Place” to reflect how libraries are open online and providing the electronic resources (e.g., e-books, audiobooks, streaming content, and virtual programming) their communities needed during the pandemic. We reworked our graphics and uploaded new social media posts to our website. Making this change so close to the campaign’s launch date launch meant that there may be many library systems that were not be able to pivot with us, so we kept the old collateral in our toolkit alongside the new content. We weren’t sure what to expect, but we knew we’d soon find out.
The new theme wasn’t the only last-minute tactic. We scrambled to add new tools to our kit, including a customizable Canva template, and created a new hashtag #ThankYouLibraries that connected to an online contest and gift card giveaway. We shifted our media strategy to make COVID-19’s impact on libraries—and their resilience in the face of it—the focus of our pitching efforts. Now it was showtime.
With COVID-19 rendering marketing campaigns irrelevant and thwarting public awareness initiatives, association professionals must be nimble.
In any normal year, NLW 2020 would be considered a huge success. But seeing as how it took place during an unprecedented global catastrophe, the results were beyond our expectations. By tying our public awareness initiative to the public health emergency, we were able to break through a very cluttered media landscape and land some major press hits. Earned media was up more than 50 percent year over year, with ALA spokespeople interviewed by Associated Press, New York Times, NBC.com, CNN.com, Reuters, PBS NewsHour, and ABC News Radio, among many others. Our campaign hashtags were used more than 22,000 times in one week. Our social media savvy honorary chairs–Olympic ice dancing medalists Maia and Alex Shibutani–amplified our messages on their channels (even hosting an interview with a school librarian on Instagram LIVE), Seth Meyers gave us a surprise boost with a video that hit all our talking points (thanks, Seth!), and Oprah’s Book Club shared findings from our public library survey on Instagram.
Not everything landed, of course. Our site traffic was down 15 percent, and our toolkit downloads were lower than in past years. In addition, a virtual book club with a longtime partner never get off the ground, and because of the delicate economic situation, we pulled back on fundraising asks that usually accompany NLW messaging. But it’s difficult–if not counterproductive—to compare then and now. Our world is irrevocably changed. That means that whether your public awareness campaign is next month or next year, you’ll need to make in relevant in a post-COVID universe.