Please Spend Some Money on Advocacy
June 17, 2014
We are launching a fundraising campaign today so we can spend some smart money on library crisis communications tomorrow. Our Rapid Response Fund is a new idea in library advocacy. It's a "bank" we will use to buy ads telling people how to support their local library during a budget crisis. Your donations will build that bank. We'll pool your donations and then use that money to buy targeted ads supporting local libraries in their local media markets and social networks.
Donate today to make crisis communications more effective for our libraries.
There is a structural and a philosophical problem in the library advocacy ecosystem that EveryLibrary is trying to address with the Rapid Response Fund: Libraries don't spend money on advocacy during a budget crisis. We may not have any. We may not know how. Sure, we read the tool kits. We get trained by the trainers. We post something on our page and consider it a call-to-action. But we wonder why no one responds to our cries for help....
They never heard our cries or saw our calls to action. We didn't put any actual advertising or marketing money to work telling our advocates what to do and when to do it. We didn't put any money to work building our networks in the first place, so when a nasty, unexpected crisis hits - a real "it hits the fan" crisis that will cut funding, close doors, and fire people - we are unable to activate our advocates. EveryLibrary thinks we can fix that problem in some circumstances. If you have a call-to-action to save your library, the Rapid Response Fund can be the quick, effective money that buys the 10,000 ad impressions you need to get 100 emails written to city council to Save Our Library. But we need to build that "bank" first.
With your help, the Rapid Response Fund will let EveryLibrary buy the ads and do the zip code-level marketing to support those local calls to action. Read our bigger write up for more details. Or just donate today on our Rally.org site because you know we're onto something smart for library advocacy. Your $25 dollar donation buys a lot of eyeballs. If you do a $10 dollar a month reoccurring donation, you will underwrite thousands of ad impressions for libraries.
And P.S. If you got to this page through our Facebook or Twitter, we paid for the post you clicked. That is how it is done....