Yesterday Beth Gallaway wrote about Return on Investment (ROI) and how to make sure to get a good bang for your buck. Beth’s specific focus was on how gaming provides great opportunities to demonstrate ROI.

Continuing on the theme of ROI, how do you:

• Make sure that administrators, community members, foundations, grant makers, etc. understand the value of all aspects of the job that you do?
• Demonstrate that the full scope of services for teens is an invaluable part of what the library offers?
• Guarantee that those who have the bucks will make sure that you have dollars that you need when you need them?

In order to prove that the money spent in teen services is a good investment, it’s important to have data and stories that you can present to others. How do you do that? Focus groups, circulation statistics, door counts, and surveys are traditional methods libraries use. But, in the web 2.0/social networking world, there are several other techniques to employ in order to find out what other’s have to say about your services and their value: (more…)

What’s ROI? Return on Investment, or, spending a little, and getting a lot back. ROI = bang for your buck!

In tough budget times, libraries look for ways to stretch their dollars, and strive to maintain the level of services patrons expect. Board, card and/or video gaming is an excellent low budget investment, because hardware, software and equipment can be utilized for multiple age groups and styles of play. (more…)

Some of your best program leaders may already be attending your programs. They’re sitting there, watching you struggle to cut the snow flake from the recycled printer paper, thinking the whole time about the really awesome program they want to run. Yes, one way to enhance your programming during lean times is to involve your teens as workshops leaders.

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Grant “writing” does not begin with writing; it begins with gathering people and information. Successful grants are not created and implemented in a vacuum. Grants are a collaborative process and include those who are willing to assume one or more roles:

• Visionary[ies]: those who can take information (data) and identify trends and needs
• Communication expert[s]: those who can successfully communicate needs, form partnerships, communicate data results, and draw conclusions
• Data trackers: those who can design methods of collecting data and track the data to show whether the needs are being met
• Community liaisons: those people who “know people”
• Stakeholders: those who will peripherally benefit from grant sponsored programs
• Target population: those who will receive direct benefits from grant monies (more…)

Abundance of Teens…

When I first saw this topic, my first thought was of Colin Singleton in John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines. Child prodigy that he was, Colin was afraid he would never do anything of worth that would classify him as a genius…so he went on a road trip to work it all out. He knew he would not find the answers at home in Chicago. What he was searching for was “out there,” and he ended up in a small town, Gutshot, Tennessee. It was here in this seemingly small, insignificant town with a powerfully painful name where he would find the answers to his conundrum amid people of large character.

Thinking about Colin’s story reminded me that most teens do not live in our libraries. We have to go “out on the road” to find them where they are, working out their own identities and problems. We have to have Colin’s tenacity and confidence that we can truly make a difference for the teens in our community, but we have to go “out there” where they live. This is a perfect opportunity to form collaborative partnerships with local junior high and high school librarians. (more…)

Some days are harder than others.  Everywhere we look, we see rapid change taking place.  Budget cuts are reducing staff and affecting families across the United States.  One has to ask: How do we keep morale up in the workplace when all of this is going on? (more…)

In recent years many libraries have invested energy and resources in creating or enhancing teen areas.   As author Kimberly Bolan points out in her great YALSA white paper The Need for Teen Spaces in Public Libraries we all know that this investment in physical space is an essential part of successfully serving teens in any library. The significant increase in the number of libraries with teen spaces has been terrific to see, but with the recent economic challenges many libraries are facing finding the staff, programming budget and general resources to make the most of a teen space can be tough.  What’s a teen librarian to do when you’ve got lots of teens with lots of energy and a shrinking budget to serve them?

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You always seem to need one when there aren’t any around, and you always seem to have too many when there isn’t anything for them to do! What are they? Volunteers! This is all especially true of teen volunteers, who range from the bored-nothing-else-to-do variety to the I-need-sixty-hours-of-community-service-for-Honor-Society sect. So how do you make the most of them (and manage to keep your sanity in the process?) (more…)

I’m sure many of you are like me and are faced with a limited budget. Long before I started in my current position, the teens were conditioned to expect prizes at our monthly teen night events. They look forward to our prize drawings and it wasn’t something I really wanted to take away. So I’m always looking for fun and affordable prizes and program supplies for my teen events. Here are some of my favorites:

Target’s Dollar Spot -This is my regular place for Teen Night prizes. I’ve found cloth bags, mini pens, and stickers that all work well for Teen Night.

The local dollar store -Every once in awhile I can find program supplies at our local dollar store. This is where I looked for craft supplies for a Girl’s Day Out: Room Makeover program and found wooden paintable frames for $1. It gave me a great craft and also helped keep the supply cost down.

FredFlare.com -I love Fred Flare and so do my teens. It’s more expensive, but if you’re looking for unique and wacky prize ideas, this is the best place to look. There are lots of great finds under $20 and be sure to check out their clearance items. This is a great place to mix up your prizes for Summer Reading Program and offer something really different.

Sushi Erasers-I first got sushi erasers to give away as a prize for an anime club event and the teens went crazy over them. I found mine at a Scholastic Warehouse sale, but ShopKawaii.com has sushi erasers for $1! Take a look around the site for other anime club prize ideas.

Operation Anime-Operation Anime is a project by Funimation.  If your anime club has 20 or more members, you can sign up and recieve a free anime DVD each month from featured titles.  The request to view the DVD includes screening permission from Funimation for the event date.  The DVDs can then be added to your library collection.  The packages also come with bookmarks and postcards that are great anime club giveaways.

Signed Author Bookplates -Two summers ago I came up with an idea to ask authors for signed bookplates to use for our summer reading program. My teen library council helped come up with a list of authors to write to and I sent them e-mails asking them if they would be willing to sign bookplates for us. Then with the help of community relations, we sent bookplates and a self-addressed stamped envelope to the authors. We got a great response and we used the bookplates to make signed books to give away for summer reading. The teens loved finding autographed copies of their favorite books and it made our book giveaway that year extra special.

What are some of your favorite steals and deals?

While planning a program with/for teens, it’s always important to ask yourself questions your teens will ask: “Is it too much like school?”,  “Why should I participate?”,  and perhaps the most important, “What’s in it for me?”

While giving back and doing for the benefit of others is all well and good, teens often find themselves with too many activities and not enough time. They pick what to spend their free time doing, and often that last question helps them decide. Will they get community service hours? Or something to put on the resume/college application?  But often, it can be as simple as a reward for participating.

I am sure that while teens like to read, many of them also participate in summer reading programs in order to have a chance a some great prizes, as so many of us offer in our  programs. But with our shrinking (or non existent) budgets, how can we provide incentives teens will want?

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