2 Developing effective channels of communication

Advocating for your library will inevitably involve an element of crossover with other work you do. Your blog, social media, website, or newsletter, as well as the activity you do around promoting books and events, will implicitly champion your library. However, you can take your advocacy to the next level by engaging more directly with your stakeholders and developing effective channels of communication. For example, you can further your library’s cause by liaising with colleagues, attending departmental meetings, and delivering school assemblies. Similarly, you may wish to engage with the student council, attend parents’ evenings, and provide the governing body and Senior Leadership Team (SLT) with regular library reports. If no member of the governing body has been assigned responsibility for the library, you could even request that it be adopted as part of their remit. Your reports could then be included at the governing body’s meetings, which would ensure your interests are represented at the highest levels in your school. Putting your claims in writing can maximise impact and awareness, but you should strive to support them with evidence wherever possible, for example, through data from your LMS. It is important that your reports link to the goals set out in your library development plan and the school’s mission statement, as well as explaining how you are achieving these.

Whichever way you approach it, actively engaging and communicating with your stakeholders will raise awareness of the work you do, signal the importance of your library to the educational process, and give you greater influence within your school.

To consider this subject further, watch the video below where Nick discusses the importance of communication and visibility when advocating for your library. After this, reflect on your own use of communication channels to advocate for your library then proceed to the next section where you will explore the relationship between advocacy and networking.

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Transcript: Video 2

NICK:

Using the library development plan that you produced at the start, along with the school's aims and objectives, can really help you to decide on your priorities. How can you create impact for your school community? How much time are you going to devote to doing this? And how are you going to record it?

Although personal relationships in school are important, you must be mindful that you need to make sure you engage with key personnel and staff in school who can help advocate for the library and for the support that it provides for the school community. So you need to be visible. You need to get involved with parents' evenings and open days, and also things like teacher training days, where you could deliver a session raising awareness of the library, as well as taking part in staff meetings, committees, and things like the school council.

So visibility is key. But as librarians, we also need to make sure that we evidence our own impact by collecting data, and through raising awareness of the initiatives and events that the library has put on. You could do this through annual reports to governors and senior leadership, by sending a newsletter to parents and students, or via social media.

Again, it's important here that you can show that what the library is doing links with the school's own goals and that you can explain how what you are doing is achieving this. Sometimes it can seem hard to have to advocate for what you do. But if you can show evidence of impact, then you're more likely to get the support of senior leaders, and are more likely to be able to bid for more funding, or get support for initiatives that you really want to run. So it's really worth it in the end.

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