Kristen Strmel Blog Post #8: Only You Can Prevent Your Library's Budget From Being Slashed

 

Image source

The image above was posted by my current workplace, the New York Public Library (NYPL) during last year's funding advocacy campaign. Right, that. It was technically the cumulation of a 2 year fight to restore our funding in the face of proposed budget cuts and could--and did--result in many of our critical resources, such as Sunday services, being slashed. This image was posted as a response to the mayor's budget plan for 2024, which would have left us in dire straits--here's its Instagram iteration, which gives a little more info.

Now, good news: our funding was ultimately restored and will be for the foreseeable future, in no small part due to the tireless efforts of both the library and the public to advocate for us. As I don't have personal overview of our social media accounts, I can't say a ton about the logistics of promoting our advocacy campaigns. Our continuing discussion of social media analytics, however, has me brainstorming a few potential ideas. 

First of all, perhaps tools like Google Alert were helpful in finding articles about how we "meme'd" our way out of budget cuts, which could have influenced a social listening strategy. The sentiments reflected in articles like this might have affected the language we used on social media posts after our budgeting was restored, reflecting an understanding of the, well, general sentiment. 

Speaking of sentiment, let's go backwards--sentiment analysis during our advocacy campaigns was likely invaluable to our strategies. Getting a sense of public opinion on NYPL's current situation would have been critical--were people feeling confident? Anxious? Angry? That could have been critical to subsequent audience engagement tactics. Negative sentiments could be transformed into something productive through links to help promote our advocacy campaigns, giving anxious people a means to help. 

On that note, I'm sure identifying influential nodes would have also been important. While I'm all for responding to every comment on a social media post if possible, it would have been imperative to respond to posters with a ton of followers, thereby encouraging further engagement. If these posters were active during a specific time of the day, this could have also influenced our posting strategy. 

Topic detection would have been a big deal too. Anxiety about our budgeting situation might have led commenters to speak about particular programs and resources they enjoy and would hate to see go away. This, in turn, might lead our social media accounts to blend their advocacy posts with topic points encouraging discussion of favorite programs or resources. 

All of this is just speculation, of course--but whatever our strategy was, it clearly worked! Guess it goes to show that the numbers don't lie (and sure I hope they don't--I was never a math person).