Using Data to Help Tell Your Library's Story
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Presented for WLA 2021 Annual Conference, November 17th, by Melissa McLimans, WiLS and Kim Kiesewetter, WiLS Surveys, focus groups, your annual report data: it’s all telling you a story about your library and your community. Join Melissa and Kim as they share ways in which libraries can use data to tell the story of both their communities and institutions. It will include an overview of different types of data that a library might use ranging from existing resources to inspiration for new research. To tie everything together, the session will conclude with ways to present selected data in a compelling, narrative format to tell a larger story to a variety of audiences.
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Using Data to Help Tell Your Library's Story
- 1. Using Data to Help Tell Your Library’s Story WLA Conference 2021 Presented by: Melissa McLimans, Library Strategist and Consultant Kim Cochran Kiesewetter, Data Analyst and Consultant
- 3. What’s the (data) plan?
- 4. When to use existing data sources and when to collect novel data?
- 5. Demographic Data 1. US Census Data 2. DataUSA 3. GetFacts Wisconsin Library Data 1. Public Libraries a. National - IMLS’ Public Libraries Survey b. State - DPI’s Public Library Service Data 2. Academic and School Libraries a. National - NCES/IPEDS Existing Data Sources Community Data 1. Education Data a. State - DPI Entity b. National - NCES 2. Workforce Data a. State - Department of Workforce Development b. National - BLS 3. Health & Human Services Data a. State - HHS Entity b. National - HHS and CDC
- 7. Surveys Excellent way to gather qualitative and quantitative data from a lot of people at the same time. ● Capture a lot of data; great for benchmarking; easy to share; can show clear directions ● Can’t capture all voices; will need to use resources to market the survey; surveys aren’t magic Questionnaires Convenient method of capturing qualitative and often descriptive data from a targeted segment of your community. ● Relatively easy and affordable; rich, descriptive data; nice option between a survey and community conversation ● Might not receive thoughtful answers; need to spend time crafting questions and analyzing for themes Novel Data Collection Methods
- 8. Novel Data Collection Methods -- “Group Talk” ™ Community Conversations Learn more about community needs and strengths and where you might fit into both through “kitchen table” conversations that build understanding and connection. Focus groups This method of data collection comes from the market research world and can be used to understand responses to services, spaces, and more. SWOT/SOAR/Internal Engagement Methods to capture unique and important perspectives about the library and community from your internal experts -- staff, board, Friends and more ➢ Rich qualitative and quantitative data; relationship building amongst participants and between the library and stakeholders; no special tools required ➢ Leading groups can be a little intimidating if you haven’t had practice; logistics can be a challenge.
- 9. Tying it all together...
- 12. Data Viz Basics 1. Audience persona 2. Identify data relationships 3. Chart type
- 13. Data Viz Best Practices
- 16. When creating a live presentation, minimize the use of text as much as possible on slides. If you feel the need to write out a lengthy explanation for your data visualizations, the data viz itself might be too complicated or over-wrought for the audience persona you’ve developed. Remember that if your slide(s) have lots of written content on them, the audience is much more likely to be reading your presentation instead of listening to you. Like you all are probably doing right now. Or maybe not. But probably. Because look at all this text! Don’t you want to know what it says?!
- 18. Image Source
- 19. Resources for Creating Data Visualizations Free or Low-Cost Options: ● Microsoft Office products (Excel, PowerPoint, Word) ● Google Data Studio ● Canva Additional Options: ● Tableau ● Power BI
- 20. Questions?
Editor's Notes
- Melissa: Whether you’re beginning a strategic planning process, need to learn about your community to design services or spaces, or want to advocate for resources, you can strengthen your approach with the use of data. But, how, what and who all need to be answered. And you can start that with a primary question. Why? So before you begin your data journey, we recommend that you think through these questions: What are your goals or “why’s” of the data collection? What is your budget (if any) for data collection?. 3. How much time do you have to dedicate to the data collection process? 4. Do you have additional resources (like staff, other survey data, or notes from focus groups held in your community) that would be useful to consider in the data collection process? And then, once you have settled this bigger questions, make that data plan more precise by articulating: 5. Who is going to do the data collection: is it you? A team? An outside consultant? 6. When is the data collection going to start and end? Sometimes you have to stop collecting data! You only have so much time and so many resources, so make sure you have an end point in mind. A survey close date, a date that you are going to present to your board, etc. Having some guardrails in place up front, through a data collection plan
- I want to acknowledge first that this is by no means an exhaustive list of places to find existing data - instead, this is just a starting point. Demographic data can be helpful when trying to create a picture of your community - what they look like, community strengths, as well as potential challenges. In addition to demographic data, different community data resources - like education, workforce, and health data can be helpful to consider as well… especially when thinking about service development and community partnerships and collaborations. Understanding what local data looks like, especially trends, can be very helpful in understanding ways your community is changing over time and how that might align to your patrons’ wants and needs. Last, but absolutely not leas, is library data. This information can be used in isolation or in tandem with demographic and/or community data to help tell your library’s story. It’s important to note that you may find you need to look more than once place to find the data you are looking for, depending on what the information is that you want/need and what format you want it in.
- Sometimes the data you need hasn’t been captured yet. so, in addition to existing data sources, we can also gather our own new, novel data.This can be done through a variety of different research methods including questionnaires, surveys, focus groups, and the like. I’ll provide a brief overview of some different methods you might use to gather data about your library.
- While data viz can certainly help you personally in understanding your data, data visualization is a more outward-focused professional skillset that takes data you have and understand personally and focuses on how to quickly, easily, and accurately convey that information to others in a visual format such as a chart, graph, or other visual representation. Data is great! But data viz accounts for the fact that data is ultimately only as great as our ability to communicate the key summary ideas in it easily to broad audiences. When thinking about how to tell your library’s story to different stakeholders, the data itself provides a foundation, but the visualization is what can take that information and turn it into something compelling and meaningful to an audience.