Wednesday, January 23rd at 1 p.m (all time zones).

In this introductory webinar, we are going to explore what it takes to build a movement for libraries in your local community. The advocacy theory, strategies, and tactics that we introduce come from some of the largest movements for causes and political campaigns. These advocacy tools include data, messaging, supporter cultivation, fundraising, using volunteers, and a wide range of tactics like Facebook, outreach, email and direct mail, paid and earned media, and much more.

All registrants will receive a link to an archived recording for later viewing.

The goal of this webinar is to introduce the tools we need to develop in order to identify, cultivate, and empower your local activists to take action for libraries. We'll show you what you need to do in your community in order to start to use those tools to build the real political power that you need in order to engage and influence community leaders.

We will look at how the current data shows that our current advocacy model is failing libraries by not addressing the core causes of the massive defunding threats, initiatives, and closures that we've been seeing for the past 5 years. We’ll explore the data about library supporters and introduce some of the major gaps in our library advocacy data. We'll talk about what data we really need to move communities and individuals to take action on behalf of their local library.

We'll look at many of the overarching strategies and tactics used by some of the best community organizers, political action committees, and politicians so you can learn to build real actionable support from networks of change through community organizing and political action.

We'll introduce basic concepts in building effective messages that really engage our communities to motivate actions such as donations, volunteerism, voting, and more. You'll gain an understanding of how important developing effective messages are to driving our advocacy.

We will emphasize a wide-range of other resources and skills that librarians and library staff need to develop if they want to have the political and community support that they need in order to increase support and funding.

While one hour is not enough time to deeply explore every facet of library advocacy, this introductory webinar will lay the foundation for our future series of advocacy, activism, and political webinars that will be available throughout 2019.