Community Relationships--How My Internship Helped Me

In Katie Paine's book, Measure What Matters, I think Chapter 9 stuck out to me with the six steps to measuring relationships with communities.

The six steps were as follows: 

1. Agree upon solid measurable goals tied to bottom line
2. Define publics
3. Who or what are the benchmarks
4. Set audience priorities 
5. Choose measurable tools
6. Analyze data 


When I read these steps, they instantly reminded me of my library internship I had the summer of my junior year of college. I was set to help with a summer-long weekly community event. The event was a series of outdoor yard concerts called, "The Brown Bag Series". They had numerous artists and genres for the event as well as food stands for people to enjoy.

The first meeting I sat in on, the first question my boss asked was, "Who are we trying to target in this series?"

Parents and children of the community were the main target we were trying to reach. We had to figure out a way to reach out to the community--and I think we did in many ways.

How we mapped out our event: 

Step 1: We agreed upon the goals we were trying to reach. We wanted to get publicity for the event to parents, children, and day cares to get more children involved since that was the music we were generally playing. 

Step 2: Our publics = children, parents, and older patrons (we eventually discussed that older patrons enjoyed the series as well) 

Step 3: We focused on how where the location of the concerts would be that would get the most attendees and how we would change plans in case of a weather change. Primarily, we focused on what needed to happen to make sure the concert went on no matter what. 

Step 4: We discussed ways to measure our performance for the series--we set up a survey that patrons could take after attending (primarily parents). We also tried to get a good head count each time to track how many attended week-to-week. 



I think the six steps are tied into the four steps we focused on during our Brown Bag concert series. The library always tried to tie in the community with their events, so I believe I had a great experience creating relationships with community members while advertising for this event.