From Funding to Awareness

A study of library support in America

By Jenny Johnson and Alice Sneary

In November 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded OCLC a $1.2 million grant to evaluate the potential of a national library support campaign to increase public library funding in the U.S. The grant funded extensive quantitative and qualitative research among voters and elected officials. The goal was twofold:

• To understand the factors that both drive, and limit, local library funding support.

• To ascertain whether a national library support campaign could be effective to increase and sustain funding for U.S. public libraries.

The findings of this research will be made available to the public library community in July in the latest OCLC report, From Awareness to Funding: A Study of Library Support in America.

The funding problem

Roughly 80 percent of U.S. public library budgets come from local public funding. But many other vital public services, such as the police and fire departments, public schools, public health, road maintenance and the park service, are also primarily funded with local tax dollars. All of these public services are important to the vitality of the local community and all warrant time, attention and support from voters and the local government—but how much and in what order of priority? How do taxpayers and elected officials think about funding these services? Are there trade-offs? And if so, where do libraries rank?

Like other public services, libraries are facing increased financial strains from increased costs for healthcare, to the broadening of content formats, to the rapidly growing volume of materials they need to provide to their users. And while library visitation is up across the U.S., library referenda are being placed on the ballot less and passage rates have declined steadily over the last decade. Without intervention, the chance of reversing this trend and improving the financial future for many public libraries is a serious concern.

Who should libraries be targeting with their advocacy efforts? Before moving forward with any marketing effort, these questions and many others need to be answered.

Research and key findings

OCLC partnered with research and marketing agency, Leo Burnett, to apply traditional marketing and market segmentation techniques to the public library funding problem. This is what we found:

• Most people will claim to support the library, but fewer people are truly committed to doing so. When asked whether they would vote in favor of a library referendum, ballot initiative or bond measure, 74 percent of voters either chose ‘probably vote yes’ or ‘definitely vote yes.’ But less than half (37 percent) were ‘definitely’ committed. Many library levies either pass or fail by relatively small margins, indicating that many of those who say they would‘probably vote yes’ do not follow through at the ballot box.

• There is a lot people don’t know about their public library. People may know about traditional services, but they are less aware of newer library services and programs. Much of the effort to develop programs to meet the needs of teens, seniors and other groups within the community go unrecognized and voters have low awareness of the electronic resources that are taking up more and more of libraries’ collection budgets.

• The library’s most committed funding supporters are not the heaviest library users. In fact, the research showed almost no correlation between a voter’s likelihood to be a ‘definite’ library supporter and how often they use the library. Advocating for library support to library users is focusing effort and energy on the wrong target group.

• Perceptions of the librarian are an important predictor of library funding support. Voters who see their local public librarian as committed to advocating on behalf of the library and its role in the community are more likely to vote ‘yes’ for a library funding initiative. ‘Passionate’ librarians who are involved in their communities make a difference.

• Most voters see the public library as a provider of ‘information.’ But those who see the library as ‘transformational’ are most likely to increase their taxes in its support. The information landscape today is a crowded space with a number of players, and many question the library’s relevance when information is so widely available on the Internet. The library’s strongest supporters believe that the library is about more than information; it is a source of transformation for individuals and communities that is worth funding. One participant in the research, a cattle rancher from Kansas, summed up the library’s transformational power when he explained, “People who’ve been exposed to libraries realize that there are a lot of other cultures and things out there that a small town of 4,000 doesn’t provide access to. The library is literally a window on the world.”

• Increasing support for libraries may not necessarily mean a trade-off with financial support for other public services. A comparison of voter willingness to increase taxes to support a variety of public services, including safety, health and education, shows that the voters most likely to fund the public library are also those more likely to fund police, fire and schools.

You’ll find more details and the rest of the key findings in the full report. The good news is that a critical number of Americans hold the public library in high esteem. Our advocacy research shows that if we target the right voter segments and engage them with the right national library advocacy program, we have the potential to increase library funding.

OCLC would like to thank the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for funding the advocacy research project and its support in making the findings available to the U.S. public library community.

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