Westerville Public Library, a frequent award-winning library, is a large, single branch library servicing Westerville, OH in suburban Columbus circulating 1.7 million items annually. Within their innovative environment, new services and offerings are frequently being thought up and offered to the community. Westerville currently uses our Gentle Nudge Material Recover and New Mover services.

Intro:

Westerville Public Library, a frequent award-winning library, is a large, single branch library servicing Westerville, OH in suburban Columbus. Within their innovative environment, new services and offerings are frequently being thought up and offered to the community.

Challenge:

How long does it take someone new in your community to find the library? Between setting up utilities, finding a new grocery store, daycare, church, etc., learning about library resources may be one of the last priorities and honestly forgotten. With the added complexity of tax boundaries, knowing which library to go to can make this more difficult.

Westerville Public Library has boundary challenges faced by many suburban libraries, complex tax borders that overlap with various neighboring cities. Reaching out to individuals in those areas has historically proven difficult for the library.

Solution:

With the help of Unique, Westerville Public Library in Ohio is actively reaching out to their new community members within weeks of moving into the service area, an ideal timeframe for establishing a new habit of library participation. A library designed 6×9 inch glossy mailer welcomes community members to the library and highlights key service features important to their community. Understanding the library’s service area allows Unique to target underserved areas with a personalized outreach campaign without stretching your marketing budget.

How it works:

• The library works with Unique to map out your unique borders.  You can even provide a shape file if you have one for your service area!
• Unique’s data services team identifies households who have moved into the service area over the past few months. This information is reported back to the library in a custom reporting format. Plus, we provide an online map view of where in your community new patrons are moving to!
• The library designs a welcome mailer, designed to attract new patrons. Unique can help with this for libraries without a marketing department.
• Unique ‘syncs’ with your existing patron database to exclude current patrons from the mailer. This can be done after the mailing to show attribution of the new mover campaign.
• Unique prints and mails the postcards to new residents. This is built on your budget, so neighborhoods and time frames can be customized.
• Patrons come into the library and register for their card.
• Coming in 2021 – Unique provides an online registration WITH address verification for new card-holders.  Customized welcome email series from Unique’s MessageBee service can be configured to help introduce your library resources to new customers!

Results:

Westerville is seeing results with new patrons from the underserved and hard to reach parts of their community bringing their mailer in as they sign up for their library card.

From the Staff:

“One of our strategic goals for 2019-21 is to ensure that we’re reaching people in the far corners of our service district. With the help of UNIQUE, this postcard campaign has given us an easy and cost effective way to invite new residents to sign up for a library card and take advantage of the services and resources we have available to them.”

– Tamara Murray, Marketing Manager at Westerville Public Library