When the Martha Cooper Library made the decision to expand their library starting in November 2022, they needed to let their patron base know.
Good…
One option was to send a mass email to all patrons of the Pima County Public Library System in the Tucson, Arizona area. However, since the service area covers about 9,000 square miles and over a million people, that would not have been effective nor feasible for the 27-location system.
Better…
A better approach would have been to send notifications to all patrons who have the Martha Cooper Library listed as their home branch in their ILS database entry. However that would have only enabled the library to send a plain-text, unlinked, and untrackable email to a static group of patrons. Sending a message only to the group of patrons that listed Martha Cooper Library as their home library was an option. That would also have ignored those who use multiple libraries, patrons who have moved to or from Martha Cooper’s service area, and infrequent patrons of the library.
MessageBee
By using their MessageBee subscription, the Martha Cooper Library was able to add a notice to their transactional notifications. The library added a graphic and button to the bottom of their hold, predue, and overdue notifications for materials being checked out of the Martha Cooper Library. This was the best way to let actual patrons of the library know. This linked to a page that let patrons choose an alternate library, and did this without having to notify patrons system-wide.
Although emails are cheap to send, it meant that the library didn’t have to incur an additional expense. It also helped by not bothering patrons who were unaffected by the construction. This solution let the right people know, without having to send a single additional email.
Alternate Language with MessageBee
With the alternative language ability of MessageBee to automatically send alternate language messages to patrons that have one designated in the ILS, the Pima County Public Library System can serve their patrons better.
Do you have patrons that would benefit from receiving messages in a language other than English? Dozens of library systems have already harnessed the power of MessageBee to send emails to patrons in their preferred language.