Guidelines for Marketing Public Library Videoconferencing Services

Guidelines for Marketing Public Library Videoconferencing Services

In marketing your public library's videoconferencing services to the community, it's important to target your message to organizations most likely to use the service - businesses, government, and other educational institutions. These are organizations most likely to have experience with the technology, to be networked with other users of the technology, and to have a specific need to find a location in order to participate in a particular event.

Please note: If any component of your videoconferencing service offering is supported through a federal grant, check with your consultant at the California State Library, as funding guidelines may limit use of any profits or revenues generated.

Marketing to Business

  • Develop a simple brochure and mail it to chambers of commerce and convention & visitor centers (for an example, see Palm Springs Public Library's brochure). These are places that businesses might contact to find out about local videoconferencing facilities. Also contact all hotels in your area, especially those with meeting room or convention facilities. Hotels sometimes get requests for videoconferencing, but few offer it, so they will likely be glad to refer customers to local facilities that offer the service.

  • Place ads in the paper and online Yellow Pages services that cover your area. Most Yellow Pages vendors offer a "videoconferencing" category. To keep the cost down, list the URL for the page on your website that has complete details about your offering. Here is a prototype for a Yellow Pages display ad for a videoconferencing facility.

  • Develop a separate page for your videoconferencing service on your library's website, and check all major search engines to ensure that the page appears if a customer types in "videoconferencing" and the name of your town. For an example of a public library's videoconferencing services page, see Huntington Beach's at: http://www.hbpl.org/facility_video.htm.

  • Register with the major videoconferencing site brokers. These are national companies that will market your videoconferencing facility on your behalf; they list hundreds or thousands of sites nationally and internationally, and are a common resource used by businesses when searching for a videoconferencing site. A site broker books your room on your behalf and bills the user. Most will pay you your usual fee, and then mark up the amount charged to the user. Here are some site brokers which have received good reports from participating libraries:

Marketing to Government

  • Mail your brochure to the MIS/IT/telecom managers of all city and county agencies in your area. If these agencies do not have their own videoconferencing equipment, they will be more likely to use your equipment (since you are another government agency) rather than go to a commercial provider.

  • If your videoconferencing equipment is in a library branch outside the county seat, make a special effort to contact your county's Chief Administrative Officer - every county in the state has received videoconferencing through the California State Association of Counties (CSAC), but all the units were placed in the county seats. Your county's CAO may be looking for other locations in the county which could host county government videoconferences.

  • Contact local offices of state and federal government agencies. Some of these agencies are big users of videoconferencing, but may not have equipment in all their locations.

  • List your library on the list of Statewide Video Conference Facilities maintained by the California Department of General Services: http://www.td.dgs.ca.gov/Video+Conference/default.htm

Marketing to Education

  • List your library on one or two general lists of educational videoconferencing sites. One of the most widely used is maintained by SBC, at http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/vidconf/directory.html. Scroll down the page for a list of some other educational videoconferencing site directories.

  • Contact all local K-12 schools, school districts, and county offices of education in your area. Administrators and teachers may be looking for places to access staff training or student instruction videoconferences, if their own institution does not have equipment.

  • Although all CSU, UC and California Community Colleges have videoconferencing, contact the person in charge of videoconferencing at your local or regional campuses anyway - especially if your library is in a remote area not served by one of the higher ed institutions. There may be times they need a videoconferencing site in your community, such as to serve a student who can't travel or to access a guest speaker.

    A directory of videoconferencing contacts for the community colleges can be located at: http://misweb.cccco.edu/esed/video/video.cfm.

    The UC and CSU systems do not make their videoconferencing contact directories available outside their systems. To find the contact at your nearby campus, contact the campus president's secretary (they always know everything!) or:
    (for UC campuses):
    Kimyatta Dorsey
    Kim.Dorsey@ucop.edu
    (510) 987-0709

    (for CSU campuses):
    Pat Curtis
    trish@csu.net
    562-985-9505
  • List your library with the California State Library's directory of videoconferencing-equipped public libraries. This resource is currently under development; contact Dan Theobald at 415-431-0329 if you would like your library included.

These guidelines were developed by Project Videonet, a cooperative initiative serving the more than 40 California public libraries equipped with interactive videoconferencing. Project Videonet is supported by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian. For more information about Project Videonet, contact project manager Dan Theobald of i2i Communications at 415-431-0329 or via email at dtheobald@i2icom.com. Last updated September 11, 2003.