Go team!

A number of librarians have formed marketing teams/committees/task forces, etc. to organize their marketing efforts. I'm a fan of the cross-functional team approach because, ideally, marketing should involve the entire organization and become a way of doing business. Luke Vilelle, Outreach Librarian at Virginia Tech was kind enough to share his experiences developing his own marketing team.

How he did it: First, Luke and a colleague delved right into drawing up a marketing plan, taking input from library staff during the SWOT analysis. Next, he drew up a charge for the marketing team and assembled members from all library departments including ILL, cataloging, reference and archives. In the future, Luke is looking to include a student and a University Relations staffer (great ideas, making the team not just a library-wide effort, but campus-wide too!).

The value of the team: For Luke, the team has been important in two main respects, 1. as a mechanism for institutionalizing marketing in the library, and 2. as a source of ideas and playground for brainstorming. Each workable idea the group comes up with is followed by an action plan and assessment measures.

For Luke, the team is a vital part of his job: "From my point of view, the marketing team has been an incredible boon to my work. There's no way I could have accomplished on my own what we've been able to do so far as a group." He's used the team on various projects, for example, "We have created action plans for celebrating the 10th anniversary of our College Librarian program, for increasing the use of Ingenta and other alert services, and for publicizing our new catalog. The publicity for the new catalog and our library's upcoming 50th anniversary celebration are our two current major projects."

Contact Luke Vilelle for more information on his group and their projects. Also, how have you used marketing teams? Please share your experiences!