What is LaunchPad?
Miranda McKearney and Anne Sarrag
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Issue 26 Spring 1999 What is LaunchPad? Miranda McKearney and Anne Sarrag |
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LaunchPad is a new organisation with a mission to highlight the importance of libraries' work with children, and build new partnerships between libraries and other sectors.
It is a unique organisation involving professionals from the library and marketing worlds working alongside each other to develop a long-term communications strategy focusing on libraries and children.
The main library organisations involved as LaunchPad partners are The Library Association (and thus the Youth Libraries Group and the School Libraries Group), the Society of Chief Librarians and the Association of Senior Children's and Education Librarians (ASCEL).
LaunchPad will concentrate on partnership projects, national library promotions and advocacy.
Partnership projects
The first of these is Reaching Parents, a £500,000 ground breaking partnership programme to take the library beyond the building and into the high street and the workplace. Initiated by LaunchPad and developed from a £25,000 grant from the National Year of Reading, Reaching Parents is designed to reach parents in different community locations, inspiring them to support the development of their children's reading. The project targets three groups.
Parents as they shop, in partnership with ASDA supermarkets
'The Big Read' in June is a reading promotion involving all 223 ASDA stores nationwide and their local libraries. With librarian visits, storytelling and author sessions, mobile library visits, reading recommendations and reading corners in cafes, the promotion is designed to catch busy parents as they shop, connecting them to books, reading and the local library. There will be massive point of sale - fronted by Boyzone - foyer posters and banners on the side of stores. At the same time libraries will be running events with displays and resources for parents.
'The Big Read' also includes storytelling training for ASDA colleagues - to raise their awareness of the spoken word and reading as parents in their own right, thus providing personal development from a corporate perspective - and the pilot of an online shopping service at Leeds Libraries, giving library users access to ASDA's stock of over 1 million books.
Through this partnership with ASDA libraries can reach over 6 million weekly shoppers, with a taster of the invaluable support libraries can give to families.
Working parents involved with Ford EDAP & London Transport
A wide range of Ford employees will be reached through The Book Shift, an innovative library partnership with EDAP, the Employee Development Assistance Programme run by the trade unions and management. The problems of working shifts will be addressed in a six-month experiment at Dagenham Body Plant where workers will be able to borrow books from a special area on the shop floor during staggered meal breaks. Busy staff at Central Office in Warley will be targeted with the overall benefits of reading as a stress buster and be offered advice on how reading of all kinds can be fitted into a frantic family schedule.
During the summer holidays there will be themed literacy activities in the London Transport Museum and the Museum's education service will be linking London Transport employees to libraries' 'busy parents' reading advice.
Parents at leisure, in partnership with Random House
'Kick Off!' focuses on 'lads and dads' (fathers aged 20-35 and sons up to 12 years) and emphasises the importance and recreational value of reading. It celebrates the kind of reading enjoyed by men and boys, introduces new reading experiences, encourages them to make reading part of their lives and shows how a father's involvement can make a real difference to a son's interest in reading. 'Kick Off!' takes reading experiences into different recreational settings such as football clubs and leisure centres.
With the support of two regional arts boards, Southern Arts and Yorkshire and Humberside Arts, the promotion will be piloted in 12 library authorities from the beginning of June, including both rural areas and large cities such as Sheffield.
The promotion focuses on two 'teams' of 11 books - one for adults and one for children. These offer different reading experiences for both fathers and sons, including fiction and non-fiction. Titles range from Joseph Heller's Catch 22 to John King's The Football Factory for adults, and from Shirley Hughes' Alfie's Alphabet to Tim Barnett's Fantastic Football Phenomena for children. Not forgetting Extra Time! Designed to complement the 'team' books, Extra Time will lead readers on to other titles, linking genres and authors: "if you liked that book, why not try this one?"
This promotion again involves librarians in building new partnerships and consolidating existing ones to find the target audiences for 'Kick Off!' They have been doing this through sports development sections of local authorities, fishing clubs, scouts, festivals, leisure centres, sports facilities and football clubs.
The pilot phase will be underpinned by training, promotional leaflets, posters - and books. If the pilot is successful, the project will be rolled out nationally to the book trade and libraries.
Reaching Parents is unashamedly a demonstration programme. It sets out to show the huge partnership potential in libraries' work with children. It showcases libraries' flair and ingenuity in developing readers, it shows how libraries can form imaginative partnerships to reach out to new audiences: they can work on the shop floor or the supermarket foyer, in a museum or a garage. Their skills and resources are flexible and transferable.
And an important factor is that LaunchPad acts as a single point of entry to the library system - all the partners we talked to said "What? You mean we can talk to you and not 206 library authorities? And you know about marketing and media, as well as the complex world of libraries?"
And the key benefits for our commercial sector partners?
National library promotions
The work of individual libraries will be maximised, and economics of scale achieved through co-ordinated national promotions. The first of these is the Reading Safari, a national summer reading challenge, highlighting the importance of libraries' work in maintaining and developing children's reading during the summer holidays in an enjoyable way, and fuelling children's imaginations and creativity. The Reading Safari will take place in summer 1999. Eleven aims to involve a million children aged 4-12 through library authorities throughout the UK. Children taking part will draw or write what they think about the books they read on the back of a series of different animal theme cards, each designed by a well-known children's illustrator. A different card is collected each time a book is read and these are stored in a personal collector folder that opens out to display the cards on one side and has a series of interactive activities on the back. When children complete the Safari they receive certificate cards. The Safari promotion and publicity material is colourful and attractive, with a zebra-stripes theme and the strap-line "Fun fact Funky fiction". Look out for those stripes!
The project also includes a book promotion with customised display units available from Books For Students, containing pre-selected titles chosen by children's librarians to stimulate imaginative, wider reading. The Safari can be based on this promotion or a library authority may choose to base it on any titles from within their stock.
LaunchPad will work with publishers to coordinate linked author/illustrator activity in libraries over the summer. A host of publishers are supporting the book promotion and all have expressed enthusiasm for this collaborative approach to a national summer reading activity in libraries, pleased to be offered a practical way to support all library authorities, rather than having to pick a few authorities to support from all the requests they receive.
Response to the Reading Safari has been tremendous. 85% of UK authorities have bought into it and the scale of the project is enormous - about 35 tonnes of paper have been used in the production of Safari materials (all from sustainable sources) and the partnership with Books For Students is invaluable in providing the infrastructure to cope with processing orders and distribution around the UK.
LaunchPad will run a trade and consumer media campaign to support the promotion, and to stimulate interest and create awareness in the run up to summer. A press launch is planned for the start of the summer holidays to kick off the project.
Research and evaluation of the project will be undertaken by the University of Central England and will be published in Spring 2000. The research will embrace the elements normally included in The Library Association's annual 'Summer Activity Survey'. It is expected that this promotion will create a model for future national summer reading activity, looking at the strategy, implementation and content at a national and local level.
Authorities have embraced the Reading Safari: Hertfordshire has teamed up with Sainsbury's making materials available in local stores with additional invitations to local school children to take part. Other authorities are liaising with Education Business Partnerships (EBPs) which can act as a broker between projects like this and companies with an interest in supporting local initiatives. In Westminster there are plans to expand the Safari to children in hospital and museums - an approach that the national organisers would like to adopt next year if early indications are favourable! As expected, authorities are involving summer literacy schools in their areas too whenever possibly,
Advocacy
LaunchPad will work to reach key audiences with messages about the value of libraries' work with children, with a strategic approach to gathering and then disseminating evidence about libraries' impact on children's lives. There will be an emphasis on demonstrating how libraries can help deliver key national objectives in the areas of literacy, education and the building of a creative and inclusive nation. Such advocacy can already be seen within the projects described above.
Conclusion
It is only a year since LaunchPad began but already it is demonstrating that the combination of professional marketing and library skills is an extremely potent one - and LaunchPad adds value.
This partnership is enabling national library promotion activity on a cost-effective scale, it is developing strong links with the commercial sector, it is showing the impact and value of library services for young people to a wider audience.
Day after day our 4,600 libraries quietly offer children some very precious things:
It is LaunchPad's mission to make a great deal of noise in celebration of just how much all this matters and just what a difference it makes to our national life. We plan to do it in partnership with others and we are grateful to our first commercial sector partners for so quickly sharing our vision and running with it.
Two final quotes to demonstrate this vision: Alan Howarth, Minister from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, at the launch of Reaching Parents described LaunchPad as a
"terrific example of how we can raise the profile of public libraries to help them take the central place we are carving out for them in the Information Society".And Liz Attenborough, Director of the National Year of Reading, sums up the essence of LaunchPad's work:
"it combines the rich resources of public libraries and the expertise and reach of some of this country's major commercial companies. It contacts a whole new audience, supporting, developing and empowering future generations."
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Miranda McKearney and Anne Sarrag are members of LaunchPad and marketing consultants.
For further information about LaunchPad, contact:
Trish Botten at The Library Association Tel. 0171 636 7543
Miranda McKearney Tel. 01962 865102
Anne Sarrag Tel. 0181 488 2694