Upcoming PLA webinar offers an introduction and how-to for community assessments

CHICAGO — The one-hour webinar, “Is Community Assessment a High Hurdle? Get Over It!” hosted by the Public Library Association (PLA) at 1 p.m. Central on August 14, will give attendees a running start towards conducting a community assessment, a vital element in library advocacy, branding and fundraising efforts.

Presenters Nancy Davis and Pam Fitzgerald from the Ivy Group are adept at strategic and advocacy planning and will review who does what in a community assessment, how long it will take and what you can (and cannot) omit along the way. They’ll discuss the pros and cons of town meetings, focus groups and surveys; how to engage community “influentials,” and the nuggets mined through peer benchmarking. New technologies—such as GIS lifestyle analysis—will also be reviewed.

This webinar is appropriate for libraries both big and small. Davis and Fitzgerald will draw on case studies from two libraries—one, a five-branch urban system headquartered in a modern iconic building and the other, a small library housed in a crowded, historic facility in a town one mile square—to demonstrate how the process (and key techniques) can be applied in a variety of circumstances.

Registration for “Is Community Assessment a High Hurdle? Get Over It!” costs $28 (PLA Members), $31.50 (ALA Members) and $35 (Nonmembers). Groups of any size can register for individual webinars for $129. The deadline to register is 11:59 p.m. Central, Aug. 12.

For more information about PLA, contact the PLA office at (800) 545-2433, ext. 5PLA, or visit PLA’s website at www.pla.org. PLA is a division of the American Library Association. PLA’s core purpose is to strengthen public libraries and their contribution to the communities they serve. Its mission is to enhance the development and effectiveness of public library staff and public library services.