“How do we get more people to come in to the library?” was one of the questions that our supervisor has casually asked my other fellow interns and I. We then proposed to come back with a well-thought answer by setting up a short presentation the following week.

 

The reason being for this suggestion is because we knew the current status of the library after observing there for more than a month since our placement started. So here are the issues we learned based on their social media:

 

  • Shared social media accounts between different branches of state libraries which results to difficulty of pin-pointing specific geographical audience
  • Miri citizens are not aware of what the public library has to offer for them such as access to various resources whether it be print or digital and study spaces
  • There is not much significant amount of engagements between the library and the publicImages below are the 3 state libraries of Sarawak

    Miri Branch

    Sibu Branch

    Kuching Branch

 

From here, we were able to deduce and narrow down what the state library here in Miri needed.

  • Increase outreach/renown
  • Increases awareness of library’s services
  • Increase in attendance and awareness for events and programs
  • Boost the audience engagement
  • Bridging target audience to Pustaka Miri
  • Promote trust and credibility

 

Using these key points, we understood that they needed someone to drive their online presence in different platforms rather than themselves since their social media accounts are shared between 3 different state libraries. The solution for this was to utilize the format of how companies/franchises use influencers to promote a brand or a service. However, our strategy for this is not to use influencers in Miri as there is not a decent amount of them or use influencers that are widely known throughout the nation because the goal is to only appeal to a specific area. To get the right audience, we would approach schools and intuitions. You may be wondering why, it’s because both the library and institutions have many factors are in common and one of them is education. This will be the strategies that we will take:

 

  • A collaborative promotion that is education related and provide incentives to the schools
  • Offer them to suggest a candidate that is known throughout their campuses
  • Approach students if they are interested with incentives that can be provided to students
  • Set up interviews to ensure the values of Pustaka Negeri Sarawak Miri’s aligns with them
  • Do an online screening of the potential candidates in any case they have a reputation that should not be associated with Pustaka Miri

 

So, these points are the summary from the presentation we had in which both our supervisor and regional manager approves of as long as we follow through it. She even suggested that there is room for improvement because once proven to be successful, other branches of the state libraries could potentially use this idea to promote themselves as well. We are currently focusing on doing a lot of pre-planning because a week from now, my placement at the state library is coming to an end. This was the best solution we can come up with for the corporate management division which only required execution of the proposal.

It has been an experience doing this because this is one of the first few times where we had to present an idea to a real-life organization/client. I look forward for this this proposal to come into action and I’ll keep you all posted once it does!