Podcasting is an often-overlooked platform for advocates to reach current and prospective supporters. It is also an approach that you can pursue creatively with readily-available resources. Join this highly-interactive session, featuring three presenters with years of experience reaching library colleagues through podcasts, to explore how to get started; how to build an audience; how to identify and attract interviewees for your podcasts; and how to further develop a community of support through podcasting to support your advocacy efforts.

Goal:

By participating in this session, you will explore and identify ways that you can incorporate podcasting into advocacy on behalf of your library and the community you serve.

During the session, you will:

• Identify at least three steps you can immediately take to create podcasts that support your advocacy efforts
• Develop practices that allow you to identify and reach out to potential interviewees for your podcasts
• Create a simple action plan to develop a series of podcasts designed to further develop a community of support for your advocacy efforts

N.B.: Participants are encouraged, but not required, to come to the session with a specific advocacy issue/project in mind so that they can work on developing podcasts that support that effort.

Maurice Coleman, who serves as a trainer, coach, and keynote speaker for the library community throughout the U.S. and is principal at Coleman & Associates, is host of the long-running (more than 300 episodes) “T is for Training” podcast for those involved in library training programs.

Paul Signorelli, a writer, trainer, presenter, and consultant serving as Library Advocacy Training Project Manager for CLA, helps identify and book interviewees for Maurice Coleman’s “T is for Training” podcast and has appeared on Steve Thomas’s “Circulating Ideas” podcast.

Steve Thomas, a branch manager at Gwinnett County Public Library, is host of the long-running (more than 200 episodes) “Circulating Ideas” podcast that facilitates conversations with the innovative people and ideas inspiring libraries to grow and thrive in the 21^st century.

About the Ursula Meyer Advocacy Fund Training Series

This program is part of an ongoing series of monthly online sessions offered through the Ursula Meyer Advocacy Fund Training Series; sessions are generally held online on the second Wednesday of each month, beginning at 10 am PT. The series honors the memory of Ursula Meyer, 1977-78 CLA President, California Library Hall of Fame inductee, longtime director of the Stockton-San Joaquin Public Library, and fierce advocate for library services and intellectual freedom. The Ursula Meyer Fund was established to provide for the training of librarians in all stages of their careers, and library supporters, in political advocacy and political action, in honor of Ursula’s belief that librarians need effective political skills to advocate for library support at all levels of government.