Exploring customer transactions – ‘Exposing’ community profiling?

Wednesday 3^rd March 2010
The Pilkington Library,
Training Room 1,
Loughborough University.

Outline of day

Background and aim of workshop

Traditional community profiling activity, such as collating demographic information, determining catchment areas or mapping other organisational activity in any given community has proved insubstantial when trying to get to the heart of how a customer made use of their library. Why did they choose that library? At what point did they join, and more crucially, at what point might they decide not to visit again? What might we do to shape that journey?

The workshop shared Leicestershire Library Service’s approach to marketing, data visualization and data mining in order to define targeted customer relationships with the service to 40 library colleagues from around the country.

Presenters:

• Nigel Thomas, Service Delivery Manager, Leicestershire Library Services
• Paula Forster, Marketing Manager, Leicestershire Library Services
• Rob Radburn, Team Leader, Research & Information team, LCC
• Sharon Pye, Research Officer, Research & Information team, LCC
• Jason Dykes, Senior Lecturer in Geographic Information, giCentre, City Uni London

Morning

Setting the scene: the background to the work

The integrated marketing approach from traditional media to social networking and website design.

The first two morning sessions by Nigel and Paula presented a series of case studies covering the journey Leicestershire libraries have taken highlighting successes and disappointments and most importantly the learning libraries should take forward.

Leicestershire was fortunate in that it had the expertise of a professional marketing team as part of the Community Services department in which the library service sat, and so started to make the first steps in adopting an integrated marketing approach to the development of services. This process moved us away from the perception of marketing as focused on posters and leafleting, and towards a whole library approach in which every library action was a potential marketing activity. The adoption of a continuous test and learn process has provided us with the evidence to challenge presumptive ideas about what we should be doing to market our services, and to ensure that scarce marketing resource is targeted in the most effective way.

Visualization and vizLib and data mining techniques

The next session focused on how the vizLib project and data mining techniques has provided local insight for marketing from Leicestershire libraries data. Rob and Jason outlined the background to the vizLib project: the pressure local authorities now have to understand their customers using locally collected data, examples of how interactive maps and graphics are an effective way to make sense of this 'data deluge' and how ESRC funding has provided the necessary training that is currently lacking in local authorities to effectively analyse library data. The result of the vizLib project has been an interactive application than allows library data to be visually explored in a number of innovative ways to answer the questions of interest to Leicestershire libraries (see video links).

For the final session in the morning, Sharon Pye, showed how a statistical technique, CHAID, could provide real insight into understanding survey data by getting beyond reporting simple percentages, and identifying the different groups of users satisfied with the service.

Afternoon Workshops

ABCs of marketing

The marketing workshop looked at the theory of marketing alongside its practical implementation covering the various stages of a customer life cycle including brand awareness, membership, loyalty and lapsed usage. The case studies also looked at library brand values and physical representation through Leicestershire's library logo and a series of icons. They also looked at how the brand was positioned across a whole range of media and channels including literature, livery and the web. The role of testing, learning and rolling out was key to the case studies as was the importance and focus on the customer and the value of customer data obtained through consultation, research and campaign evaluation.

Adventures in data visualization

Graphics are designed and deployed with various levels of success. In the second workshop Rob and Jason provided some practical guidelines, with plenty of examples, on how to develop the skills required to use the correct graphics that can help present and analyse data sets using anything from Excel to Processing. The emphasis was on policy makers demanding better graphics from analysts, and for analysts to use and design graphics critically and creatively from an informed perspective rather than a ‘one size fits all’ approach to graphical techniques.

9.00-9.25am	Registration and coffee	-
9.30am	Welcome and housekeeping	Nigel Thomas
9.45am	Setting the scene: the background to the work	Nigel Thomas/Paula Forster
10.00am	The integrated marketing approach from traditional media to social networking and website design.	Paula Forster/Nigel Thomas
11.00am	Q&A	-
11.15am	Break	-
11.30am	Visualization and vizLib and data mining techniques	Rob Radburn/Jason Dykes/Sharon Pye
12.30pm	Q&A	-
12.45pm	Lunch	-
1.45pm	Workshops: Adventures in data visualization ABCs of marketing	Rob Radburn/Jason Dykes Paula Forster/Nigel Forster
2.45pm	Break	-
3.00pm	Workshops: Adventures in data visualization ABCs of marketing	Rob Radburn/Jason Dykes Paula Forster/Nigel Forster
4.00pm	Round up and close	-