Public Library Marketing Campaign

Project
Develop the library’s first full scale marketing campaign

Client
Chattanooga Public Library

Year
2021

My Role
Art direction, marketing

Here We Grow, the Chattanooga Public Library’s first marketing campaign, launched in 2021 to inform existing and potential patrons of library services and materials through TV commercials, online video ads, and billboards. Despite Covid-related timeline setbacks and script rewrites, the library launched a twice award winning campaign that brought lapsed and new patrons into the library, both digitally and physically.

As the library’s multimedia designer I worked in collaboration with the library’s public relations coordinator, as well as renown local ad agency, Humanaut, to bring this project to fruition.

I didn't know the library did that!

In 2019, the Chattanooga Public Library hired an outside firm to create its first ever service plan. The new plan identified ways the library was not connecting with the community as well as brought attention to the most commonly heard phrase by library staff: “I didn’t know the library did that.”

To address these issues, the library secured an ongoing marketing budget with the hopes of raising community awareness about the library, and to increase the number of active patrons.

Here We Grow

Following the release of the library’s new service plan, the library’s public relations coordinator and I soon got to work gathering input from library staff and community members about what they thought the library’s identity was.

The insight gained from these surveys was used to ideate and propose our new marketing slogan: “Here we grow”.

“Here we grow”, of course, is a play on words, combining the phrase “Here we go” with the message that “Here [at the library] we [the community] grow”.

We were paying homage to the fact that our library had become a place of both individual and community growth, while also highlighting how one might essentially grow up in the library as the library continued to expand offerings in every age range.

Enter Humanaut

Finally it was time to start interviewing local videographers who had each placed a bid on the contract to produce our first commercial.

A small committee of library staff and board members, myself included, chose Humanaut, a full service advertising agency based in Chattanooga, TN. Despite their status as an independent agency Humanaut was well known for serving large national brands such as Organic Valley, Splenda, Bombas, West Elm, Soda Stream, Lyft, and many more.

Production begins

After much rescheduling, and rewriting as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, filming began in October 2020, and through the winter, video clips and billboard designs were edited and finalized by both Humanaut and the library public relations team.

Contracts were also secured for local, cable, streaming, and public access television advertising, as well as bilingual billboards.

Both the library public relations team and the board chose these advertising platforms so that the campaign would reach new and existing city residents who were not already familiar with the library and not exposed to online library marketing, specifically those who are non-English speaking, without internet access and not residing near the downtown area.

Commercial & Ad Spots

The Here We Grow campaign launched in February 2021. Television commercials ran from late February to early July. Billboards, Facebook ads, and YouTube ads launched at the same time and ran through May.

How did we do?

After launching this campaign the Chattanooga Public Library performed a monthly evaluation of their ILS as well as Google Analytics. Results showed the following year over year improvements:

New library cards increased by 143%
Unique website visitors increased by 31%
Existing account updates increased by 202.5%.

That’s not all, following the success of our campaign in 2022 the Chattanooga Public Library received the John Cotton Dana Award for outstanding public relations, as well as the IFLA International PressReader Award given to creative, results oriented marketing projects.