In this session Diana Friend, Communications and Marketing Director
for Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library (also David
Lee King's home library) talked about how they used GIS (Geographic Information System) data to
do some targeted marketing in their rather large service area.
Serving a rather large geographical area with a population of 178,000
with 90,000 cardholders, Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library
wanted to be able improve its services and market its services to
targeted under-served populations. To get the greater detail about
its service area, they provided anonymized patron data to a GIS
expert, who told them that there were 31 different market segments in
Shawnee County and gave them a lot of detail about how those market
segments lined up with their users. In her presentation, Diana
described several examples about how they used this data.
In one case they had figured that an inner-city population was
under-served. However when the GIS data and the patron data was
lined up, they found that this area actually had a high percentage of
cardholders (77%) and had one of the highest average checkouts per
customer.
They had been offering a free mailing service which was costing them
a lot of money. It was designed for people living on the outskirts
of the service area (20 some miles away). They found that the
majority of people using the service lived less than 5 miles away, so
they stopped offering the service for free.
By dividing using a point system they tried to develop an equitable
distribution of off-site resources such as bookmobile routes, lock
boxes and dispensers. The GIS data helped them put these in places
that made sense and served their population best.
Finally they used the GIS data to send out a bulk mailing to people
living in an area where they found they had a lower than expected
number of cardholders. Offering a Nook color as a prize for people
who signed up for a card in that area, they got well over their
desired 1% return (57 new cards for a population of 3600) on the
mailing (a high percentage of response for a bulk mailing where a lot
of people may not be interested or will just throw it away) which
they considered to be a success.
This was an interesting session, but I wonder if my library's service
area and population are just too small and homogeneous for this kind
of research to be particularly useful.
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