Hello everyone!
Well thank you so much for joining our webinar today, where you will learn how to engage your readers with one tap digital magazines. We are so happy to have all of you joining us live or watching this on demand.
So today's webinar is going to benefit public library,
Academic and professional partners
Who offer magazines or are interested in adding magazines to their digital collection.
Ok.
Today's webinar is in between a beginner and an intermediate session, meaning we'll cover the basics and then we're going to move at a faster pace and you'll hear best practices from several libraries and academic partners. And there are no prerequisite to joining today's webinar.
And as a bonus for joining us live today, we are giving away a physical marketing kit to thirty lucky participants, so stay tuned into the second half of the webinar where we will introduce how you can get this!
Now a few housekeeping items. You will receive a follow up email from Zoom tomorrow around this time and that will include a recording and a pdf copy of the presentation. We are using a Zoom webinar today so you can ask any of your questions under the Q and A button. We have a great group helping out on Q&A today, including Emma, Holly, Lydia, and Marissa.
We will enable chat and polls at the appropriate times for some engagement so we encourage you to do that and right now let's go ahead and open up chat.
And I'd love to hear what your favorite magazine is?
So if you have a moment, go ahead and type in your favorite magazine.
Okay while you do that when we close the presentation today we will give you a certificate of attendance that you can save for your records.
Let's do some introductions. My name is Lauren Bajda. I am a product trainer at OverDrive and I will be our moderator today and my favorite magazine at the moment is HGTV for home design inspiration.
Next we have Abbey Patton. She helps our Public Library Account Managers become more helpful and knowledgeable resources for our library partners and her favorite magazine is Delish, which truly looks delicious.
And then we have Katie. She is a Product Liaison and she helps prepare OverDrive partners and team members, like myself, for new product updates and releases. and PawPrint is her favorite magazine because she loves all things cats, including her four fur babies.
And then we have Joy she is the Assistant Deputy Director for Development and Communication for the Buffalo and Eerie County Public Library System in New York.
She has early thirty years of combined professional experience and the non profits and four profits world and the fields of marketing communication er fund raising and special events
Her favorite magazine is US Weekly.
Next we have Susan. She is an Electronic Resources Specialist for the Contra Costa
County Library System in California. She has over two decades of experience working in public libraries and with managing all aspects of digital resource collections.
Finally we have Rachel. She is a Marketing Manager for North American Public Libraries and she helps to spread the word about great events,
Programming, and special offers OverDrive has available to public libraries. We are so happy to have all of you joining us today and I see so many fantastic favorites coming through the chat from National Geographic to Good Housekeeping, Consumer Reports.
Cat Fancy and more! So thank you so much for sharing yours as well.
Okay so we have a one hour session for you today.
We are going to discuss new and popular magazines that your patrons will want to read this fall and holiday season. We'll share some recently released Libby updates that's gonna make life even easier than ever to discover and engage with magazines at your library. Success stories from top libraries, who effectively drive magazine circulation, marketing resources to spread the word, and next steps for success.
All right well at this time we'd love to kick it off with a check in poll to get a pulse on the group.
So I am curious and I'm gonna go ahead and launch this poll for us.
Curious if your library currently offers digital magazines or print magazines?
So give me one second,
And the poll should now be live. If you're not seeing it, you might have dual monitors and you can see if the poll is just being hidden.
Awesome. So we have
Hundreds of people joining us live today so it's fun to see all of these answers flying in.
I'll close the poll in three,
Two and one.
And share those results.
So it looks like the majority of you joining us today do offer digital magazines at your library.
And the majority of you also offer physical magazines at your library.
Wonderful.
Thank you so much for your participation there.
And the last thing I want to cover before I pass it on is just some reasons on why magazines are fantastic and
All of you probably know this already. So it expands on the content variety in your library catalog,
Which can appeal to a wider user base.
It allows for the consolidated management of platforms and vendors for your library when you're choosing digital magazines through OverDrive.
We provide fresh, current juvenile and young adult content, in addition to great adult magazines.
It increases your library's overall circulation of content.
Simplifies that patron experience because magazines are seamlessly integrated into the Libby app.
And it provides a really excellent reading experience with Libby's special article view.
Well, with that I'm gonna go ahead and pass it over to my colleague, Abbey.
Thanks Lauren. So I am really excited for my section of this presentation, which is new and popular magazines and so I did want to kick us off with a little poll. "What is our most popular magazine of 2023 so far?" This is based on the number of checkouts we've seen from all of our magazine partners.
And we are giving that some time to check, to tally.
And
I do want to point out that I'm going to be giving you these checkout numbers and just a reminder that the one of the reasons that we can get these so high is because our magazine package is Simultaneous Use. Uncapped checkouts. So people can checkout as many issues as they want and never run into a hold or tell them that they reached capacity. So I am going to end the poll
And share the results. Oh no.
I'm sorry did you already share it, Lauren? I got it yes. You're so far ahead of me, but we can see that US Weekly won.
But the actual winner is, drum roll please, The New Yorker. So that, so far, in 2023, The New Yorker has had over fifty seven thousand checkouts across all our magazine
All our magazine partners. Our second runner up or first runner up is actually Cooks Illustrated with fifty... over fifty five thousand checkouts and then for those of you who got US Weekly, which actually most of us within this group did as well before we ran the numbers, that is our second runner up. Our third place winner with forty seven thousand five hundred plus.
So let's go ahead and get Justin Timberlake off the screen and put up my queen, Taylor Swift. So one thing that I really want to highlight about our magazines is that we have a ton of, what we call one off or special edition issues. So if you've ever gone to the grocery store and you've seen People's Ultimate 80s Trivia,
Oh my goodness, they are asking twenty dollars for this magazine. I really want this content, but I can't get it. We actually get a lot of that content from our magazine content providers and we go it goes into our collection upon release. So I just put some of what I thought were the best, most recent, one off issues we got. So People Ultimate 80s Trivia Quiz, TIME The Year in Review, Taylor Swift,
And Curious Crochet Creatures. I'm going to teach myself to crochet one day so it's nice to know that this is here in the collection. These one off issues are fantastic and it's a really nice way for your patrons to start utilizing the library and start saving some money.
Next, I want to highlight that we have a ton of holiday goodies. Halloween is now behind us and we have some really great winter holidays coming forward and these magazines can be a great way for your patrons to prep. One thing that is really amazing about our magazine package is that we include three years of rolling content. So if there was a recipe in Taste of Home from two Thanksgivings ago that your patrons want to pull up and use again for this Thanksgiving, but they forgot to save it, they can go into Libby peruse the past three years of backissues and pull that magazine out. Check it out, get their recipe, and win the Thanksgiving pot luck once again. I had to put in some holiday cookies ones in here. There's also crafting for those people that already know how to crochet and all those other fun things. There's recipes, there's cookies and there's interior design, which is always really wonderful. It it can also help spruce up your homescreen and make it look a little festive.
Another thing that our magazine package offers is foreign languages. So this is a really great way to increase the depth and breadth of your collection without putting a lot of labor on your selectors because it is an all inclusive package and so when you pull in all of these foreign language content it's there for your patrons. It's always available and your... it's right there, you don't need to go in and
Pull it out separately to purchase it. To make sure it is in your collection. So we see here that I have some Italian language and Spanish language content. There's also Italian kids content, which is really exciting because sometimes when we're looking at foreign language, we kind of focus on the adult, but this is nice because it does remember to pull in those kids, as well. We have a multitude of languages and I encourage you to go into Marketplace or if you already offer them pull them up yourself and just see what you offer and what might resonate with your community. And speaking of kids
We also have some wonderful kids magazine content. So we can see here there's another...there's more wide variety. There is Bluey, which seems to be taking over the world. My child is only ten months so he is not quite into Bluey yet, but I'm already excited for him to be in to it because from what I've seen, it looks like a very fun show and I used to have an Australian Sheepdog. We also have Crafting for Kids so that someone doesn't have to be age thirty and not know how to crochet. And then we also have Sports Illustrated for Kid. A little bit of something for everyone, old or young.
And I would be remiss if I didn't point out OverDrive's All Access Comics. So this is a separate package from our magazine offering, but it's similar in that it is Simultaneous Use. If you were to purchase this collection, you would get over four thousand of the best comic and graphic novels from publishers that include Disney, Marvel, IDW, Image, and Dark Horse. Readers of all ages will find something to love in this collection, including beloved characters and stories from Frozen, Lion King, Star Wars, Mickey Mouse, Captain Marvel, Spiderman, and the Avengers, which are all very top of mind considering we just had Halloween and saw all of these people roaming about our neighborhoods. One thing I do want to highlight about All Access Comics is that unlike our magazine package, a comic does count as an ebook checkout against patron checkout limits, while magazines are uncapped.
And I do just want to highlight that
Minecraft 2009, which is this center image here so far in 2023 has had one hundred twenty four thousand five hundred plus checkouts and I think that that is a really amazing statistics considering if we go back and look at what we what The New Yorker issue
It was multiple issues of The New Yorker in 2023 and that was fifty seven thousand checkouts. So it definitely something to consider looking into our All Access Comics as well. Thank you all for listening to me and I'm going to pass it over to the wonderful Katie.
Hello everyone that my name is Katie Blachman, Product Liaison here at OverDrive.
As part of my role, I help create email communication and other resources to help prepare you, our library partners, for product updates and improvements. I'm so excited to have the
Opportunity to spend time with you all today to share some recent updates to the magazine experience in Libby.
Now we know magazines are an important investment for your library and we want to ensure you see a return, ensure that you see a return on that investment, both through your magazine usage and overall user engagement.
In late September, based on partner feedback, we introduced several updates to simplify and enhance the user experience with magazines from your library.
All with the goal of helping you delight more readers and increase your magazine usage.
Let's explore some of these recent changes together.
First we've branded this as
One tap magazines and that is our way of significantly simplifying the user journey for accessing magazines.
Now anywhere a user sees a magazine in your collection, they can open it and start reading with just one tap.
The screen recording on the slide shows
That it was as simple as see magazine, read magazine. There were no additional steps required.
And the primary option next to every magazine is open and that instantly launches in the magazine reader, which you are seeing on the screen.
From there users can navigate to the special article view, which were seeing now, which creates a simplified reading of dedicated articles where users can leverage options to customize their reading experience like increasing the font size or switching to my preferred way of reading, which is in dark mode.
We based off librarian and user feedback, we've also simplified the steps it takes us to subscribe to your favorite magazines.
From search results and title details pages, like you're seeing on the screen, there is an easy subscribe button. After tapping subscribe,
Libby walks users through the steps to either set up their first Notify Me tag,
Or add the magazine to an existing one.
Once you add a Notify Me tag to a magazine you'll then automatically get a notification when the next issue is ready to enjoy.
Users can receive push, in app, and/ or email communication based on their preferences on each device that they use Libby on.
And then we also wanted to make it easier for users to find all the magazines that they're actively engaged with in one central place.
And that is now called the magazine rack, which is available on a user shelf.
From the magazine rack, users can easily access the latest issue of any magazines they're subscribed to and any other issues that they have chosen to add to their magazine rack.
This is especially helpful for users who engage with a lot of magazines and don't want to see their magazine titles interspersed with their ebook and audiobook loans since that can cause a lot of scrolling and make it a little bit harder to find exactly what you are looking for.
The latest issue of any magazine that you subscribe to will stay on your magazine rack until the next issue is released.
But you can also choose to keep issues of other magazines or back issues on your rack.
By default issues that you manually keep are available from the rack for seven days.
You can increase that at any time if you need access to something for longer.
For example, if I find a favorite fall recipe in a specific issue, I can keep it on my rack to reference the recipe for as long as I need.
Just keep extending it by seven days.
Next up we want to make it easier for users to discover magazines in your collection.
From the magazine rack, users can tap on the blank cover image, which you're seeing on the screen on the lefthand side. It has a plus sign and from there that will take them to the newsstand.
The newsstand is a new view of a users recently opened issues and other popular magazines from your library.
It's designed to help your users discover more of the great magazine content your library offers.
And users can tap the quick filters of the top
To browse magazines by popular categories like we've seen home and garden, food and wine, and more being very popular.
Now let's go over a few additional notes about magazines.
First to save space on users devices magazines are not automatically downloaded. Instead, users can choose which issues to download in the mobile app for iOS, Android or Kindle Fire.
Again, that helps with performance of the app, and makes it so that there aren't a whole bunch of automatic downloads happening in the background.
Well and second, while manually kept issues are saved to the magazine rack for seven days, by default, as I mentioned on the previous slide,
Users can choose to extend this period in seven day intervals as many times as they like.
That the last point that I want to note on this slide
Is you may be wondering if magazines are no longer borrowed since users just open them and don't have to go through a borrowing process.
You may be wondering how your library gets checkouts so let's break that down.
Checkouts are registered for your library
When a user opens a magazine. So when they tap that open option by a magazine,
Or when they're notified about the next issue of a magazine they're subscribed to.
But your checkout period for magazines is still important and here's why. If a user opens the same issue multiple times during the checkout period, as determined by your library, it still counts as the same checkout.
For example, let's say your library has a twenty one day checkout period for magazines.
If the user opens a magazine that will count as a checkout.
If they open it several times within that same twenty one day period,
It still is all part of the same checkout.
But if they then open the same issue at some point in the future, after that twenty one day period, that would then register as a new checkout.
And that's similar to how checkouts work for ebooks and audiobooks.
All right and last I want to share that we really appreciate the feedback our partners and users have already shared with us since these updates went live.
By far the biggest point of feedback was that users wanted a way to easily tell which issues on their magazine rack they'd already finished.
And in last week's Libby release,
I'm happy to share that we did just that.
Libby will now automatically mark issues as finished
And gray out the cover image, as you're seeing with House and Garden,
When the user reads at least ninety five percent of an issue.
Users can also manually mark subscribed issues as finished at any time or if it's an issue of a magazine that they're not subscribed to they can remove any kept issues from their rack if they no longer need them.
With this update the magazine rack is sorted with unfinished issues first so users can easily see when they haven't finished yet and start reading from there.
And now that we've heard about some of the latest Libby updates for magazines I'm excited to turn our attention to some success stories of how our partner libraries are using magazines to engage with more of their community. First we'll hear from Joy from Buffalo and Eerie County Public Library in New York.
Joy, take it away!
Thanks so much Katie, and hi everyone again! I'm Joy Testa Cinquino, I am the Assistant Deputy Director,
Development & Communications for Buffalo and Erie County Public Libararies here in Buffalo, New York. We are thirty seven libraries and we have two mobile units. Our population is just under a million, about nine hundred eighteen thousand people. We began offering ebooks in 2009 and we began offering our emagazines back in June of 2022, so just about sixteen months ago.
And frankly emagazines have been successful for us!
The selection is vast, from food and wine, to Good Housekeeping, to travel and golf and even more.
Every time I look up a magazine I'm really amazed at the variety of collection and I'm one of those people that wants to read before I go to bed. So pretty much every night I'm looking up to see what magazine I feel like reading from my cell phone in my bed.
I am also amazed at the ease of use and the opportunity to borrow those newsstand only, sort of one off magazines, like the ones you see in a grocery store, Target, that really could be $14-$15.
Since we started, our library patrons checked out over one hundred thousand emagazines from our OverDrive collection of over five thousand editions.
Most popular would be US Weekly here in Buffalo, Women's World and The New Yorker. And then our top kids and teen emagazines are Minecraft World magazine and Girl's World.
So why is this so exciting? Because it's really an excellent opportunity to engage your community and onboard patrons with current materials with every single issue.
So how did we spread the word?
All libraries are busy, but several things were occurring here within a month of our planned launch, that really not only distracted our staff, but distracted our whole community and it made things kind of a challenge. We got a new library director after a year of not having one. We went fine free wiping out hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of
Of dollars in in charges and fines. And there was a major crime in our community that made the national news and took place just one block from one of our libraries.
So fortunately OverDrive came to the rescue! They have resources to print, distribute, and share digitally for promotional campaigns, as well as some webinars that we took advantage of.
For our staff, what we did about three months before our planned launch, we presented, we had some staff members from our training department present during what we call a monthly manager and directors meeting , which has managers and directors from all of our thirty seven libraries. It was an in-person meeting and then we followed up with some emails.
We offer training on how to access and look up magazines because, let's face it, not everybody who's in our libraries and working for us is comfortable with downloads.
We also gave some staff the ability to test the product and they could see what it looked like.
The goal, of course, to get employees of all levels excited about another great benefit for library card holders.
We touted benefits such as no circulation cap, unlimited simultaneous use, and now e- content, our magazines, our ebooks, and audiobooks, were really found in one place.
With the smart tags and Libby patron could now be notified when each new issue is released.
Patrons can enjoy issues, of course, of every magazine 24/7.
For the public our campaign was a little bit different and we did something because of all the craziness going on in our community. We really made the magazines available on June 1st, 2022, but it was sort of a quiet release. We didn't make a lot of noise for ten days. Once we did, we made sure that our thirty seven libraries were armed with social media, because thirty seven libraries means thirty seven Facebook pages. Many also have Twitter or X pages and Instagram, and things like that. So we wrote the post and we continue to do that now.
We also made posters and flyers and bookmarks for all of our libraries. We send out,
Usually quarterly, messages to all of our library card holders who have opted in to get our message and we included a coming soon emagazines.
Since we had a new library director, he was out and about, talking to the media and doing some other speaking engagements and meeting people. We've made sure on his bullet points that he was talking about e magazines, as well, because that was a new feature for us.
The library, at the time, had a podcast called "All Booked Up," so there was a program dedicated to the magazines.
And then there was a little bit of spending that I did for to promote this with something called Step Out Buffalo. I'm not sure if your communities, probably many of them do, have this kind of thing. It was it's a totally online resource where people learn about upcoming community events and family activities and we actually bought like a year of advertising and every every other month I promote one thing. So one month was specifically prompted to our econtent resources.
So here's just some easy tips for you. What you're seeing right now, the major part of the screen, is the front home page of our website and we've had pretty much for the last year in the center section,
Magazines.
Ebooks magazines and streaming and if people click on that link they're gonna get to our how to page that our Tech Lab folks
Put together and it's an easy way for people to just find what they're looking for.
And you can do that too. It's really, I would suggest everyone do that, utilizing their home page of their website.
We talked about our quarterly emails to our card holders. We also updated the letters that we send to people who get new library cards.
We get daily (ten, twenty) new library card holders a day. They're applying online. We're sending up sending them a letter. In that letter we made sure to mention that emagazines are now on opportunity. Or as a benefit for library card holders.
In the past we did have some patrons that complained about e content accessibility.
So we made sure to mention that we lend out Chromebooks and hot spots in our libraries.
And that we also have in total, in all of our libraries, on-site public computers for people to use.
Next we have some examples of the social media.
And the big one the Reader's Digest.
Last month Buffalo was featured as one of the nicest places in america. So yay for Buffalo! I took advantage of that and posted the cover of the emagazine cover on our some of our social media.
And last I looked over 250 people had viewed that post.
That was in the the local media as well that were we voted the nest place in america.
Then next with that smaller ad, the photo of Paul McCartney of the Beatles with his dreamy eyes, was the cover of a special edition emagazine this summer. So I ran a social post late at night
With a statement, "Can't get to sleep? Borrow a digital magazine with your library card." and again it linked it to the OverDrive catalog page.
We conduct trainings through our mobile services hitting a lot of senior centers and parades, community events. And we make sure that our staff knows how to show the ease of downloading and the ease of use. Especially for our senior community.
We push a magazines during our public programming. And I don't know, maybe some of you other libraries have indie author day coming up on Saturday. We've got a program here with over a hundred people coming. We will make sure that they have flyers about our econtent.
And we also stuff it in when we're giving away things with our giveaways in outreach programs.
Then finally, really, you know word on the street. What are our patrons saying? I love these and one of them really you know touches the heart. The second one is an asian immigrant living in Buffalo. "It's great to know that others care about us with the vast selection of emagazine offerings."
And you know patrons love the service. I strongly encourage you to browse the OverDrive resource center really frequently if you can. It really has so many ready made marketing ideas and the curation tools to help you promote and develop your collection. We have a graphics, we're fortunate to have a graphics department here within our library. I know many libraries don't. But so the resources from OverDrive are really really helpful. You know remember expanding the formats you offer also expands the users that you reach. So I totally encourage you to be a super hero. Market your digital content to increase customer engagement.
Now I'm pleased to encourage Susan to login. So from the opposite side of the country,
from me,
We have Susan Kantor-Horning, the electronic resources specialist
For the Contra Costa County Library.
Susan
Alright let me go ahead and make sure Susan is up front from backstage.
Here we go. In just a few seconds Susan will be joining us. And excellent job Joy what a great example.
Yeah thank you! There was a lot of great information there. So I'm Susan Kantor-Horning from the Contra Costa County Library. Contra Costa means opposite coast. We are on the east bay from San Francisco. We have 26 library locations.
We're about seven hundred and sixteen square miles.
Our population is
Over a million. Our OverDrive circulation in 2022 was 1.6 million and were hoping to get at two million for 2023.
So our patron
Database has
About 447
Thousand card holders. However, only one 158,000 that are active card holders. So one of the goals the library has is to add new card holders and to re engage the lapsed users. We also want to create awareness of what the library offers to those communities that are harder to reach. So the library created a series of marketing campaigns that focused on our digital resources.
And so the ads that we created
Were prior to our purchase of the OverDrive magazines. We've actually only started offering OverDrive magazines in late September of this year. But these ads
Were
Made to to market
Libby and eaudio books. And the first one we did was on the exterior of buses that went throughout the Costa County. The image that you see there is what we used that empathize all the eaudiobooks that are available. And then we also
Had a billboard that uses the same image that was displayed on a busy highway out in far eastern Contra Costa County so and that
Digital billboard displayed in last December and then the bus ad went last fall into early January.
And then this year we launched our first ever cable television and streaming advertising campaign. We created a commercial called "Opening Doors" and this aired on the local television and various platforms such as HGTV, Animal Planet, NBC Sports, A&E. We featured the ad on our home page and it was a
It had thirty seconds and two fifteen second ads and they were in english and spanish and they were very well received. And I believe Lauren is going to
Show the ad now.
[Begin audio] Your free Contra County library card gets you more than ever before. Access premium digital subscription and learning services for free. Available to you any time, anywhere. Stream quality, thoughtful entertainment. Learn a language. Gain access to leading news publication and thousands of ebooks and audio books from wherever you are. Received at home learning assistance and getting in person support tot. Visit ccclib.org to get your free library card and open new doors today. [End audio]
Thanks Lauren! So this
Three months campaign wrapped up in June and the number of impressions exceeded the goals that our
Leadership had. And they were well received by other county department and other libraries and patrons and staff.
And then the Bay area libraries, the consortium of libraries, have just gone in on a
Purchase of an ad that is appearing
Now
On Spotify and that highlights the Libby audiobooks and that is gonna run for two months.
So
Why we added OverDrive magazines? We had a small task team made up of staff from our collection development committee that assessed the usage of our print magazines, titles in our collection. And we found that
There was still a strong demand for serials. But serials they go out of print
Each year, like six to eight
Titles a year were going out of print. And
Some are just now being offered in digital format. And then of all our print serials the newspapers have the highest in house use. But as libraries are experiencing all over the country,
There's problems with getting these papers delivered. So a couple of years ago we were able to offer our local newspaper in a daily digital image edition. And so that has just been an incredible boon to our circulation, that digital newspaper collection. Borrowing rates have increased by 1,000 percent during that
The three year period of
2020 through 2022. So while we do offer
Digital magazines from other providers we decided to purchase OverDrive magazines for for many reasons. And
Of course it expands our digital serials offerings and it increases our access to materials in languages other than English.
We all know that Libby is very popular with our users and we're seeing continued growth year after year with this collection. And we've been offering the simultaneous use collections such as the All Access Comics for a couple of years. We like to feature that. We have free comic book days every year that we like to feature our
Our comics so
That is doing well. And then also we have children's eaudiobooks from Recorded Books. That's another Simultaneous Use (SU) subscription and that's great to have because we're ordering fewer physical audiobooks.
So
As I mentioned we just launched the OverDrive magazines in September and to do that we sent out, we have a monthly newsletter that goes out to over 200,000 subscribers.
We posted on Facebook and Instagram. We have
Our public information officer writes a column for the local newspaper.
And we have these beautiful graphics. Here's one that
Displays it's still displaying on our home page and on our magazines and newspapers page.
We have digital signage in our community libraries.
And
And yes as of
Just
Just a little over a month we have had 20,000 circs which
Is incredible. I mean we knew they would be very popular but
This has
Exceeded what
We were expecting. And then staff was given notice, of course, that OverDrive magazines were coming. And next week I'll be giving a webinar to staff just to give them more information about using OverDrive magazines and to answer any of their questions. So hopefully
The the magazines will
Attract and retain more library users. Libby makes it very easy to find these, to find this new content. And we like that the magazines don't count against a patron's total number of checkouts. And there's always something to read. And the new one-tap experiences is very easy and intuitive.
I haven't received - I answer a lot of technical support questions, and I haven't
Had anybody who's having a problem accessing this content. So it's very intuitive and it's easy to
To subscribe to a magazine and then view it on your shelf. So we're very
We're happy with the experience so far
Thanks
Thanks you Susan, you got a lot of love too. I don't know if you saw those reactions when we played the commercial. People enjoyed that! Oh great. Thank you.
Okay well what we would love to do right now is take a quick pause from the presentation and we want to hear from you. So I'm going to have my colleague Emma open up chat again. And you heard a lot of ideas so far from Joy and Susan on how they market magazines at their library. We'd love to hear what are some ideas that you would like to implement? Maybe you are already marketing magazines, tell us what you're doing as well. This is a really great opportunity to learn from your peers. You are in a room with over a hundred library partners so a really great time to get that insight.
So I see some chats coming through already. Take just a moment to read some of those.
Oh a film in a short video to share on social along with utilizing OverDrive's marketing content.
Kimberly likes to promote on social media and promoting with flyers at local events. Awesome
Yes we can share that ad. We can share in the follow up pdf. Someone asked if we could show that video again.
Deborah would like to make a video for their website, that would be fantastic.
LeAnna said they currently do email blasts and social media posts but a short video would be cute. Lots of videos. I like this, Heather said that they use stickers
To add to all the physical magazines that they also have available in Libby. Let me go ahead and read one more
Yeah we have some duplicartes here which is fantastic. Yvonne said we have magazines listed under the elibrary web page and post periodically on social.
Fantastic well we'll keep that open for another minute or two because we have even more suggestions coming your way. At this time going to pass it over to Rachel.
Thank you Lauren and thank you Susan and Joy for sharing all of those awesome programming ideas. Love the cable ad I love the social media content. As a marketer myself it just warms my heart. So thank you for sharing that and I hope everyone got some good ideas. So now that we've heard from the public library than what they are doing to promote magazines, I would touch a little bit on what our academic partners are doing to promote magazines. So I want start with Cardiff University in Wales. So Cardiff does three core things to drive users into Libby and their magazine collections. So first, as liberians on the call, you all know and Joy and Susan both mentioned it, like your front line staff is so important to know about the offering and then share that with the community. So at Cardiff they use their email to continually update their staff about the magazine offering, new issues that were coming, new ways they were merchandising collections within magazines. And so they just kept the staff up to date so that they could share that with the students at the university.
They also use indication sessions with students. So these were in person sessions where they had students ears. They were learning the lay of land of the university and they mentioned magazine collections there. And last but not least they promoted on their library home page. So with these three things they were able to drive a lot of students into Libby and drive magazine checkouts and circulations. And to do that they also wanted to make sure that once
Users got there, the magazines were merchandiced in a great way. So as you can see on the right hand side. You know Cardiff University is a global university. And what they do as they built collections of magazines based on languages. Ao you can see magazines in Italian or magazines in Japanese. It was just a really nice way that to market magazines to their patrons.
Go ahead and next slide
Thank you
Then we have Edge Hill University. So Edge Hill had a reading for pleasure collection that they wanted to feature. And so they built a landing page where they promoted this collection
In their physical library. You can see this image has their physical books and magazines along with a nice plant and a chair where, just inviting students to sit and read for pleasure. A nice little break from some homework. But this landing page they also merged the digital aspect where they talk about Libby and being able to find magazines digitally if we weren't able to make it into the physical library. And the next portion of this landing page doesn't necessarily have to do with magazines but I would be remissed if I did not mention this as a marketing professional. They allowed students to actually recommend titles that they wanted to see in this collection. And I just thought that was a really nice way for the library to connect with their students and just let them know that, "Hey! We're listening." Another nice thing Edge Hill did
Surveyed their student body and wanted to understand what were the topics that matter to them. And they found out that neuroiversity,
Health, actually menopause were all very hot topics within their student body. And so based on those things that they built magazine collections that spoke to those topics. So again, listening to their student body, listening to their community, and then reacting with the way that they're merchandising magazines. On the right hand side you can see there's a health collection of magazines.
Go ahead and next slide please Lauren, thank you
All right then we have Lancaster University in England. So Lancaster did a great job of meeting their students where they are, and that is on social platforms. So you can see the two book ending images here were reels that were posted on Instagram and they just highlighted some of the magazines that would be of interest to you know a student aged person. They use nice pop colors and imagery and graphics that were GIFs that really interact with the students. And then in the middle is a image that they pulled from the OverDrive resource center that they posted on Facebook.
Go ahead and next slide please.
Next we have Joliet Junior College. They, like the past example, posted on Instagram. You can see on the left hand side they pulled an image from the OverDrive resource center. But the cool thing that they did here is they added their logo to it. So we encourage you to you know use our resources on the resource center (which I will cover in a second). But then put your own spin on it. Make it your own brand and your library voice. Joliet College also mentioned that having the magazines available digitally for their student body really help with the transition during the pandemic.
Prior to the pandemic that had a lot of circulation within their physical collection but then with the switch and people staying at home you know
Offering magazines digitally really helped with that transition.
Next slide please
Ok so now that I've given use some examples of how academic libraries are promoting magazines, I want to talk to you about the marketing resources you have available.
All right so if you have not been to the OverDrive resource center, do not walk, run there now! Go ahead and scan the QR code. You'll also get this presentation after in a follow up email so if you don't have your phone available it's okay you also be able to access it. But our resource center is honestly with another member of your marketing team. And if you don't have a marketing team, it can be the one member of your marketing team. There is so much on there. We've got social media images, press release templates, trainings, print docs, digital assets. You name it, it's on there. And the really cool thing is we're refreshing this all the time. So if there are upcoming holidays or trending topics or heritage months, we're making sure that we're keeping that
That content current and fresh. And next slide please.
And on that resource center
You will be able to find a refreshed marketing kit. And in this marketing kit there are two sizes of social media posts. One for Instagram and then the other for Facebook and other platforms. Additionally there are bookmarks. These bookmarks promote magazines are available digitally.
This is perfect just to slip into the jacket of a magazine so that if a patron is sick or it's a really bad now day or something like that he can't make it in, they always have access to the library. Or for Joy's example, she's up late at night, the libraries not open, they can pop the magazine on their phone. There's also print materials here. So there is an eight and half by eleven flyer which is perfect placed next to your magazine collection. As well as an eleven by seventeen poster which you can just place around your library.
Along with all of these materials there is a programming guide. It gives you ideas on how to use these materials as well as example social media posts copy to get you started. Like I mentioned before
Take these as just a baseline.
Add your logo, add icons or colors or what have you, and really make it your own. All of this can be customized to your brand.
Alright next slide please
All right so as Lauren mentioned and as you may have heard in some of the promotion, we want to give you a magazine marketing kit! And for the first thirty people that complete the magazine form, so just scan the qr code and complete the form, we will ship these materials to you.
So we will send two hundred printed bookmarks. These really focused on magazines and gives directions on how to download Libby. Along with two hundred printed business cards and then one hundred stickers. And I think someone mentioned this in the chat that they do this. But you can take these stickers and place them on your physical magazines so that patrons know, "Oh, I have the option of viewing this in the library or also at home." It's just a really nice touch to promote your digital collection!
So I'm going to give everyone
Couple more seconds here. Scan that QR code, fill out that form. This will be available in the follow up email as well if you're not able to scan right now.
Alright Lauren I think we can go to the next slide and I am going to hand it over to Abbey who is going to talk about our special flash sale! Abbey take it away
Alright I can cover this for you Abbey real quick. Wanted to let everyone know that we have a special flash sale that is going through November 24th, so we only have a couple days to take advantage of this. And this is available to our new magazine partners. So a handful of you on the poll earlier said that you do not currently have magazines. So this is where you're at. When you purchase the magazine package you get 10 percent off your first year. And this offer is available through November 24th.
And then we also have an offer for our current magazine partners. So let's say you have magazines but you don't have a comics package that Abbey mentioned earlier. When you purchase the All Access Comics package you get 20 percent off your first year. And again, just like the new magazine partner offer, this is only available to people who do not have the current magazine package. If you are interested in this, please reach out to Account Manager and they will be able to set you up with the next steps. If you don't know who your Account Manager is, just reply to that follow up email and we'll be able to point you in the right direction.
Thank you Rachel!
I'll tell you what, I went on the website to look at the marketing kit and there are so many responses I couldn't even get to it right away. So I had a refresh it. So just a sign that people are excited and that they are in there.
Okay well I'm just gonna highlight some next steps for success after our magazine webinar today. Like Rachel mentioned we encourage you to contact your OverDrive Account Manager to take advantage of our flash sale.
Second, we encourage you to promote your magazine collection. You can use free resources that we featured from our resource center
Or take away some of those ideas you heard from Joy, Susan, and all of your peers in chat today.
If you are doing something well we would love to hear about it and feature your library in our blog. So you can always email Rachel at rmayfield@OverDrive.com to share pictures and examples of how you're marketing your magazines. And then we'd love to try and get that in the blog as mentioned.
And then the third next step is simple. Sit back, relax, and enjoy watching your magazine checkouts soar.
With updates to the one tap magazines in Libby, it's even easier than ever for your users to enjoy digital magazines.
Well as we close our webinar today I want to let you know about some upcoming training sessions. We do have a how to train your community on Libby webinar. That's going to be Thursday, November 16th. This is a train the trainer session so we highly encourage you to join us. We offer this quarterly. So if you haven't attended it in the past year we'd love to see you. And then we will be losing out the year with an Introduction to OverDrive Marketplace webinar. Registration for this will go up soon. And that's gonna be on Wednesday, December 13th for all of those who are new to Marketplace.
To sign up for any of these you can visit our resource center.
Okay well I want to give a special thank you to all of our speakers. Abbey, Katie, Joy, Susan, and Rachel. If you can use those reaction's let's give them all some love, some digital applauses for their great efforts there! And then thank you to those assisting with Q&A. Emma, Holly, Lydia, Kevin, and Marissa.
So just as a reminder you will receive an email from Zoom tomorrow and that will include the recording and a pdf of the presentation.
Okay so at this time Emma's going to chat out a certificate of attendance that you can save for yourself. If you need a track any of these pd hours.
And then when you close out of the webinar today, a short survey will come up. Like one to three minutes. If you have the time we do always appreciate your feedback so we can continue to improve our webinars.
Alright, with that we are going to leave you. Thank you so much for your time and we hope to see you soon. Happy reading!