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Human Library Toolkit: Marketing and promoting your event

This toolkit has been created by librarians at the Universities of Hull and Huddersfield with support from Academic Libraries North. Its purpose is to provide ideas and resources to help with the planning of Human Library events.

Marketing and Promotion

It is important to create a marketing plan from the outset of the project and mark out in your timeline when you will need to produce some publicity and comms to recruit your books and then promote your event to a wider audience to attract readers for your books to talk to.  

The section of Recruiting and Support your Living Books talks more about the recruitment side.  Here are some tips for publicising your event.

How to publicise your event

Things to include are:

  1. Explain what a Human Library is, who is running it and why?
     
  2. Identify who could be interested and divide them into small groups based on shared characteristics, status or behaviour.  Write different messages aimed at your target audience.  This will help you write more persuasive and engaging content. 
     
  3. Next think about what you are asking people to engage with and why they should care.  Highlight the benefits people will get from attending such an event.    Remember to promote your event with confidence.  A Human Library is a unique event.  People are often intrigued by the concept.  They also usually love hearing the stories of others and are keen to take part.  Including the book title of your living books, a sentence about their story plus photographs, if possible can all help to raise the curiosity or interest of a potential reader and persuade them to attend. 
     
  4. Think about when the best time is to schedule your messages.  When do you need to send it out and how often?  E.g. If using social media, is there a time of day that will get more response?
     
  5. Identify the most effective marketing channels for the people you are trying to reach, e.g. social media, posters, plasma screens across university campus, word of mouth, staff/student meetings, email to staff or student networks/groups, staff and student newsletters/intranets.  Do you need a budget for publicity?  Are there time constraints or deadlines that you need to meet for each of the channels?  Could you get someone in a senior position with influence to endorse it and even send it out on your behalf?
     
  6. Finally, remember to evaluate your promotion.  Did it work?  Did your communications achieve what you wanted them to do?  If not what went wrong?  What could be improved for next time?