Steve Coffman and I just wrapped up a 3-week webinar on Plural Funding Models on Learningtimes.net. The guest this week was Patricia Martin , a specialist in sponsorship who created ALA’s Sponsorship Marketing Division that generated $6M revenue in 18 months. As Steve quite rightly says, Patricia knows more about library sponsorship than anyone in creation. Why is that? Well, because, sponsorship is a deal, not a donation and, let’s be honest, our profession is not renowned for its deal-making capabilities. Yes, we have a few colleagues among us who are very adept at making deals. But it’s not a core competency folks. In fact, even the deal “mind-set” is a stretch for many of us. C’mon….admit it.

Martin talked about the reasons sponsorship efforts fail for organizations. The #1 reason? Because the organization doesn’t have the right attitude towards developing, closing and managing ‘the deal.’

In addition to sponsorship the course looked at earned income, contributions and an overview of “plural” funding. Each week participants in this course were asked to discuss the various funding models with their colleagues and determine the pro’s & con’s of the models for their specific environment. Many participants in this course, and in other courses that Steve has been conducting, find that their colleagues are just not ready to consider funding other than the traditional taxes, grants, “fund-raising”, etc. In other words, the attitude shift Patricia Martin referred to is not there.

This is not a topic that is going to go away. We do need to be exploring other funding or revenue streams. Our current funding model is not working effectively for many libraries. And, even for those libraries that do want to maintain and strengthen the traditional tax base, the “deal making” approach, attitude and skills are going to be critical. There’s a whole lota competition for those tax dollars, so we’d better be good at competing for those dollars and closing the deal. Now….off my soapbox and back to work!

Rebecca