Tweed-Weber Announces a Turnkey, Cost-Effective Library Board Self-Assessment

Reading, PA - Tweed-Weber, Inc., a research and strategic planning consulting firm that works with numerous libraries and library systems in Pennsylvania, is pleased to announce a turnkey process for library board evaluation. The Library Board Self-Assessment was developed to allow a board to assess:

• How the board operates structurally
• How the board operates behaviorally
• How the board performs its duties
• How well board members operate individually

The Library Board Self-Assessment is 100% confidential for board members and takes only 15-20 minutes to complete. In addition, virtually no staff or management effort from the library is required. Tweed-Weber does all the work with an all-inclusive, turnkey process that includes the assessment, online implementation, data analysis, and a final report.

The ONLY thing a library director or board chair needs to do is forward an email (prepared by Tweed-Weber) to board members asking them to complete the self-assessment. That's it. Tweed-Weber does the rest.

The Library Board Self-Assessment can be delivered in as little as two weeks from the time it is ordered, and once a base year is on record, it is benchmarkable in future years.

The Library Board Self-Assessment was designed specifically to enhance the performance of library boards as they work to transform their libraries into Libraries of the Future. 

For more information, contact Sharon Danks, Vice President, Tweed-Weber, Inc. through any of the following methods: via telephone at 1-800-999-6615, by email at sdanks@tweedweber.com, on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.), or on Twitter (@TweedWeber).

Tweed-Weber Announces a Turnkey, Cost-Effective Nonprofit Executive Director/CEO Performance Evaluation

Reading, PA - As of September 2012, there were 1,080,130 charitable and religious tax-exempt organizations in the U.S. 82.3 percent of them had operating budgets of less than $1million.* Each of these organizations, however, has an Executive Director (President/CEO) who plays an essential role in the organization and materially impacts the organization’s ability to fulfill its mission and create sustainability for future generations. Without an effective Executive Director, the organization is leaderless and, without a leader, the organization and its future are in jeopardy.

 

As we enter the fourth quarter of the year, not-for-profits operating on a calendar year are once again faced with the essential task of evaluating the performance of their Executive Director. This activity may be among the most important tasks a board is asked to perform. It is on virtually every governance best practice list.  

 

While few boards would question the need to evaluate their Executive Director’s performance, many might ask how it should be done. Implementation considerations include:

• What questions should be asked on an Executive Director’s evaluation? 
• How should those questions be answered? What kind of a scale should be used?
• How can every board member participate in the process? 
• How can the performance evaluations be collected? 
• How can the results of the evaluations be aggregated and analyzed? 
• What should the final evaluation look like once it is completed?
• How can the process be as complete and professional as possible?

Tweed-Weber, Inc. has developed and tested a turn-key performance evaluation process for not-for-profit Executive Directors that answers these questions. It has facilitated this evaluation process for a wide range of not-for-profit organizations, and the outcome delivers to these organizations the information they need to evaluate and communicate their Executive Director’s annual performance.

 

The evaluation enables the board to evaluate its Executive Director in the following areas:

•  Knowledge and experience
• Judgment 
• Community leadership
• Organizational leadership
• Communication
• Initiative
• Fiscal responsibility
• Strategic direction
• Adaptability
• Planning
• Employee development
• Overall performance 

 

It also provides the opportunity for directors to answer three essential open-ended questions regarding the Executive Director:

• Most important accomplishments during the past year
• Areas of focus for the coming year
• Personal skills, capabilities, and/or characteristics worthy of development 

   

This evaluation is conducted online and a complete report is submitted to the board within ten days of the survey’s “close” date. It is a complete one-stop process that makes it simple and easy for a board to fulfill this important governance responsibility and acknowledged best practice. Because Tweed-Weber understands the budget constraints of most not-for-profit organizations, especially the 82.3 percent of small not-for-profits operating under $1 million in revenue, it is offering this entire evaluation process from beginning to end for just $595.

  

For more information, contact Tweed-Weber through any of the following methods: via telephone at 1-800-999-6615, by email at mail@tweedweber.com, on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.), or on Twitter (@TweedWeber).

 

   

*National Council of Nonprofits.

A Tipping Point for Libraries

By Al Weber, President, Tweed-Weber, Inc.
 
At a meeting in the summer of 2012, the chair of the board of a county library system made an observation that fundamentally changed my thinking about libraries. She said (and I’m going to paraphrase here, but only a little), “The Internet is having the same impact on libraries today that the Gutenberg press had on libraries in the 15th Century.” It turns out this individual, whose intellect and insight I am growing to admire more and more with each additional interaction we have, sent me down a thought path that’s worth sharing.

First, a little history. In 1439, Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, known to us as simply Johannes Gutenberg, printed 180 copies of the Bible, in the first production run of his invention with mechanical moveable type, what we now call the printing press. Prior to this time, all books were manuscripts, hand-written one at a time, taking months, if not years to produce. Availability of these “books” was to say the least, limited. To make the point, in 1300, 139 years prior to Gutenberg’s world-changing invention, the Vatican Library listed 443 “books.” It is thought to have been the largest library in the world at the time. By 1500, 61 years after those first Bibles came off the press, that number had grown to over 3,500 volumes. By today’s standards, that would be a small community library. By the standards of the time, however, that number kept the Vatican Library solidly in first place.

Libraries throughout the world began to grow. In 1598, Bodleian Library at Oxford University, one of the larger libraries outside of the Vatican at the time, contained 2,500 volumes. Over the next 250 years, Bodleian’s collection grew to the size, where by 1849 the library housed 220,000 books and 21,000 manuscripts. It took only 65 more years for Bodleian to pass the one million volume mark (in 1914).

1981, 67 years after Bodleian reached its historic, seven-figure level of books, marks the year in which IBM brought personal computing, one of the earliest versions of electronic information machines, to the non-expert masses. This represents yet another “disruptive” technological moment in history. Since then, information technology has become faster, smaller, cheaper, and dramatically more user friendly. Knowledge and information has become available in massive quantities to enormous numbers of people. 

The degree of change in available reading material created by Gutenberg’s press pales in comparison to the proliferation of reading material available today. In 2010, less than 30 years following the introduction of the IBM personal computer, 2.7 million titles were self-published in the United States and electronic books (e-books) have enabled over 295,000 publishers to bring even more books to the e-market. Learning, once the province of the privileged, can be experienced by virtually anyone who wants it.

Add to this, the growth of access to the Internet. Wikipedia (which I accessed on line of course) says of the Internet, “There is no consensus on the exact date when the modern Internet came into being, but sometime in the early to mid-1980s is considered reasonable.” Which makes it reasonable to say that in 1983, just 30 years ago, there were virtually no Internet users. Wikipedia also reports that, “As of June 2012, more than 2.4 billion people—over a third of the world's human population—have used the services of the Internet. To make things even more exciting, the Pew Research Center reports that as of August 27, 2013, 70 percent of Americans have high-speed Internet connections at home.*

What does this mean for libraries? At the risk of repeating the title of this posting, they have reached a tipping point and having done so, will never be the same again. There will certainly be a continuing demand for printed books. Libraries will still need to provide printed copies of best sellers and other books to the millions of people who enjoy reading them that way. (In a recent survey of over 1,700 library patrons, 71.7 percent of respondents reported they believed books would be very important in five years, while 57.1 percent reported that e-books would be very important.) But I think the writing is on the wall (as well as this posting) that library leaders will be faced with the continuing challenge of learning what their communities need and finding innovative ways to meet those programs, services, and resources.

*Kathryn Zickuhr and Aaron Smith. "Home Broadband 2013." Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (August 26, 2013) http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2013/PIP_Broadband%202013_082613.pdf, August 29, 2013.

What You See Is Not Necessarily What Is Real

By Al Weber, President, Tweed-Weber, Inc.


Less than two years ago, two events coincided to deliver a learning point that might be worth sharing.

At a planning meeting for a pretty sophisticated manufacturing company, someone made an off-hand comment about the local library. The CEO of the company, a guy who is well educated and extremely good at what he does, was instantly dismissive. “Libraries,” he said, “who uses them anymore? With the Internet almost everywhere, who needs a library?”

Knowing a little bit about libraries, I responded almost immediately. “Let’s start with tens of millions of people every day and work up from there” was my reply. The CEO was surprised, you could even say shocked, to learn there was still an essential need for libraries in this time where the Internet was “almost everywhere.” We took a short diversion from the agenda of the meeting and discussed the continually evolving role of libraries in today’s diverse world. We talked about the fact that many millions of people use the library to access the very Internet he wrongly assumed came to everyone like it came to him. We talked about the role of libraries educating children and adults, providing paper and electronic books to those who love to read, serving as a “third-place” for people looking for a neutral location to meet up with friends, and delivering non-book resources such as CDs and DVDs to people without other access to them.

At one point, he declared defeat on the point saying, “I guess because I don’t use a library, I just never saw that.” The point here is that what he saw (no current need for libraries) was not real.

Less than a few weeks later, I was rolling out the results of a patron survey to the management team of a library system in Pennsylvania. As we walked through the demographics of the respondents, I reported that their patrons were: more married, better educated, and wealthier than the overall population of the county they served. And, in a statistic that was just dripping with irony, given my CEO’s earlier comments, they were extremely well connected to the Internet. This conclusion was based on the fact that 94% of the respondents had completed the survey from their homes.

One of the key library managers, who was well educated and extremely good at her job, instantly rejected the sample (and its resulting conclusions) saying it was not representative of the people who use her library. Knowing a little bit about sampling, I explained that with 848 respondents we could report the data at a 99% confidence interval, +/- 4% error rate. She could deny the results of the survey all she wanted but if the system were to repeat the survey 100 more times, in 99 of those 100 surveys the results would be the same, plus or minus four percent. Her follow up comment was, “Well, we don’t see those people in our libraries, that’s for sure.” That may very well be, I responded but the respondents felt strongly enough about their library to take the time and complete a survey that I would hardly call “short.”

Further discussion concluded the people they actually recalled seeing in the library were a relatively small number of “frequent flyers.” They were voracious readers who appeared regularly to pick out new books. They were people without a computer in their home who used the technology in the library to check email and search for jobs. They were students who gathered with their friends after school in a place they found safe and fun. They were retirees who came in almost daily to read the newspapers and magazines. They were folks who came in out of the cold or heat to get warm or cool off in the library.

At one point, she declared defeat saying, “I guess I just don’t see those married, educated, affluent people as much because they are not here as regularly.” The point here is that what she saw (her library regulars) was not reflective of all of her patrons, but rather a very small subset of them.

People who lead organizations regularly have to make decisions about and set direction for those organizations. It is easy, and dangerous, to make those decisions and set direction based on individual impressions, opinions, and anecdotes. Good data, whether secondary data from public sources, or primary data from research like the patron survey referenced above, can help you make better decisions based on what is real, not just what you see or hear. In the end, the cost of gathering this data is much less expensive than the price you'll pay for a less-than-good decision.