Friend-ly Tips: Effective Friends Marketing

Communications & Marketing is a broad topic – sometimes frustratingly so. After all, essentially everything your organization does has strategic communications implications. However, the concept is difficult to isolate and grapple with on its own, particularly in today’s rapidly evolving communications landscape. And today, COVID-19 and its fallout add yet another level of complexity to the equation!

With these conundrums in mind, MALF is pleased to spotlight Communications & Marketing during our last webinar of 2020.

Kim Horton, Sr. Director of Communications at The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library, will lead and keynote this session.

Horton honed her craft as an independent strategist, working with an array of Minnesota-based nonprofits and cultural institutions including Literacy Minnesota and The Ordway Center for the Performing Arts.

She pivoted to Friends and Foundation work four years ago. In addition to her work with and on behalf of Saint Paul Public Library (SPPL), Horton is a staff consultant for Library Strategies Consulting Group. In that capacity, she has led branding and messaging campaigns for library entities in Gloucester (Mass.) and Louisville (Ky.) – to name just two clients from her recent repertoire. Her trainings have also benefited dozens of smaller libraries, particularly in Minnesota and North Dakota.

As is doubtless the case in most communities, 2020 is proving an eventful year for library funding in Saint Paul. Last month, Horton spearheaded an innovative, grassroots public awareness campaign to benefit SPPL. It included the distribution of more than a thousand Friends-branded yard signs across all seven wards of Saint Paul. Horton will tell us a little about it, and scale her learnings from this and many other illustrative marketing campaigns to Friends in communities of all sizes.