If you haven’t seen it yet, please take a few minutes to watch this fun video, created by the staff at the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library! Truly a joyful group effort that involved staff from all over the library, this is my favorite summer library promo video they’ve ever made (and they’ve made some fun ones).
How long did it take to put something like that together? According to Alisha and Jill, the masterminds behind the project, it took about 2 hours to film, and a “few” hours to edit, using Power Director. Alisha re-wrote the lyrics to YMCA to match the SLP activities, and a storytime dad sang it for them. All of the staff helped decide what dance moves to do, and Alisha says it was easy to get everyone to come over and help spell out the letters in LIBRARY and READ on the floor–she told them they’d be able to lie down on the job, plus she fed them cookies!
Jill says: “This video is an important part of our SLP promotions. We visit as many of the 18 elementary schools in Eau Claire as we can in person. However, sometimes a school may not be able to have us visit in person. So we provide a link to the video to the school and rely on this video to get the kids excited about SLP. We also have many schools that tell us that they will show the video even after we visit in person. It allows them to remind the kids about the SLP even closer to the end of school, and most classrooms have the capability to show videos to the whole class and 5 minutes when the teacher would normally show some sort of video anyway.
“We also use the video as part of our social media (mostly Face Book) SLP promo. This particular video has had the biggest response yet with almost 6,000 views on FB. We also put it on our library’s YouTube channel and link from there to our kids website and Twitter.
“We really rely on our amazing staff to be up for anything and make this work. This is the second year in a row that we have had a brand new staff member start the same morning of the video and get pulled into the craziness and be awesome! We also had an adult reference staff member and a custodian wander by and get pulled into it.
“Mostly if you have fun on camera and let your audience see that, you have won. Our #1 goal is to make the audience think that the Summer Library Program is going to be fun. That’s it.”