Many of you know that when I am not editing, I work part-time at my local library as a library services associate. We have needed a new library for decades, and since 2017, I have also volunteered a considerable amount of my spare time working toward that goal. Some of that has been serving as a board member for my local Friends group, which I helped revamp after years of dormancy, but it has also included serving on the fundraising committee. Our fundraising campaign publicly launched in 2021, but the work behind the scenes had started long before then.
People in the community would say ruefully that we would get a new library when pigs fly, which became an inside joke between those of us fundraising for the cause. On August 7 of this year, however, pigs did indeed fly as we hosted the ribbon cutting for our new library.
I was just one of many who worked very hard for a long time on this project. It was a massive group effort that would not have been possible without so many people in our community caring and becoming involved. For my part, as both a Friends board member and a fundraising committee member, I spent a lot of time applying my writing, editing, and communications knowledge. I edited or wrote a lot of press releases, fundraising letters, web copy, social media posts, funding request applications, and more over the years.
Ultimately, our fundraising campaign raised over $4 million, mostly in private funding. When we first started on this journey, we were told we would need $2.5 million for a building of this size. But then COVID and inflation happened, and the price for the same facility skyrocketed. A consultant we spoke with when the goal was still $2.5 million told us that, in his professional opinion, what we were doing was possible but unprecedented for a rural community of our size.
During those same early days, we revamped the library’s branding, which involved redesigning the logo and revising the tagline. I fought hard for “Our Library, Our Future,” which was the eventual winner, possibly because of how forcefully I argued for it. đ “Your Library, Your Future” was also a strong and worthy contender, but I still preferred the former, and I think coining that tagline may be one of my own personal favorite moments of the fundraising journey.
That use of the plural first person “our” is unusual in a tagline. Marketing almost always prefers singular second person. It’s an appeal to “you” that generally works, not an appeal to “us.” But that is exactly why I wanted “our.”
Early groundwork for the campaign had involved a lot of focus groups and feasibility studies where we gauged community interest in the project. We knew we needed widespread community support to make this new library a reality. And I had noticed over and over again that even people who had no preexisting connection with the library often were converted to the cause quite readily after we had pitched why we needed a new library during these discussions. And I could always tell the exact moment when they had been hooked because they subconsciously stopped referring to the fundraising representatives as “you” and began saying “we.” Within an hour, they would switch from saying “If you want a new library, you’ll need to raise a lot of money” to “I have some ideas for how we can raise money for that library!” I felt like that really captured something unique and vital about the project, and I wanted it encapsulated in the tagline. Thus, “Our Library, Our Future” was born.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you that words don’t matter. They do. They can even make pigs fly.
If you’d like to learn more about the new library (and see lots of great photos), check out this library blog post I also wrote that recapped the grand opening earlier this month.
Need help making sure your words are hitting the right note? I can help! These are the kinds of things I help writers with when I am copyediting and line editing.
