Publicity and Outreach Officer Annual Report 2018

submitted by Sara Nodine

List of Previous Goals and Progress Made

• Exhibits
  • This year MLA exhibited at the SEM meeting in Denver (October) and ALA meeting in New Orleans (June).
  • The SEM meeting was the first exhibit there in quite a few years. It was fairly well attended and I (Sara) met with roughly 60 people at our table. Discussions ranged from learning more about our organization/field to information related to our publications. While a beneficial venture, I would not recommend having in on too frequent a rotation. Additionally, the way they handle exhibitor registration and set up was not conducive to easily setting up and interacting with  attendees (though it may have just be in that hotel).
  • The ALA meeting appeared to be another successful exhibit. I was unable to attend and we had 12 MLA members who staffed our booth throughout the meeting. I am grateful to them for their service and it seems as though we had quite a bit of traffic. It looks as though we interacted with roughly 150 people during the conference and the topics of conversation were varied, as usual, and we had a number of people to stop by and say hello. A good number of these conversations were about our organization.
    
• Physical flyers
  • The flyers continue to be very helpful at exhibit tables as a way to distribute information. I think evaluation in the future needs to continue as to whether or not we want to replace the trifold brochure on music librarianship. The Membership Committee has been considering this in recent years.
• Social media
  • Facebook and Twitter were taken over by the Website Committee and were able to distribute information with greater frequency. Currently on Facebook we have approximately 1,600 followers and on Twitter there are 506 followers.

List of Future Goals

• Continue to exhibit at related organizations’ conferences (ALA, AMS, ACRL), update promotional materials.
  • Aligns with FY2018-2019 Action: Engage with other organizations and offer webinars and presentations.
• Contribute to the association’s social media (Facebook, Twitter, MLA Blog) by either creating content or amplifying content created by others.
• Begin research on presentations to music schools, with the goal to implement by FY2019-2020.
  • Aligns with FY2018-2019 Action: Expand Membership opportunities at all levels of the Association.
• Devise and research other avenues for outreach and engagement.
  • Aligns with FY2018-2019 Action: Expand Membership opportunities at all levels of the Association.