Background:

Once Upon a Time...
...people built and safeguarded the knowledge of the Western World--they were monks, it was the Dark Ages, and they were considered very "unworldly".

...reference librarians inhabited the back corners of libraries, were considered the keepers of rarely used information, and infrequently sought out by the public.

...I&R professionals gathered information about community organizations and waited by the phone, like the Maytag repairman, for those in need.

Today...
...monks maintain the Internet and pastors are politically active fighting to hold together and safeguard their communities.

...the reference section of the library is full of computers, central and growing--the doorway to the world-through the Internet.

...I&R professionals ________________________

Opportunity:

You have the power to fill in the blank! The roles of your predecessors evolved and they are perceived as central and critical keys to the success of their communities. Are you ready to come "Out of the Shadows"?

My central message is that I&R organizations MUST actively work to become a critical resource in their communities, recognized and supported by community leaders and the public, or they will be replaced by more responsive organizations-public and private.

The most likely cause of your demise will be your organization’s history and its parochial leadership. Look around this conference and you will find I&R organizations fighting for resources, pigeon-holed by their past narrow, mission-specific community role. You will also find I&R organizations with no problem marshaling resources--they have had visionary leaders who generally built broad bases of support, forged alliances with every community group and population definable, and sought to be in the thick of any community information project.

Last year I wrote "Bureaucracies will become the roadkill of the information superhighway--and rightly so!" Nothing has occurred to change my mind. It is critical to forge alliances with groups building a larger and larger database of community resources--and seek to become the funded caretakers of that database!

I do not think most of you have a choice whether or not to make large portions of your database openly available to the public, easy to use and free--I think it will be critical to your future funding and community support.

Costs and Pricing:

The most you can generally charge is what "your competition" --the next best source your "customer" might turn to--charges and in many cases your competition is the free phonebook. To charge more, you must offer a premium product.

To create and maintain a comprehensive community database is expensive. Look for opportunities to work with other organizations to control those costs. Technology improvements make it possible to distribute work more easily than ever before. Are you the best, most cost- effective organization in your community to receive and process telephone inquiries 24 hours a day? If not, collaborate with whoever is. Recruit community groups (social work schools, scout troops, senior groups) to help add and update resources, create inexpensive input methods like forms on the Internet. It is cheaper to publish on the Internet than to print a traditional directory--that’s why the federal government is phasing out offering free information -- except on the Internet.

Distributing customized subsets of your database-offering specific lists to organizations for a fee enables you to generate incremental revenue, but requires you to know what it will cost you to produce--in time and materials. What it costs to produce a part of the database for someone requesting it is only one factor in pricing that list. You want the revenue generated to exceed the price. After that, other factors take over pricing decisions. Who is buying the data and how it will be used, and the opportunity cost of buying it elsewhere should all figure into the pricing. Technology allows more specific targeting and that enables more cost effective advertising for which a premium may be charged. Remember, the price of next best source a buyer might turn to--your "competition" --is your maximum price.

Controlling the Use of Your Database:

Create a policy outlining what data will be available and what won’t, and the terms and conditions of use of your database. That should be spelled out and presented--in any directory, on a website, and in any agreement to distribute a portion of it. You must also realize that most of the information in your database is available elsewhere and there are limits to the extent you can "control" its use.

Which Technologies?

I&R, Information & Referral, is a dynamic, interactive process, choose dynamic, interactive media. I favor the internet and the telephone.

The Internet offers many advantages. I expect Information and the Internet to become almost synonymous in the next few years--it’s where people will go for most information. It is ideal for providing customized levels--general or specific, basic or complex, local, regional, national or international. Dynamic, frequently changing information is not well suited to publishing--in books or on CD-ROM or disks. People follow diverse roads to information and the internet makes it easy to cross their path, where ever they are coming from. Many of you will say "my clients don’t have access to the internet", but who are your clients? A few of you deal directly with clients, but most of you work with intermediaries--agencies, social workers, parish nurses, volunteers, and friends.

To effectively direct phone inquiries will require centralization on a community-wide basis. 911 is for emergencies, what number is for non-emergency help? From any cellular phone, 611, get you information; in Atlanta, 711. A centralized telephone system compliments an interactive database for those who need help getting help and it addresses the access concerns some have. Work to develop a community-wide I&R number that can be easily marketed to the community, then work hard to educate the population from elementary school up on what help is at which number and when to call each.

Marketing, Collaboration, and Leadership:

The best defense is a good offense--you must offer the best, broadest, most user-friendly, lowest-cost resource you can; offering a free service for the public makes it unprofitable for "competition" to enter your "market". I think it is unrealistic for directories of not-for-profit community resources to require participants to fund it. Many commercial databases do, others use advertising to cover costs. Most advertisers will not perceive your users to be a viable market.

The success of I&R organizations will be directly related to their ability to coordinate and embrace other community organizations. Start by training the trainers--the more the intermediaries and professionals in the community understand and can effectively use your information, the more value it will have and the less open they will be to supporting your competition. People are willing to pay through taxes for community services they consider vital. Part of your job is to work to become vital to the community. Internet access makes you easily available, it makes usage easy to track, it is inexpensive to add other community resources to it or to link to other resources. It enables the easy sharing of maintenance and updating tasks. Someone has to be responsible and accountable, but that does not mean all the work must be done by professionals in-house.

Consider commercial collaborations; most I&R’s freeze out for-profit entities by design from inception, forcing them to create competitive alternatives. Bring together those most likely to consider that option and negotiate a compromise that meets your needs and theirs. “For-profit” entities are not the evil empire; in health care, they and not-for-profits are almost indistinguishable. Most for-profit entities are strong, efficient organizations, able to out- maneuver and out-gun you. You do not want them as competitors. I was able to create one of the most comprehensive senior resource sites in the state, if not the nation, in less time than it took for community groups to even get together and debate the idea! You would be disturbed to learn the scope and number of organizations I offered assistance to, most for free, who turned me down. I do not think it is unreasonable to integrate commercial with non-commercial resources and to price accordingly following a model like commercial TV, with public service announcements, or hospitals, with their built-in cost of indigent care.

Make user help easy and obvious. By example, phone, and e-mail, make it easy to guide new users.

Finally, for the good of your community, yourselves, and your clients, don’t be resistant to change. Embrace it, mold it, manage it, lead it to solve the problems your community faces. You are involved in an activity every good person in your community wants to be involved in--helping those in need. Make it easy for them, you and they will feel better-- and for the best of reasons.

May 19,1997.

RST Consulting

http://www.rstc.com/ir/airsconf97pres.htm