How to find audiences and use them to build support for your library or increase library use among non-users for next to nothing. By Patrick "PC" Sweeney. Political Director, EveryLibrary. Patrick is the co-author of "Winning Elections and Influencing Politicians for Library Funding," available now, as well as "Before The Ballot: Building Support For Library Funding," available in Spring from ALA Editions. We talk a great deal about using big data to attract new users, market our materials, win elections, and find new donors or volunteers but for many libraries this data is cost-prohibitive and difficult to use. This is something that I run into fairly often when working with a library on an initiative that requires them to know something about their community. Companies such as Axciom, Experian, Accurate Append, or L2 charge significant sums of money for their data, but librarians are often surprised to find that there is a large offering of big data for free through many of the tools that they were already providing to their communities. In this article, we'll talk about where to get big data for free (or low cost) and introduce a few tactics to use it.
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