Competency D

Apply the fundamental principles of planning, management, marketing, and advocacy.

Section 1: Introduction

Planning, management, marketing, and advocacy are the practical machinery that allow an institution to fulfill its mission. In order to serve its constituents, any library or archive needs to turn its sense of purpose into a concrete plan, manage the day-to-day work of executing it, communicate its value to the people who need to know about it, and make the case for its funding to the people who control it. These four elements are dependent on each other. Without a budget behind it, the most well-designed plan is useless, and a program without advocates will eventually lose the resources it needs to keep running.

Planning, in the organizational sense, involves turning a broad goal into smaller, more specific components that can be acted upon. Rosenblum (2022) describes strategic planning as involving four stages: preparing to plan, which includes clarifying an organization’s mission and values and assessing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats; developing the plan, which means identifying specific goals, objectives, and projects; implementing the plan; and finally measuring the results against the goals originally set. I worked through a version of this process directly during a group project, setting a goal of strengthening an institution’s relationships with peer film institutions. The goal itself, “foster powerful partnerships and creative collaboration,” needed to be broken into specific objectives, with a target population and outcome indicators with dates and targets attached. These objectives included a plan to increase collaborative activities with outside film institutions by 25% and to revive a dormant conference for film librarians by choosing a date and venue within the year. This project involved the same movement from broad goal to measurable objective that Rosenblum describes as the heart of the planning process. Rosenblum also draws a useful distinction between efficiency, how well an organization does something, and effectiveness, whether that thing actually accomplishes its underlying goal; planning without a serious effort to measure effectiveness risks confirming that a program ran, without confirming that it worked.

Management consists of the day-to-day tasks that keep a plan in motion, including staffing decisions, budgeting, and judgment calls made whenever roadblocks arise, most of which cannot be accounted for in the plan itself. Mackenzie-Ruppel, Haller, and Goch (2022) frame effective human resource management as extending well beyond simply executing administrative processes, requiring managers to weigh employee costs, including recruitment, training, and separation costs, against organizational needs like reduced labor costs or an infusion of new perspectives. I had to think through these exact issues in coursework responding to a proposed staffing consolidation during a budget crisis as well as a pandemic that limited on-site work for staff members, discussed further in my evidence below. In both cases, I had to adapt to a new situation and figure out a way to balance the needs of our staff members, our patrons, and the larger organization.

Marketing, for an information organization, differs from advertising in the traditional sense. It involves making sure the people who could benefit from a service know that it exists and how it could be helpful to them. Alman (2022) frames marketing as an extension of an organization’s strategic plan, built on the same goals and objectives. She argues that assessment cannot be an afterthought but must be “an inherent component of a marketing plan,” (“Evaluation and Assessment” section) used to determine whether the plan or a specific project needs to be revised. She raises a caution relevant to my own experience: an organization’s social media presence cannot serve as an effective communication tool unless it is actively monitored and regularly updated. I learned this directly doing volunteer social media work for a professional archival association. The organization I volunteer for tracks post types and followers gained and lost by platform on a quarterly basis, continually assessing whether a presence on any particular platform is worth the time and labor involved.

Advocacy is about how institutions can ensure their needs are met when they are dependent on others’ decisions about resources, whether those stakeholders are legislators, administrators, or funding bodies. Sweeney (2022) argues that advocacy is fundamentally political rather than a demonstration of service quality: libraries with high levels of funding succeed “because of strong public support, regardless of how much the library offers or how high usage is,” (“Political and Public Support for Library Funding” section) citing research showing that American voter support for libraries actually declined from 74 percent to 58 percent between 2008 and 2018, even as libraries expanded their programming and services considerably over that same period. Advocacy and marketing are related but not identical: marketing builds general awareness and goodwill, while advocacy involves building the kind of political relationships and voter support Sweeney describes, so that when a specific funding decision is on the line, an institution has supporters willing to act. I have done this directly, writing to a member of Congress in support of continued federal funding for film preservation, and I have also written a formal recommendation that a cultural institution organize with peer institutions to lobby for a specific piece of federal funding under direct political threat.

I expect to rely on all four elements of this competency constantly in an archival career, even though none of them are the part of the work most people picture when they imagine an archivist. Preserving material that no one knows how to access, or that no funder understands the value of, is not sustainable in the long run. Planning, management, marketing, and advocacy are what make it possible for actual archival work to happen and to keep happening in the face of ongoing changes in the internal and external environments.

References

Section 2: Evidence

My understanding of this competency comes from coursework in organizational planning, archival management, and advocacy for film archives, alongside ongoing volunteer work in marketing for a professional archival association.

My first piece of evidence is a strategic planning document from INFO 204, in which I wrote a goal, objective, target group, and measurable outcomes for strengthening an institution’s relationships with peer film institutions. This artifact demonstrates the planning process Rosenblum (2022) describes directly: I moved from a broad goal (“Foster powerful partnerships and creative collaboration”) to a specific objective (strengthening relationships with film institutions that the organization had previously collaborated with on research projects), then built out concrete, measurable outcome indicators, including a target to increase collaborative activities with outside institutions by 25% within the year, and a plan to revive a dormant conference for film librarians by selecting a date and venue by year’s end. I further broke down each indicator into a set of concrete actions, including scheduling meetings with counterparts, drafting memoranda of understanding, compiling a report on a previous conference, and reaching out to potential speakers and vendors. This artifact demonstrates my ability to translate a broad organizational goal into an actionable plan with a defined population, timeline, and success criteria.

My second piece of evidence consists of two case studies from INFO 256, responding to management scenarios involving operational continuity under external pressure. In the first, a university library planned to consolidate its specialized rare-materials catalogers into a general cataloging department during a budget crisis. My response argued for the specialized skill the work required, but also planned for the more likely outcome that the consolidation would proceed regardless, negotiating specific workflow protections, including reserved staff hours, ongoing communication with the new department, and a commitment that the change would be reversed once the university’s finances improved, rather than simply accepting whatever terms were imposed. In the second, a pandemic forced an archive with a mostly analog collection to close its reading room while keeping staff access limited to short, infrequent shifts. My response prioritized digitizing existing finding aids, expanding virtual reference options like video consultations, and using the short in-office shifts staff still had to create digital surrogates that could be worked on remotely, rather than treating the closure as a full stop to service. Together, these two cases demonstrate how I proposed adjusting staffing conditions and day-to-day work processes under constraints, both internally imposed through a budget decision and externally imposed through a global event.

My third piece of evidence is my ongoing volunteer work managing Bluesky posts for the Society of California Archivists (SCA). My posts primarily keep SCA members informed about association news, including elections, upcoming events, and other timely information. Because much of this content is originally drafted for other communication channels, posting to Bluesky requires me to adapt the messaging to the platform’s character limit and determine what information needs to be preserved when condensing a longer announcement. I also designed a graphic in Canva that the rest of the social media team subsequently adopted for their own posts, incorporating SCA’s logo and brand palette with relevant clip art. This work takes place within a broader effort by SCA to assess the value of its social media presence. The organization’s 2023–2025 Strategic Planning Task Force found that members relied more heavily on channels such as the West_Arch listserv, the SCA newsletter, and the SCA website, and questioned whether less-used social media platforms were worth maintaining. Volunteers on the social media team therefore report quarterly on post counts, topics, and follower gains or losses, while Bluesky has continued to gain followers during the time I have managed it. This gives SCA ongoing data with which to evaluate the various platforms and the time and labor required to maintain a social media presence there. My work demonstrates that marketing must be deliberate and adaptive: I communicate information to a specific audience of archivists, reshape content to fit the constraints of a particular platform, contribute original visual material, and participate in an ongoing process of evaluating whether the organization’s communication efforts are effective.

My fourth piece of evidence is a pair of advocacy efforts connected to film preservation funding. The first is a letter I wrote to my member of Congress in support of reauthorizing the National Film Registry, making a specific, direct appeal grounded in my own personal connection to film preservation rather than a general statement of support for libraries or archives. The second is a recommendation I wrote in the Political section of an environmental scan of the Margaret Herrick Library, responding to a 2025 executive order threatening the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ funding. Rather than recommending the Library advocate alone, I argued that it should unite with other libraries, museums, and archives to demand Congressional action, using its communication resources to raise awareness among film scholars and other constituents. The third is a mock social media post, written for INFO 204, responding to AMPAS’s 2024 layoffs of sixteen senior staff members at the Margaret Herrick Library and Academy Film Archive; the post named the institution directly, tagged an existing film-advocacy organization, and linked to a real petition calling for the archivists’ reinstatement. This reflects Sweeney’s (2022) point that political support for libraries depends on organized, sustained relationship-building rather than individual institutions making their case in isolation; a single letter can register one constituent’s support, but a coordinated response across multiple institutions, or a petition with thousands of signatures, can provide the kind of collective political pressure Sweeney argues is necessary to actually influence funding decisions.

The organizational settings behind these artifacts shaped the marketing and advocacy techniques I was able to recommend and use. SCA is a small, all-volunteer professional association with limited capacity, so its social media presence depends on volunteers doing communication work alongside their jobs and schoolwork. That makes questions about the value of individual platforms especially important, since maintaining a presence requires volunteer labor that could otherwise be directed elsewhere. The Margaret Herrick Library operates in a different setting as part of the larger Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, creating different possibilities for advocacy: rather than acting alone, I recommended coordinating with peer libraries, museums, and archives and using existing communication infrastructure to build broader political pressure. My letter to my member of Congress differs from both examples because it was an individual advocacy effort rather than an institutional marketing or advocacy campaign; its impact therefore depended primarily on making a specific appeal as a constituent rather than on organizational resources, and would have been stronger as part of a coordinated effort. Together, these examples demonstrate that marketing and advocacy techniques need to be adapted to the setting in which they occur, including an organization’s capacity, staffing, institutional relationships, and whether the advocate is acting on behalf of an institution or as an individual constituent.

Section 3: Conclusion

Planning, management, marketing, and advocacy are not skills I expect to use only occasionally in my professional life; they are the ongoing tasks that determine whether an institution’s mission-critical work, like selecting, organizing, and preserving materials, remains accessible, sustainable, and financially viable. In my future career, I expect to apply this competency by treating these four areas as inseparable from archival practice itself: setting measurable goals, adjusting plans when constraints intervene, evaluating whether communication efforts are actually effective, and building the type of sustained political relationships that ensure an institution stays funded both during and between crises. To stay current in this area, I plan to follow the Society of American Archivists’ Advocacy and Public Policy resources, and to continue my involvement with the Society of California Archivists, whose own strategic planning process has shown me firsthand how an organization gathers data, weighs competing priorities, and revises its approach based on the needs of its stakeholders. I also plan to continue seeking opportunities to practice these skills by participating in organizational planning and outreach efforts, paying attention to how institutions evaluate their communication efforts, and looking for opportunities to contribute to advocacy on behalf of archives and cultural institutions. These resources and experiences will help me continue developing the ability to adapt planning, management, marketing, and advocacy strategies to the changing needs and constraints of the organizations I work with.