Meeting Room Use Agreements

Last week I discussed meeting room policies and many of the possible considerations you might want to undertake if your library offers meeting room space to the public. What should be kept in mind, however, is that, unlike with a library program, you have little control over the content of the meeting beyond what is outlined in your policy. Because of this, it can be extremely helpful to have something in writing that the patron/group that is booking the room fully understands their responsibilities to the library in order to use that room. A meeting room use agreement can serve this purpose. It can also provide a record that a user has fully read and agreed to abide by your policy and gives you the opportunity to request more information or review any expectations that may have been overlooked, usually in the form of missed or partially answered question(s) on the agreement form. If you decide to have a meeting room agreement as part of the process for reserving and using a room in your library, here are some things you may want to consider:  

Policies are generally at their best when they encourage accountability on both the patron’s side and the library’s side.

Format

If you decide to require patrons who want to use your meeting room to fill out an agreement form, you’ll first want to decide what format you prefer for the agreement: digitally, in writing and/or in person. Online forms have the benefit of requiring answers to all the questions you consider to be most important, including a question that requires the requester to acknowledge that they have read your policy in full and agree to abide by it. The downside to a digital form is you won’t get a “wet” signature, so you may want to check with your town counsel as to whether requiring a statement such as “by writing my name below I agree on behalf of myself and my organization…” counts as a binding agreement. You will also want to consider those who have limited or no digital access and make sure you have printed copies of any digital form available for patrons to use as a substitute. Asking for something in writing means there will be a legal “wet” signature, but there is less oversight, and you may need to go back and forth with the applicant to cover any important questions that they missed, which can be time-consuming. This can be rectified by requiring the applicant to sign in person, but that can be a barrier to access if the person needing to fill out the agreement has trouble physically coming to the library. For many libraries, a digital agreement offers the best combination of access and accountability, but you’ll want to ensure that you’ve considered your options and decide on the one that best suits your needs and those of your community.  

Sponsors & Contacts

Many libraries ask that any group using the room either be based in the community the library serves or have a community member as a sponsor. One of the benefits to this requirement is the library is able to ensure that they are, again, being good steward of tax dollars. By offering the room for community use, particularly if the room is offered free of charge* you are ensuring that the benefit of room use is staying within your library’s community. If this is a requirement you outline in your policy, you may want to ensure that your agreement not only has the information for the community member sponsoring the group, but also the primary contact information for the person running the meeting. In many instances, these may be the same person, but in the event the sponsor does not plan on attending, you will need contact information for a person responsible for the meeting in the event the library closes unexpectedly (inclement weather, power outages, etc.), the room is needed for in-library use, or other unexpected circumstances that make the room unavailable at any previously agreed-upon date and time.  

Defining expiration

I mentioned in my last post that many libraries restrict the number of times a group or organization can use the library’s meeting room over the course of a year, to allow for more equitable access to the entire community. If this is something you are going require of the group, you’ll likely want to have a way to keep groups accountable to this and to other limitations that may appear in your policy. You’ll also want to allow yourself a bit of flexibility to update your meeting room policy as necessary, which means notifying anyone who has agreed to your policy that the terms have changed. In addition to keeping records of this (another benefit to using a digital form that will drop all the information into a spreadsheet), you may want to consider a time limit on the agreement itself. In other words, you may want to request that anyone requesting the use of your meeting room will need to sign a new agreement every year (or two, etc.). You can do this on a rolling basis (i.e. the agreement is “good” for 12 months after it has been signed, submitted and approved) which will give the requester the most time to take advantage of the room, but it will require you to check every month to see whose agreement may be expiring. Or you may want to consider a hard deadline for a new agreement. The requester may only get a couple of months’ “use” out of the room before they need to sign a new agreement, but you’ll only have one month when you’ll need to contact those whose agreement is expiring. 

If you decide to follow the hard-deadline route, you’ll want to make a couple of things clear to minimize confusion when someone uses the room. You’ll want to decide on a date that is effective every year (or whatever time span you decide works best for you) and follow through when that date rolls around. For some, a calendar year may work best, meaning groups or individuals wanting to use the room will have to sign a new agreement every January 1st. For some libraries it may make sense for a fiscal year date (new agreement every July 1st). Whatever date you decide, make sure that date is clearly communicated in your policy, in any preamble you have to your agreement form and that you also clearly state that the agreement on file must be current in order for rooms to be booked.  

Responding

If you are going to commit to holding people accountable for the use of the meeting room and following the policy that you’ve outlined, it’s only fair for you to be accountable in the timeliness of responding to their request. If you are using an agreement, prior to permitting any meeting room use, it will be helpful to the requester to give a minimum time frame for submitting the agreement. Do your best to accommodate the requesting person/organization, but make sure you give a minimum timeline that is also realistic for you to consistently complete or even ahead of the deadline. For example, you may want someone submitting an agreement no fewer than 14 days** in advance of their event. To communicate that you take their submission and your accountability seriously, you may want to consider indicating a response timeline; for example, “After submission, requesters can expect a response within 5 days.” If this is something you choose to do, you’ll want to make sure this is a timeline that, even under strenuous circumstances, is achievable for you. If you are usually able to get back to someone with approval or a request for more information in a day or two, it’s perfectly OK to build a buffer of an extra couple of days into your response timeline for those times when staffing is tight, reporting deadlines are looming, or unexpected circumstances pop up.  

Speaking of tight staffing conditions, I recommend choosing someone to take care of keeping track of meeting room agreements and booking meeting rooms should you be unable to attend to request for any period of time (vacation, sick leave, conferences, etc.). For Directors, this is usually an Assistant Director or Head of Reference or similar position. If your library has limited staffing to begin with and you perhaps are only open a few days a week, you may want to consider having a chain-of-command type of responsibility matrix with 2 or 3 people who will be able to take over if you and your designated backup be unable to attend to responses for a period of time.  

Policies are generally at their best when they encourage accountability on both the patron’s side and the library’s side. This way, all expectations are clearly laid out and each party involved knows what to expect from the other. This is particularly important with meeting room policies and any accompanying agreements you may use. Unlike a library-run program or general behavioral policies, libraries rarely have sufficient staffing to check in when an outside group is using the meeting room. In the best of circumstances, expectations have not only been clearly laid out but have also been fully met. Should that not happen and, for example, the meeting room’s condition after it’s been used doesn’t meet your expectations or you receive patron complaints, you are likely to find out after the meeting has ended, sometimes not until a day or more after the event. Ensuring that you have someone who is responsible for following through on the policy and knowing that the person (be they a sponsor or the person running the meeting) was fully apprised of your policy (and therefore, your expectations) before that meeting took place, eases the burden on your staff to monitor the meeting and give you recourse and a contact person to review the expectations and what was or was not met.  

*Many libraries provide the use of their meeting rooms free of charge to the community. There are others who offer use of the meeting room for a nominal charge. Reasons and conditions under which a library will charge for meeting room use vary, but make sure your Trustees review their bylaws and any documentation surrounding any trusts that may have established the library before considering a charge for any kind of room use.  

** Providing a number of days tends to be a clearer way to express deadlines. If you were to request a minimum timeline of 2 weeks, for example, it leaves room for possible confusion: did you mean from the day the agreement was submitted (which could be any day of the week)? Did you mean from beginning of the week it was submitted? What do you consider the beginning of the week: Sunday or Monday? If your library isn’t open daily, you may want to clarify “business days” or “calendar days” to ensure your expectations are clear to the person submitting the agreement.  

Special Edition: Calculating and Communicating Your ROI

We interrupt your regularly scheduled, policy-centered fortification with a practical guide on determining just how much value your library contributes to your community. Welcome to ROI 101: Your library’s return on community investment. In this Fortifying Friday post, I’ll be showing you some tools that can help you calculate the value of your services to your community and the return on investment those services bring for every tax dollar that’s invested in your library. I’ll also give you some suggestions on how to frame those numbers in a way that can be meaningful to those who are making decisions about library funding.  

Return on Investment 

A return on investment (ROI) is generally a metric that’s used in the business world to calculate how much profit was gained from an investment. As a government service, public libraries obviously don’t turn a profit, nor are they meant to. But that doesn’t mean that libraries don’t add immense value to their communities. While some of that value will always be incalculable (who can quantify the positive feelings or nostalgia someone feels in a library?), there are some very concrete ways to quantify what a library offers its users and non-users alike. Enter the ROI.  

Most public libraries in Massachusetts are funded by a combination of municipal, state and some federal tax dollars. Though some are also privately funded as independent 501(c)3 organizations, they still receive enough municipal appropriations to obtain state certification and state aid. For our purposes, we will be looking at the return on investment for the municipal tax dollars, i.e. what the city or town spends on its public library, as these are generally the largest part of a library’s budget and are the funds most likely to be applied to the most common library services. The library’s municipal officials (town management, select board, city council, etc.) are also likely to be familiar with an ROI figure as an understandable and relatable metric. 

There’s a Calculator for That 

How does a library start calculating its ROI? Fortunately, the Maine State Library* still posts a ROI calculator that was developed by MLA and the Chelmford Library’s Brain Herzog. So what’s left for you to do is obtain the correct statistics to plug into that tool. Those statistics they’re asking for? You already have them. Your ARIS statistics that you submit to the MBLC every August have the numbers you need. Click “calculate” and you’ll have a number.  

Don’t get too excited (yet). The number you get from the calculator isn’t your ROI. That number is the dollar amount of what your services would cost the average person if they were paying for them out of pocket. The next number you need is your municipal appropriation, which you can also easily get. While you may have this number in your budget files and in your financial reporting that you submit to the MBLC in October, you can also get it in relation to the budget of the other departments in your municipality.  

Have a Slice of Municipal Pie 

As a self-admitted data nerd, this is quite possibly one of the most underrated library tools out there (the CensusData tool runs a close second). Allow me to introduce you to the municipal pie. This link will take you to the MA Department of Revenue’s site that lists and charts every MA municipality’s budget info and breaks it down by department. Here is where you see your total municipal budget appropriation and where your budget falls in relation to other departments in your city or town. Here’s how you get there: 

  • Find your municipality from the drop-down.  
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Screenshot of detail of website with Division of Local Services: MA Department of Revenue logo indicating the content of “Schedule A General Fund and Library Expense Prepared for the Board of Library Commissioners” with a drop-down menu asking to “Select Municipalities” and listing the name of MA municipalities with a selectable check box next to each option 

  • Choose the fiscal year you want to see. (For ROI purposes, it’s best to use the most recent, but you can also compare to previous years for other interesting information.)  
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Screenshot of detail of website with Division of Local Services: MA Department of Revenue logo indicating the content of “Schedule A General Fund and Library Expense Prepared for the Board of Library Commissioners” with a drop-down menu asking to “Select Fiscal Years” and listing years from 2024 back to 2003 with a selectable check box next to each option

  • Click on “Chart Library Expenditures” to see the pie chart breaking the tax dollar budget appropriations for your municipality. For demonstration purposes, this pie chart is for ALL the municipalities in MA. That tiny pie slice is the percent of the budget that all libraries have in the overall budget of Massachusetts. In other words, on average, libraries across the state are 1.1% of the Commonwealth’s budget. How does your municipality compare?** 
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Screenshot of detail of website with Division of Local Services: MA Department of Revenue logo. The selectable option “Chart Library Expenditures” is highlighted.

What’s Your Number?  

OK – you have your calculated value and your municipal appropriation. To calculate your return on investment, divide the value determined in the library calculator by your total municipal budget, (calculated value / municipal budget = ROI). This number will very likely be greater than 1. When you multiply this number by 100, you’ll get your ROI percentage. This is a valuable metric that will be understood by a good portion of your community regardless of their connection with the library. 

Spread the news!  

Your library’s percentage is very likely over 100% and is probably somewhere between 100-1000%. The most important thing you can do now is to put that in context for your community. Here’s an example:  

  • You’ve calculated that your ROI is 430% 
  • What this means: The value of your library’s services is 4.3 times what your municipality invests in your library 
  • Or: For every $1 tax dollar that your municipality invests in your library they get $4.30 back in services that do not cost your community any additional money 
  • To put it another way: You’re offered a savings account where, for every dollar you put into that account you get $4.30 back in interest. (I don’t know a single person who wouldn’t take that deal.) That is essentially what your library is offering where, in this case the interest = services.

One more point you want to stress: those services that are worth 430% MORE than the tax dollars that have been invested to your library do not cost your community any additional money. The people using your services are doing so at no additional cost to them beyond the taxes they have already paid into their community. No one is asking them to pay a fee to take advantage of a staff member’s expertise on safely and critically navigating the internet. No one is charging admission for the early literacy benefits of a story time at the library. Libraries are not charging per hour for after school programs that tutor kids and give them skills to succeed. Most of us know (as I’ve previously mentioned) that if you are considered a municipal employee (and most library workers are; even association libraries usually get their staff salaries from their municipal budget), then you have a responsibility to be good stewards of tax dollars. Your ROI is concrete data offering proof that you are stretching those tax dollars as far as they can go.  

Once you have your number and its context, get this information out into your community! Do NOT wait to get this information out there. Your ROI is not an “ace in the hole” number to pull out only during budget negotiations (though it can be helpful to remind your municipality of your ROI during those negotiations). This is a number that everyone who enters the library, uses library services, or has a say in library services should be able to see. Put it on flyers; post it around the library; add it somewhere on your website; send everyone picking up a hold home with a bookmark that tells them just how much their tax dollars are offering them. Update this information every year as your new budget comes through. Most importantly, arm your advocates with this information. The more people in your community who know the value of the services you are offering to your community, the better. I’ve talked before about showing the community you’re a good steward of tax dollars. This is a great way to demonstrate what good stewards you are because you are backing that info with data. You are telling your community: we know how to stretch a dollar and get the most out of the money we’re given. You give us $1 and we will use that dollar to give our community services that are worth multiple times your investment.  

*There are other library calculators out there, but the ALA links to the Main State Library one while their tool is, unfortunately, not currently available.

** A note for Association libraries: your “slice” of pie will likely be considerably below the average since your primary sources of income are structured differently than municipal libraries. That doesn’t mean you can’t still get some great data, though!