Last Wednesday evening (August 10), we had our annual Enrichment Center Team planning session which all feeds into our Budget preparations. We have a couple of new team members so that was fun getting to know each other. We reviewed our Atriuum statistics for the last year. We doubled the number of additions to our collection, our circulation, and number of new users from the previous year. We spent the rest of the time stepping off of our 2021-2022 plans to developing our plans for 2022-2023. And we organized the team for the new year. We are now in the follow up phase that involves my emailing those who attended our meeting to review the first draft of an implementation strategy and organization chart. We will continue our planning through email.
What about your team? What and how do you approach preparing for the next year and the budget?
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Our team just met (5 members). We go over what we accomplished this year - what worked and what may need to be changed and what we want to accomplish next year. We list by month projects/ideas we want to accomplish and implement, with a price beside each one. Also, we include costs for buying books, supplies and program maintenance. This year we prepared and printed a library brochure to go in "vistor/new member/prospect" packages, a brochure for readers to use to find books in the Dewey Decimal System, and 5 bookmarks that readers can pick up. These bookmarks list authors we have under the following categories: Amish, Historical, Inspirational, Mystery/suspense and Romance. Our budget was turned in this morning.
Wow, I'm impressed. We don't really plan, budget-wise. We generally get the same amount from the church every year; I believe we may have asked for an increase once or twice but generally we are able to manage well with what we receive. Denise and I try to meet once a year to plan for the year ahead in terms of newsletter, changes we want to make, reading programs, and that kind of thing. We have found that leaving town for an overnight is the best way to accomplish this, as there are too many distractions in either her house, mine or the library!