Denver Public Library

A strategic roadmap informed by mission, vision, and values in Denver

Libraries are among the most important public institutions in our communities–they are valuable spaces in which every person, regardless of socioeconomic status, can engage in knowledge sharing, personal and professional development, and community activities. In Denver, officials at the Denver Public Library (DPL) understand how important their organization is to the community they serve, and they take that responsibility very seriously.

“People trust the library as a resource to help them solve problems, find information, and become more information literate,” says Kirsten Decker, Manager of Strategy and Evaluation at the DPL.

Kirsten and her team are an extremely smart group of individuals (of course they are, they work at the library!), and they are spearheading a strategy execution and performance management program that will no doubt act as a template for other public libraries looking to better execute on their mission to serve.

The DPL is over 130 years old, and has 27 locations across the City of Denver. These locations house nearly 700 employees, including the part-time and on-call staff. These efforts, which include working diligently to provide a more welcoming, equitable, and accessible space for residents, have also grown to include a new task–telling the story of the library and its work.

“Libraries are really, really good at helping other people tell their story, whether it’s through our reference services or through our writers’ workshops or all the different things that we do for the community,” says Kirsten. “But we’re not great at telling our own story. Libraries often fall into the under-resourced, but highly utilized part of our city budgets. We’ve grown our operational capacity, we’ve been asking questions like: how can you capitalize on what you have, how can you demonstrate your value, and how can you continue to grow in the ways that your community needs you to?”

With a little help from Envisio, Kirsten and her team have built an impressive roadmap to respond to those very questions.

Strong library, strong community

Long before they started working with Envisio, leadership at the DPL started on their strategy execution and performance management journey in the same place as many others: with a visioning process that was designed to identify the mission, values, and metrics which would guide them as they worked to provide better services to their community.

“The strategic planning and the visioning process started in 2016,” says Kirsten. “When we started, we leveraged the Harwood Turning Outward method of community engagement, part of which was conducting about 60 community conversations across the Denver area. The goal was to try to understand the aspirations of the community, and to ask ‘what type of community do you want to live in?’ From there, it became a conversation about how the library can help facilitate that.”

As they looked to source external feedback on what mattered most to their community, the DPL was also working internally to ensure that their guiding principles and subsequently, the strategic roadmap that detailed them, were reflective of those ideals.

“Parallel to that, the library was also undergoing a revision of its vision, mission, and values,” says Kirsten. “I don’t think that’s a prerequisite to successful strategic planning, but I think organizations should review their vision, mission, and values on a periodic basis.”

The DPL did extensive (and we mean extensive) work engaging their staff in both the formation and the execution of their strategic plan. “About half our staff, 350 employees or so, had an active role in helping develop our current vision, mission, and values,” says Kirsten. “Isn’t that great?”

Early on in the process, the DPL team decided that it was important for there to be forces inside the organization dedicated to guiding and maintaining their strategic efforts.

“Some organizations use consultants,” says Kirsten. “This isn’t bad, but then you don’t necessarily build that skillset from within, and so there’s this tremendous opportunity to do it internally.”

Building this internal capacity for strategy execution and performance evaluation was part of the reason Kirsten was hired at the DPL. Her and her team’s successes have led to a significant expansion in the department’s capacity and subsequently, their mandate inside the organization.

“I was brought on to say okay, we have our vision, mission, and values, but let’s talk about how we operationalize and live these values,” she says. “That work started in 2019, and the department’s staff have grown since then.”

We now have a full team of management and data analysts who can help with that programmatic evaluation around impacts and outcomes. We have quadrupled over the last couple of years, and I’ve been really fortunate to be able to make that happen.”

Curiosity, equity, and stewardship are just a few pillars of success

Through their visioning process, the Denver Public Library identified the values that guide their strategic roadmap. They are:

• Welcoming
• Connection
• Curiosity
• Equity
• Stewardship

But taking these high-level values and translating them into actionable objectives that can be measured is a challenge that many organizations, the DPL included, find challenging. A results-based methodology helped inform the team’s decisions, says Kirsten.

“Results-Based Accountability is built on the premise that you need to know what your outcomes are before you talk about the what and how,” she says. “Our strategic plan has to be rooted in our values, which I think is wonderful and also hard, because values are intentionally kind of ethereal – feely – and can be hard to measure.”

“How do you take a feeling like ‘is a space welcoming’ or ‘is an organization welcoming’ and quantify it? What would that look like? What would you observe? From there, you can start to ask ‘what can we measure that’s indicative of those values’ and for us, none of them are easy to measure–welcoming, curiosity, connection, equity, and stewardship. So it was a pretty detailed process of getting our organization to a place where we could agree on three to five indicators to help identify whether we are really living our values and actualizing our value-based commitments.”

The DPL’s work in overhauling their mission, vision, and values, along with their work to translate those concepts into indicators and actions, has left them with a strategic roadmap to guide their efforts moving forward. They’re even working to ensure that this roadmap and the strategic efforts it details have the necessary funding for success.

“As we moved through, we worked to align our budget process with this roadmap using priority-based budgeting,” says Kirsten. “And ultimately, the goal is that this roadmap informs the investments that we’re making.”

“For us, our strategic roadmap is what we’re going to do in service of those values. And from there, every year our budget becomes our annual action plan–what we’re going to do and what we’re going to measure. That annual action plan gets translated into actions in Envisio, and we report on them on a quarterly basis. We work to highlight wins and successes, and then we talk about what the challenges have been and what kind of support is needed to move forward. We bring everyone together, our entire executive team, once a quarter to review all these action items.”

Employee engagement is paramount to success at DPL

For Kirsten and her team, involving everyone at the DPL in their strategic mission is essential for success. Their efforts in doing so are beyond commendable–both during the planning phase and in the execution of their strategic roadmap.

“I’m really proud that when all was said and done with our strategic roadmap, we have successfully engaged 75% of our organization in this work. I’m super happy with that,” says Kirsten. Communication and gamification were constant throughlines for this process that helped pave the way for the DPL’s successes.

“A big focus that I’ve had over the last three years is not only being communicative with our staff, but being effective in that communication,” says Kirsten. “The implementation of our strategic roadmap was super gamified. We created a road atlas for our staff, a personalized booklet with your name and position… it was kind of cutesy, but our staff got really into it. We made videos and animated all kinds of stuff, and we made it so people could earn points by learning more about how their job supports our strategic roadmap.”

Using gamification to spur employee engagement in strategic planning is an exciting and innovative way to help staff learn how their work affects the overall quality of service offered by the DPL. Kirsten and her team are immensely proud of their efforts in this arena.

“We had branch locations competing for the point lead. We had toolkits for our managers to be using with their teams on how to build confidence with strategy, and how to talk about those intersections between an employee’s work and the strategic roadmap,” says Kirsten. “And it was a ton of work, but it really made a huge difference in engaging our employees in our strategic efforts so they could learn more about their personal impact on the community. We even had some prizes, some pins and some personalized, and branded DPL gear. Let me tell you, that stuff was coveted among our staff.”

Celebrating successes big and small is a key tenet of successful strategic execution, especially so during the COVID-19 pandemic when library employees and many other public servants were under immense pressure to steer their communities through tough times.

“Beyond the gear, we also held celebrations at winning branch locations, and it was all a pretty big deal,” says Kirsten.” There were concerns that the road atlas might crash and burn and people might not play, but our staff loved it. And this was all happening during the pandemic. There was very little fun in the world, work was hard, and none of our front-line library staff were working from home… they were out there working with the community. To be able to help them see how much their work matters and matters to the organization as a whole, was really important. I think it became more important than a lot of people thought it might.”

“It’s easier to try new things when people feel comfortable with the foundation. We’re a fairly risk-averse organization, like most governments. But what this road atlas and this employee engagement strategy showed is that we can try new things and we can invest in new ideas related to the strategic roadmap. The fact that we did this visioning process with folks from across the system means that some of the ideas that we came up with were pretty unique. Why not try something new? If it doesn’t work, well… we budget on an annual basis. We’ll figure it out.”

Envisio provides a platform to centralize, analyze, and prioritize

With their strategic roadmap and their employees engaging to the point of getting competitive, the DPL arrived at a new challenge in their journey–where exactly were they going to house all this work so that it was intuitive to access, update, and analyze? The old solution of a spreadsheet just wasn’t going to cut it. Kirsten and her team set out to find a more agile solution.

“I am so spoiled in that I’ve always worked for organizations that are really sophisticated with their strategic planning and their performance-based budgeting. With that said, it’s really exciting to work for an organization that isn’t there yet, but wants to be,” says Kirsten. “And so that was really where I came on and said, Hey, I’ve been in the position of managing this in spreadsheets, and it’s possible, but it’s really complicated… and it confuses people… and you lose track of stuff… and it’s not the best use of anyone’s time. And so, Envisio was funded through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) investment in our organization for the first year, and then it was built into my general fund budget.”

As often happens in local government, it was a peer recommendation that first steered Kirsten and the DPL toward Envisio.

“I was at an ICMA webinar and heard somebody speak about how they had implemented Envisio in their organization,” she says. “I knew it was what we needed. So we did our due diligence, and went through the RFP process, and received three different bids. Envisio was the one that met our needs best, and the one that helps us tell the library’s story, which is something that I see as a huge part of my job.”

From the onset, Envisio has made a huge difference in how Kirsten and her team are able to manage the strategic affairs of the DPL. This was never more evident than when, during their implementation process, they had to rely on a spreadsheet for their year-end review.

“While we were ramping up and building our plan out in Envisio, we did our last year-end review in a spreadsheet, and sure it got done, but it was a lot of work for me and my team. And is that really the best use of our time and energy? Envisio has made it a lot easier, and I think it’s introduced a level of accountability that is really powerful. Now it isn’t me hounding people for updates, it’s something that your director can go in and see that updates are required. It empowers a higher level of accountability system-wide.”

Fostering a culture of transparency and accountability

Envisio hasn’t just made reporting and tracking of the strategic plan simpler–it has also helped Kirsten and her team provide a pathway for the accountability and transparency that staff and the community want to see from their library.

“I saw how we could leverage the tool both internally for management and externally for communication and transparency, and those were two of my top priorities. People aren’t going to do things that are hard because their jobs are already hard, and you know what? That’s really fair. But Envisio makes the updates entry easy.”

Kirsten and her team know there’s still work to do when it comes to managing, measuring, and maintaining their strategic roadmap.

“Our strategic plan is active and being managed in Envisio,” she says. “What we are currently working on is standardizing what 10% means, for example, on the completion bar, so trying to make it easier to understand where the library is in its plan.”