Last week I presented at the Library Marketing Conference in Indianapolis, IN on using the trauma-informed framework as a strategy for libraries’ marketing and communication practices.
It’s an area I omitted, accidentally, from my book, which now seems like a terrible oversight since I worked for five years as my academic library’s marketing and communications librarian. And yet, it seems that many people working in library marketing and communications are coming around to empathy, kindness, and care, without the trauma-informed framework.
That was delightful. So I confessed to my audience that I didn’t think I’d tell them anything they didn’t already know. But presented the six principles as a checklist of sorts that they could use in their crisis communications.
Many people realize that we’ve had a rough few years/decades/centuries; that now is a time for kindness and caring for each other.
After my presentation a person approached me and we spoke about how it the empathy vs. tough love binary seems like one of the divisions our country experiences. While it’s certainly not as simple as some people have empathy and some tell others to “suck it up and move on,” sometimes it feels that way. How do we get perceptions round vulnerability and strength to widen?
Rebecca Tolley 
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