To encourage deep user and stakeholder engagement a library service must have something of value to offer to users, potential users and stakeholders. Furthermore it needs to be able to communicate and deliver that value in an attractive, consistent and reliable way.

But what is value? Value is anything that helps users or stakeholders get to where they want to go in an environment full of noisy, often irrelevant, messages. Everyone attempts to engage with services that will speed them to their chosen destination efficiently, effectively and enjoyably, with as little hassle and as inexpensively as possible. The destination may be a career aspiration, a lifestyle choice, a simple ongoing task or even a nice warm feeling of contentment.

Not all sources of value are equal and for the librarian's desire to engage to align with the user's willingness to engage the most important sources of value need to be provided by the library as uniquely as possible. There is value in scarcity and significantly less value if the source of value is easily accessed across a whole range of competitive suppliers. The analysis of competition at the end of Chapter 4 will have provided you with an understanding of how unique your value is likely to be.

General features and benefits of library service are not necessarily valuable to readers, even if librarians think they are. They only become valuable if individuals find them so. For the service you provide to be truly engaging you must have a deep understanding of your users rather than simply give them what fellow professionals think is important.

Value, as noted above, is ultimately defined by library users and other stakeholder groups rather than by the library service. Library staff may have some views on what is valuable but beware of simply assuming that what you think is valuable about libraries will be shared by non-librarians. The outputs from the activities suggested in Chapter 4 should have highlighted some areas of potential value and inspired early ideas about how to create winning and engaging offers and messages. However, it is likely that you will have noticed that not all potential users and stakeholders are looking for the same values, so before creating offers and messages, users and stakeholders need to be grouped to focus on this development.