2023 Wrapped
Hello & Happy New Year to the wonderful patrons of Queer Liberation Library! This is Kieran checking in to give you a round-up post of what happened this year for QLL. Let me begin by saying it was a lot!
We started out the year a little unsure of where we’d end it. We had just been accepted by NOPI, our fiscal sponsor, at the back half of 2022 and we were trying to figure out exactly what we needed in order to bring the library into reality. We spent a lot of time in the first few months of the year working on our social media community. Our March Madness bracket was super fun and successful, and the winner of that bracket is currently one of our top titles in the library: Hunger Pangs by Joy Demorra.
In the spring, we also had an incredible update done to our website, courtesy of Max at Max Burns UX. We had so much fun working with Max to make our home-base website look and feel perfectly us. They understood our goal aesthetic (”friendly cyberpunk”) and really delivered. They were also able to use really excellent feedback from our patrons and help us offer a toggled Dark Mode for the website. The QLL site looks better than ever!
We were lucky enough throughout the year to be approached by a couple of journalists about the project, with local news outlets to international publications interested in reporting on this work. We were able to do interviews with The Buckeye Flame, Xtra Magazine, Lone Star Live, and CNN.com, all of which you can read through out In The Media tab under the About section!
Then we had to choose: Did we want to take a big swing and try to open the library this year or did we want to put it off until 2024? There was some hesitance, and reasonable considerations for both options, but ultimately we decided that the whole point was to get this library going. So we should get it going! And very suddenly, it became crunch time as we prepared for June, for Pride, and for our first annual fundraiser. And wow, the success of that fundraiser blew us off our feet.
The fundraiser ended in July with a total of $16,666 raised. That money went primarily towards our access to the Libby platform and to our opening collection of books. We spent the next three months putting those technological puzzle pieces together and doing testing. And then, finally, on October 23, 2023, Queer Liberation Library opened its digital doors.
In the first 24 hours, we received over 1,500 membership applications and over $2,000 in donations. We were circulating books and generating holds immediately. We were able to use those new donations to buy a few extra copies of some of the immediately popular titles to keep the collection breathing for our patrons.
And now, as the year winds down to its resolute finish, we can give you some stats for how this year went for QLL overall.
In 2023, we were able to:
Open one library!
Reach over 6,500 followers across our social media platforms
Double our patron list from opening day to over 3,000 patrons in two months
End the year with 557 books in the collection, after opening with 405
Fundraise a total of $36,475.07
We cannot thank you enough for your support, in the financial sense but also in the emotional sense. Your excitement and enthusiasm about the project comes back to us when we read your messages on social media and in our emails. We are so honored to be doing this work with and for our queer family across the country.
We are so excited to jump into 2024. We have lots of plans for how to take the next big steps for QLL to offer resources and information that are useful and important to our community.
Everyone please have a safe, happy, queer New Year, and we will talk again soon!