Everyone has it in them to be a library advocate!

Building an effective library advocacy team requires a range of skills and personalities which, together, can make for a powerful and effective voice for libraries, from the grass roots to the town hall to the national capital.

Clearly, public speakers and relationship-builders are important, but so too are the people who track laws and decisions, gather evidence, communicate online, or write effectively.

To get you thinking about how you can help, IFLA has worked with WebJunction to develop a personality test you can try yourself online.

Try the Library Advocate Personality Test.

If you want to go further, you can download the more advanced version as an Excel file. Simply write in how good you feel you are at different tasks, and it will tell you which three advocacy personalities match you best.

In the ‘Test!’ tab, fill in your scores for each of the statements in the yellow box to what extent you agree, with 3 = strongly agree, and 0 = strongly disagree.

Once you have finished, your top three personality types wil appear in the blue box.

In the ‘Personalities’ tab, you can see a longer description of each of the personalities discussed.

Why not try this as a group, and think about how your different strengths can work together?

See also our advocacy capacities grid to understand where you stand as a team.

Download the Excel file.