Hoopla Instant doesn’t spin your budget out of control—it helps you take control of patron satisfaction.
Library budget management is necessary, of course, and can present a substantial set of challenges, especially for smaller libraries or libraries that aren’t located in booming metropolitan areas. But there’s good news: Hoopla offers a variety of tools to help you manage your digital media budget.
Here are three ways—each found on the Midwest Tape eCommerce website or view the tutorial from Elise Kody, Senior Customer Support Specialist—to keep your Hoopla budget under control while keeping your patrons engaged and satisfied:
Price caps
To help reduce spending, some libraries implement price caps on various formats, effectively blocking titles that carry a cost per circ over a specified limit from appearing on the Hoopla platform.
The Trending Titles Report allows you to see the top trending content at your library, with the ability to enter a custom date range and select specific formats. Using this report will help you identify the impact a selected price cap may have on your patrons, giving you the information you need when deciding on the cap level. Titles that are blocked by price caps can be viewed—and unblocked on an individual basis—in the Blocked Titles Report.
As the maximum price point of Hoopla Instant titles is $3.99, setting a price cap for all formats to $2.99 will help reduce spending by around 5%. For a more drastic reduction in spending, lowering the audiobooks cap from $3.99 to $2.84 will help decrease monthly spending by around 19%—however, this may also eliminate access to some of the more popular content your patrons are looking for, like The Tenant by Freida McFadden, and the Harry Potter and Fourth Wing series.
To lower your price caps, please reach out to your Hoopla Customer Support Specialist.
Monthly Borrows
Another way to control your budget is to change your monthly borrowing limit. Managed in the Budget Planning Report, adjusting your library’s monthly borrow limit to a number that is beneficial to both you and your patrons can be key in maintaining an optimized budget.
While most libraries offer around 10 circulations per patron per month, those wanting to reduce spending might consider lowering this number from 10 to eight, which results in roughly 9% decreased spending.
Patrons do have alternatives when facing monthly borrow limits. First, the Hoopla Bonus Borrows program is in effect the last seven days of each month. Patrons can choose from a selection of audiobooks, eBooks, comics and manga, movies, TV shows, and BingePasses without using any of their monthly borrows—all at no cost to the library.
The second option is BingePass. Offering this format to your patrons allows them to unlock seven days of unlimited access to entire collections and platforms featuring dozens of titles each—all for a single borrow. Libraries only pay for the initial BingePass borrow, and all subsequent circulations within the BingePass are free, lowering the average cost per circulation for your library. BingePass is a great way to get a ton of content into your patrons’ hands without driving up spending.
Libraries that would like to decrease their circulations limit to less than six should reach out to their Hoopla Customer Support Specialist.
Monthly Budget Caps
Also found in the Budget Planning Report, the monthly budget cap tool lets libraries set a monthly spending limit that breaks into a daily budget. Once the collective daily budget has been met, patrons are prevented from using Hoopla for the rest of the day and advised to try again the next day.
Once it’s set, libraries can raise the monthly budget amount at any point in the month but cannot decrease it until the following month to prevent disruptions in patron usage.
The tool can also be used to view the Budget Breakdown for the current month and enable the Roll Forward option. Roll Forward allows for any unspent budget allocations to roll forward into the following months to help mitigate patron blocks. Libraries choose their reset month, typically aligning it with the end of their fiscal year so that any unused allocations don’t roll over into the next fiscal year, causing an overspend.
The Budget Cap Blocks report shows the patrons—and their attempted borrows—blocked due to the library exhausting their Instant budget for the day. If you notice patrons are being blocked early in the day, it may be a good idea to explore coupling the monthly budget cap with price caps for different formats.
Let Us Help!
To explore any of the budget management options Hoopla offers, or to learn more about what Hoopla’s management tools can do for your library, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your Customer Support Specialist.
