FCPL has typically made cases for additional funding and services based on tugging on heart strings. Stories about children reading over the summer, adults gaining literacy skills and teens having a safe space; FCPL focuses on qualitative examples when speaking with funders and politicians. The ROI document is intended to bring together both the head (quantitative data) and the heart and create one cohesive document about the value of the library.

For this library system, the innovation was all about taking the mountains of data it already had, and building a stronger and more visible case from it. Telling funders that they more than get their money back for services wasn't cutting it any longer. Showing them the math that for every dollar put into the library, more than $6.50 in value back to the community was returned — that made the impact that library staff and the library board were looking for.

The main goal of the ROI document was to better publicize the value of FCPL, and to show exactly what additional funding and support would generate. The document had a lot of buzz at the local level, and was picked up for an article in Virginia Business magazine's December 2018 issue. Following on that success, as part of next year's budget guidance, FCPL is to provide information about costs for expanded hours across all branch locations.