| By Mark Rzeszutek |
All businesses start with ideas. How can your library help them grow?
With Gale Business: Plan Builder, aspiring entrepreneurs and experienced small business owners can access the tools they need to plan, launch, and optimize their small businesses or nonprofits. This digital tool helps you strengthen the ties between your library and the local small business community—even if you don’t have a dedicated business librarian.
On June 21, 2023, an improved user experience with new features will launch in Gale Business: Plan Builder. With this update, your library can offer a more intuitive business-planning tool with a cleaner, modern look and enhanced capabilities.
What’s New?
1. Offer Streamlined Navigation
In the updated experience, users can navigate through the five sections of guided business planning from one static drop-down menu on the left-hand side.
2. Help Users Learn
Users can find the Learning Library in the top navigation of Gale Business: Plan Builder. With this tool, they can search or browse articles on business topics and terminology to expand their knowledge and understanding of business.
3. Save User Sessions
Offer a seamless experience for all users, even if they’re returning to Gale Business: Plan Builder after some time away. With the new experience, users can easily navigate back to the content they were previously viewing using the Pick Up Where You Left Off link in the dashboard.
4. Provide More Guidance for New Users
Help new users navigate Gale Business: Plan Builder with Guide Me buttons in each section. Users can click through to receive detailed explanations about what to do in every field, one at a time. Four questions at the top of every page also explain the reasoning for what they’re doing as they complete their business plans.
Users can visit Helpful Resources to find links to other resources from Gale and around the web that are relevant to their business needs.
How Does the New Experience Affect Current Users?
All business-plan data from current users is preserved and ready to continue growing in the new Gale Business: Plan Builder experience. Aspiring entrepreneurs and small business owners will have access to an improved, modern experience as they continue nurturing their businesses.
Connect Users to More-Relevant Resources
Provide users easy access to additional business and legal resources through Gale Business: Plan Builder. The dashboard offers integrated access to Gale Business: Entrepreneurship, Gale Business: DemographicsNow, and Gale LegalForms in subscribing libraries.
Not yet a subscriber of Gale Business: Plan Builder? Discover everything this powerful program can do for small businesses in your community, or request a trial today.
Meet the Author
Before joining Gale as an associate product manager, Mark spent many years building English language teaching books as a content production manager on the National Geographic Learning team at Cengage Group. Whether in the U.S. or in other parts of the world, he loves spending his free time visiting libraries and cat cafés.