Townsville Citylibraries

Townsville Citylibraries is a public library service operated by Townsville City Council in North Queensland, Australia.

Serving nearly 200,000 residents across Townsville and surrounding areas, the service includes three permanent library branches, a mobile library, and a dedicated home service.

Requirements

Townsville Citylibraries sought a more meaningful way to understand and demonstrate the impact of its services, programs, and spaces.

Although a range of evaluation tools and methods had been used – such as customer satisfaction surveys, raw program usage data, academic research, and psychographic personas – Business Development Planning Officer, Caitlin Single, identified three key challenges:

Capturing and measuring the true impact of library services on the community.
Benchmarking performance against similar libraries to identify areas for improvement.
The desire to understand what different user demographics truly value in their library experience, and how to meet those needs, became a central driver in the search for a more insightful and outcomes-focused evaluation approach.

Approach

In 2019, Townsville Citylibraries joined the Public Libraries Evaluation Network (PLEN) – a national initiative set up by Culture Counts to help libraries consistently collect, measure, and communicate their value.

Since then, the library has remained an active participant in the network. This long-term collaboration with Culture Counts has provided a reliable and consistent evaluation framework that directly addresses their key challenges, empowering Townsville Citylibraries to design, test and evolve a process that works for them. Key steps included:

Implementation of a consistent data collection initiative: Townsville Citylibraries distributed the PLEN Library Use and Outcome Survey in 2019 and 2024. The gap was due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other external factors, and will now be sent annually with the 2025 survey about to go out.

Launch of the ‘We Love Libraries’ Campaign: In 2024, they branded the data collection initiative as ‘We Love Libraries’, to create a memorable and engaging campaign that better engaged library users and encouraged participation. The library-wide initiative ran for four weeks in July 2024, with a strong focus on maximising engagement across all areas of service. Each staff member played a role in promoting and encouraging customer participation, spanning branches, mobile services, and events. To support this, additional resourcing and staffing were allocated to ensure feedback was gathered from a broad range of users, including home service recipients and residents of Magnetic Island.

Outcomes

The 2024 ‘We Love Libraries’ campaign was the most expansive to date, with the goal to ensure that all users were given the opportunity to have their say.

The ‘We Love Libraries’ campaign generated over 3,000 survey responses, doubling the result of previous efforts and significantly increasing the reliability of the data collected. As a result, Townsville Citylibraries achieved the following key goals:

Goal 1: Strategic reporting and communication

The PLEN survey templates helped Townsville Citylibraries easily collect data from their communities about the outcomes generated from library experiences. They accessed real-time, filterable results through the Culture Counts Analytics Dashboard and received a shareable summary report clearly outlining their value. These tools supported clear communication of the library’s impact to stakeholders and strengthened evidence-based strategic planning.

“92% of respondents agreed they felt safe and welcome when using the library. These results help us to compare and understand our impact, looking at where we are having the most impact and where we might need to improve. We can use these learnings to gain evidence to advocate for support” – Caitlin Single, Townsville Citylibraries.

Goal 2: Peer benchmarking and collaboration

Townsville Citylibraries leveraged the PLEN Big Data Dashboard and the Library Use and Outcomes Report to monitor performance, track trends, and report against national benchmarks. By comparing results with libraries of similar size and demographic profiles, Townsville Citylibraries can identify both strengths and areas for improvement. This also fosters opportunities to learn from peer libraries that are excelling in particular service areas or successfully engaging key audience segments.

Goal 3: Understand what is working well

Analysis of the 2024 ‘We Love Libraries’ survey responses revealed the aspects most valued by users, including welcoming spaces, friendly staff, accessible digital services, and ease of use. These insights help the library demonstrate real-world outcomes delivered through its services and spaces.

Goal 4: Identify areas of improvement

Open-text feedback highlighted several common suggestions for improvement, including upgrades to the library catalogue, increased access to online content, extended opening hours, and the addition of amenities such as coffee. These findings are shared with library planners to inform service enhancements that are more aligned with the evolving needs of the community.

The ‘We Love Libraries’ data also played an important part in informing Townsville’s Citylibraries soon to be launched strategic plan.

“PLEN allows us to monitor our performance, explore trends, learn from others, and report against national standards. It has helped us make and support operational decisions to better suit the needs of our users.”
Caitlin Single, Townsville Citylibraries

The Public Libraries Evaluation Network provides libraries with the tools and resources to conduct meaningful evaluations, including survey templates, a big data dashboard and online reports. Are you interested in finding out more? Visit our page or Contact us here to organise a demo.