Measuring Impact by Listening to Users

Impact stories are what library users tell us about their experiences and, most importantly, the changes that happened in their lives as a result of our services. You might also hear these called user stories, library stories or community stories.

These stories are vital in understanding your library's impact. Yet they often get overlooked, mainly because measuring qualitative data isn't always straightforward. Many organisations rely on metrics that are relatively easy to collect such as attendance figures, participation and completion rates.

But these numbers don’t tell the full story of the impact of your library’s work. They don’t tell you why someone came to your library, what they value about your services or how the experience made a difference in their lives. 

Libraries want (and need) to understand how and why change happens. So, how can we capture the moments that reveal the real story of our impact?

More and more libraries are collecting user stories about their work. These are sometimes in the form of testimonial quotes, such as “I love my library” or “The library is my home away from home”. 

Testimonials are great for marketing and promotions. They are positive and real (and often encouragingly kind). But they don’t tend to tell us much about a user’s experience - what the person actually did, what changed for them or why the experience mattered for them.

But there is a crucial difference between a testimonial and an impact story. 

Impact stories ask deeper questions. They capture the specifics: what brought someone to the library, what was their experience like and what changed for them as a result of this experience. 

These stories can reveal what’s working and what isn’t. And this insight is essential for understanding the value of library services and the impact they have on their communities, far beyond what we find out from the statistics.

So, how can you start? You don’t need a complex system to start capturing these stories. Here are a few ways libraries are doing it.

For example, the American Library Association's 'Show up for our libraries' campaign encourages library staff and users to advocate for their libraries in multiple ways, one of which is sharing stories of positive impact in their communities. The campaign recognises that personal stories can be effective tools for demonstrating value and impact of their work to funders and policymakers.

And it’s not just public libraries that are utilising impact stories. Any library that serves users can benefit from collecting this kind of evidence to both understand and demonstrate the impact of their services. 

Academic libraries are also increasingly asked to demonstrate how valuable they are to both their students’ learning success and to organisational goals. For example, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) works with academic libraries to measure outcomes using patron surveys that ask their users “What good did we do?”. 

Another approach used in academic libraries is library impact story logs - simple online documents that allow staff to capture user stories at the point of service, making it easy to record impact as it happens.

While it can be hard to resist the temptation to ask as many questions as you can while you have their attention, we are advocates for a simple, one question approach. This has many benefits.

Removing complexity helps encourage wider participation. By not making big demands on the time of those who contribute, you can remove the barriers that often stop people from responding at all. An open question has a dual benefit: it keeps the research focused on one key area, while significantly reducing the demands on the participant.

This approach doesn’t require a complex system. Asking a relevant question can also be done right at the point of contact, serving as a brilliant conversation starter to get to know your users better.

Traditional surveys with closed-ended questions often force users to tick boxes. By asking one open question, we give users the opportunity to tell us what really matters, not just what we assumed would matter.

Users often don’t value the same things we do. By moving away from closed-ended, predetermined surveys, we can collect stories that would otherwise stay untold. It allows for those unexpected findings, those moments where a user tells us something we hadn't even anticipated.

Ultimately, this is a human approach that builds bridges. Reading unedited stories about how your work matters to people can build a collective appreciation within your team. It helps everyone realise that their work is truly meaningful, creating a genuine sense of shared purpose.

This is about opening a clear communication channel between your organisation and your service users to better understand the value of your work (and to identify areas where you aren’t having the impact you expected). 

Impact stories certainly aren't the only way to demonstrate your library's value. Different types of evidence are all important to get a full picture of your services and their impact. But stories from your users are a very powerful and authentic part of the equation, as they let people describe the impact the library has on them and their community in their own words. And this can tell you a lot more than numbers alone.