Glasgow Women’s Library is a vibrant information hub housing a lending library, archive collections and contemporary and historical artefacts that celebrate the lives, histories and achievements of women.
We also support thousands of women across Scotland every year to improve their lives through our services and programmes, including support and activities that tackle a wide range of issues from poverty and women’s health, sexuality and surviving violence.
Learning is at the heart of what we do: we deliver over 200 innovative events and activities across Scotland every year, from film screenings to guided walks and core programmes including our Adult Literacy and Numeracy and Black and Minority Ethnic Women’s Projects.
Since 2010, we’ve been recording monitoring and evaluation data about our events and activities in a system based on the open source client relationship management software CiviCRM.
This system, which we call Library Out Loud, allows us to record both anonymous equal opportunities data and user-related attendance information and feedback.
However, while it was simple enough for us to add data to the system, we found that the inbuilt reporting was not suitable for our needs, and we often found ourselves exporting data to be processed in Excel spreadsheets. We were also not taking advantage of the inbuilt features of CiviCRM that would allow us to communicate more effectively with our users based on their interests and the events they attended at GWL.
The Make:IT:Happen Organisational Development fund gave us the opportunity to redevelop Library Out Loud, working with our consultants Fuzion to add new reporting elements and streamline the way we monitor how users access and engage with the Library.
You can also view the Library Out Loud prezi on the Prezi website.
More information about the Library is available on our website.