The Growing Library: From Community Insight to Community Growth
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Explore a five-part approach to community-led library marketing.
Ian Downie shows how libraries can create a stronger foundation for decisions about community engagement, outreach, and future growth.
How well does your library really know the community it serves — including the people and households it is not currently reaching?
In this webinar, Ian Downie will explore a five-part approach to community-led library marketing. We’ll look at how libraries can move beyond headline cardholder numbers to establish a credible picture of their true community reach, better understand the people beyond their existing patron base, identify the right audiences and opportunities for growth, create more relevant outreach, and measure the impact of their efforts.
The session will examine how stronger community intelligence can help libraries distinguish between what they know, what they assume, and what they still need to discover — creating a stronger foundation for decisions about community engagement, outreach and future growth.
Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how to move from simply promoting library services to taking a more strategic, evidence-led approach to understanding their community, expanding their reach and demonstrating their impact.
If you're interested but can't attend the webinar, go ahead and register. We'll send a recording after the live event.
Join us on Wednesday, December 16, 2026
at 2:00 pm US Eastern, 11:00 am US Pacific
Fill out the form to register for the webinar
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Register to receive the recording
If you're interested but not able to attend the live webinar, go ahead and register. We'll send a recording to all registrants after the event.
About Ian
Ian Downie is the CEO and founder of Growing Libraries, a company focused on helping public libraries better understand, reach, and grow the communities they serve.
Through Growing Libraries' Community Insight™ platform, Ian works with public libraries to combine library cardholder data with household-level community intelligence, giving library leaders a clearer understanding of who they currently serve — and, importantly, who they do not.
His work focuses on helping libraries turn community data into action: identifying opportunities to increase library card ownership, segmenting audiences for more relevant outreach, engaging new residents and families, and measuring the impact of community growth initiatives. Ian is passionate about helping libraries move beyond broad demographic assumptions and traditional usage statistics to build a more complete, evidence-based understanding of their communities — and use those insights to ensure that more people discover and benefit from everything their library has to offer.
Ian has almost 20 years’ experience creating software solutions for public libraries. Prior to Growing Libraries, Ian was founder of two other library vendors, collectionHQ and Patron Point, which were acquired by Baker & Taylor and Springshare, respectively.
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Join us
Learn how to create a stronger foundation for community engagement, outreach, and future growth.