Client: Gunnedah Shire Council, NSW | Project Timeframe: 2026 & ongoing
“The Liveability findings have been incredibly valuable in helping us understand what our community values most and where they see opportunities for improvement.”
Kelly Stidworthy, Director Corporate Services, Gunnedah Shire Council
Regional councils are being asked to do more with less – engaging diverse communities across large geographic areas, meeting Integrated Planning and Reporting requirements, and ensuring community feedback meaningfully informs long-term decision-making. Gunnedah Shire Council is taking a more integrated approach, bringing community engagement, liveability, service satisfaction and strategic planning into one consistent evidence framework.
The problem: turning community engagement into a consistent evidence base
Developing a Community Strategic Plan (CSP) requires extensive community engagement. But for councils with limited planning and engagement resources, gathering feedback is only part of the challenge.
Engagement can happen across surveys, workshops, pop-ups, stakeholder conversations and other activities, often at different times and in different formats. Without a consistent approach to capturing and measuring this information, valuable community insights can become fragmented, making it harder to see the bigger picture, track change over time or demonstrate how community feedback has informed strategic decisions.
For Gunnedah Shire Council, the development of its next CSP presented an opportunity to do things differently. Rather than treating engagement, research, planning and reporting as separate activities, Council wanted to establish a centralised evidence base that could support the full planning cycle.
The solution: connecting engagement, measurement and planning
Gunnedah partnered with Place Score to establish an integrated evidence, engagement and planning framework for its CSP.
The process began with the 2026 Gunnedah Shire Liveability Survey. 648 community members shared what they value, how they experience their local area and what they believe needs greater attention.
Rather than ending with a research report, this evidence became the starting point for strategic planning.
Place Score brought the findings directly into workshops with Council executives and Councillors, providing an evidence base to help shape the community vision and strategic directions. These emerging directions are now being taken back to the community for further engagement and testing, with Place Score continuing to work alongside Council to translate the evidence into the new CSP itself.
“What we have engaged most with is the consistency of data and the ability to benchmark our results against other local government areas, states and national results. That broader context gives Council greater confidence in the decisions we’re making.”
Kelly Stidworthy, Director Corporate Services, Gunnedah Shire Council
Supporting the process is a centralised system that brings together:
- Liveability and Service Satisfaction measurement (scheduled for 2028), planned around the CSP cycle to reduce overlapping engagement and build consistent evidence over time;
- a systematic engagement capture tool that brings feedback from CSP surveys, workshops and other engagement activities into one place;
- and the Place Score platform and CSP Direction Report, making community evidence accessible for planning, decision-making and ongoing reporting.
Together, this creates a clear pathway from community voice to evidence, strategic direction, the CSP and ongoing measurement.
The outcome: continuous community hearing
For Gunnedah, integrated planning means community engagement doesn’t end when a survey or workshop closes.
Council is building a centralised evidence base that can continue to inform the CSP throughout its life, connecting what the community values and needs with strategic direction, service performance and future decision-making.
As Kelly Stidworthy explains, the value is in connecting these activities rather than treating them as separate projects:
“What has been particularly valuable is the way this approach connects engagement, evidence and measurement into one continuous process. As a small council with limited resources, having Place Score involved has helped us maintain consistency and quality throughout the project while ensuring community remains central to decision-making.“
Kelly Stidworthy, Director Corporate Services, Gunnedah Shire Council
By establishing its Liveability and Service Satisfaction programs together, Council can also plan future measurement around its strategic planning cycle, reducing duplication and creating greater consistency in how community priorities and performance are tracked over time. Gunnedah’s approach demonstrates how regional councils can turn resource constraints into an opportunity to work differently: engaging more strategically, centralising evidence and getting greater value from every community conversation.
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