Dashboards Mind the GapLondon is one of my favorite cities – not only because it is a beautiful urban city that feels small and quaint, but because the people are so welcoming. This week I enjoyed spending some time exploring the city and I noticed the “Mind the Gap” PSAs in the Tube. The London Underground started this campaign in 1968 using the phrase “Mind the Gap” to alert passengers to the space between the platform and the train, which can be especially treacherous. Now, the phrase is used by transit authorities around the world.

Like passengers on a train platform, we in the social sector also need a reminder to “mind the gap” between where we stand and where we want to go. Our favorite tool for minding the gap is organizational dashboards. Dashboards can be useful in a number of ways, such as tracking key metrics for programs, analyzing progress to goal for fundraising and monitoring progress toward completion of a strategic planDashboards mind your organization’s gap not only in collecting data and turning it into insights used for decision-making, but also in tracking progress, communicating it and ensuring accountability. For example, board and staff can quickly review the dashboard and focus on things that need their attention. To do this effectively, many of our clients use signal lights (green = celebrate, yellow = caution and red = act) or other color-coding processes. Armed with this information, your board and staff can know when to spring into action.

To develop a dashboard, it is important to decide which indicators to track.

For a strategic plan, organizations develop high-level objectives about where they want to go. For example, a high-level objective could be to improve internal communications. Once that is defined, staff and/or board need to develop a connected project plan (e.g., assemble a committee) with deadlines, owners and completion percentages associated with each activity to track progress toward the objective. You may even want to continue tracking it beyond completion by measuring improvement through an employee survey. We have included a sample dashboard in PowerPoint with many types of objectives to better understand how to construct one.

For fundraising, organizations develop budgets that forecast how much money is needed to support the organization. A fundraising dashboard could track the number of asks requested, expected (using a percentage likelihood to be received) and received per quarter to ensure that the organization will meet or exceed fundraising targets. For example, if you submit a $25,000 grant to a foundation and it is your first request for a new program, you may want to show that you only have a 50% chance of getting it, which calculates to $12,500 of possible revenue. You may even want to compare this year-over-year to find giving trends and track asks made over time.

For a program, organizations may want to track key metrics that can be regularly updated and reviewed for program improvement. You might want to start with the end in mind – for example, how will we use this information? Then, decide what data to collect, where it should come from and how often you will track it. We discuss this more fully in our blog on impact culture.

We hope you start to “mind the gap” by using dashboards as a tool to communicate as well as track your progress toward your strategic plan, fundraising goals or program metrics. The key to success is unlocking the data points that matter most, making it easy to track them and regularly reviewing them for celebrations or course corrections. We welcome your input on how you use dashboards to achieve your strategic goals.

 

 

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