Last week, two colleagues and I presented about dashboarding in Detroit at the NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference.
By the time we began, the room was bursting at the seams. People stood along the walls and sat on the floor near the front.
Many of the questions shared the same starting point: where do we go from here? Some organizations were just starting to think about dashboards. Others had tried and found that the results were harder to use than they expected.
This is striking because the purpose of dashboards is quite simple: put real-time information in the hands of the people who need it, when they need it.
What distinguishes them from a PDF report is that they allow the viewer to explore their own questions through interactive visuals without needing to analyze raw data or request a custom report.
When they work, dashboards become powerful tools for everyday decision making. Turning that promise into something that works in practice requires not just the right software but thoughtful design.
Our conversation reinforced something I’ve seen repeatedly in evaluation and analytics work: dashboards succeed or fail based on how well they are designed for the people using them.
From that conversation, a few principles stood out.
