Lessons from Data Strategic Planning
The Dashboard Trap: Nonprofits need questions, before they need data viz
Many nonprofit organizations (and for-profit organizations) believe that creating a data dashboard is the key to solving all their data challenges. The idea is appealing! Imagine if one visual screen could quickly tell you how your organization is doing? Unfortunately, the reality is more complicated, just like the complex social problems we are all trying to solve. A dashboard is only useful when people in your organization are prepared to engage with the data, ask the right questions, and act on what they see. Without that foundation, dashboards can easily become cluttered, misinterpreted, or worse, completely ignored.
A data dashboard is a visual display that brings together key information about an organization's work in one place for easy viewing and monitoring. Dashboards can be designed to track overall strategy, monitor a specific program, or highlight trends. (Tableau Public shares many beautiful dashboards on their Viz of the Day page.) At their best, dashboards help organizations identify patterns and questions to guide their work. However, many dashboards fail to live up to their promise because they are built without a clear purpose or without the organizational capacity to support their use.
If you are interested in improving your data use and culture, building a dashboard should not be the first step your organization takes. Dashboards assume a level of data literacy that may not yet exist within your team. They can unintentionally introduce bias if metrics are not presented with enough context, and they rarely explain why something is happening or what to do next. They are also high-maintenance tools that need regular updates to remain useful. Many nonprofits invest time and energy in dashboards only to end up with tools that are not updated, maintained, or supported. These become displays that no longer reflect current work and are eventually abandoned.
One of the most important lessons from our work with almost 70 organizations in Connecticut is that the most successful dashboards are driven by thoughtful questions. Dashboards are not just about reporting data; they are about answering the right questions that will help leaders make data-informed decisions. Nonprofits should design dashboards with specific, mission-aligned questions in mind, asking themselves: What decisions will this dashboard help us make? Who will use it? How often will we review it? What comparisons are meaningful? Dashboards that focus on these kinds of questions are much more likely to guide organizations toward relevant, data-informed action.
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