Welcome to Whole Whale’s comprehensive resource for building nonprofit dashboards on a budget — for a variety of purposes. While dashboards are pretty awesome — and awesomely pretty — things, it’s important to remember that it takes people and process to make data actionable.
The goal of this resource is to reduce the cost of creating dashboards (especially for those working for nonprofits and social impact organizations) while maintaining a high level of quality and clarity. Remember, the holy grail is not to create the ultimate 47-page dashboard that contains all of the things. The goal of any dashboard is to deliver the right data to the right people in the right time frame so that a business decision can be made.
The goal of any dashboard is to deliver the right data to the right people in the right time frame so that a business decision can be made. Subgoal: Don't create Dashzilla. Click To Tweet
3 Useful Types of Nonprofit Dashboards
1. Strategic or Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards
BI dashboards track key performance indicators (KPIs) of departments within an organization — or the organization as a whole. These may be revisited on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. Strategic dashboards can be shared internally, or externally as a report for stakeholders.
2. Operational or accountability dashboards
These dashboards show the data of now, helping keep the ‘trains running on time within your organization. Accountability dashboards give a view of information needed on a daily or weekly basis, like a running total of ad spends, sales interactions, user support tickets, staff activity, web data, or social activity.
3. Analytical dashboards
Analytics dashboards show data in a way that allows users to identify trends over time, explore segments, manipulate filters, and search for insights. This requires clean, consistent data that connects with or pairs to the single “source of truth” database, such as Google Analytics.
Nonprofit Dashboard Category Topics
We have created specific resources around each of these topics for dashboards for your organization. This is by no means a comprehensive list of dashboards, just some of the most useful ones we’ve seen. Please don’t take this as a challenge to merge all of the below dashboards into a mega Dashzilla meant to solve all of the problems and cross all of the eyes. It’s a trap.
Resist the temptation to merge all useful dashboards into a mega Dashzilla meant to solve all of the problems and cross all of the eyes. To quote Admiral Ackbar, it’s a trap. Click To Tweet
Strategic Dashboards for Nonprofits
Impact/Program Nonprofit Dashboard
- What & Why: This is a summary of KPIs and other leading indicators around programs and outputs. These can include on-the-ground work as well as digital impact.
- Audience:Board of Directors, Investors, Public
- Frequency: Quarterly to annually
- Key Metrics:Quantity of services, reach, quality score of services, delta over time period, KPI inputs, KPI outputs
- Tool Recs: Connect via API or dynamically integrate via Google Sheets the data needed for KPIs. This will make updating easier. Keep costs down by laying out data in a tool like Google Data Studio or Microsoft Power BI, or see below for more tool options. Once set up, screenshots can be taken to make presentations or PDFs.
- Examples & Resources:
- How to think about digital impact
- Sample strategic dashboard from PSI.org, using a designed PDF download.
PSI.org used a designed PDF download for this strategic dashboard.
Annual Report Dashboard
- What & Why: Annual (or even quarterly) reports build a narrative around the major north star metrics of an organization. They tell a story of financial health, impact reach, and growth of the organization, while layering in the stories from the field and reiterating organizational mission and vision.
- Audience: Internal Board of Directors, Investors, Public with modifications to hide sensitive data
- Frequency: Quarterly to annually
- Key Metrics: Organization-level metrics (north stars), audience reach, regions, organizational health indicators, programmatic growth
- Tool Recs: Many organizations go with a designed PDF, custom bootstrap html solutions, or long scrolling (parallax) template sites on SquareSpace. These take serious time to design and produce. Our recommendation is to focus your nonprofit’s dashboard time on building something smarter and more dynamic. From there, you can take screen captures for snapshot reporting.
- Examples & Resources:
- 13+ of the best annual reports — with ideas to steal for 2020!
- The Council of Nonprofits’s guide to annual reports
- Check out Whole Whale’s customizable annual report template!
Template
Annual report template
Save time on design and focus on showing your impact
Operational Nonprofit Dashboards
Financial Dashboard
- What & Why: Balance and income statements don’t tell the full visual story needed when it comes to finances. Use dashboards to visualize your nonprofit’s budget shortfalls (or windfalls) and to create a fiscal narrative for your team.
- Audience: Internal, Board of Directors
- Frequency: Quarterly or Annually
- Key Metrics: Performance trends year-over-year, breakdown of revenue/expense sources, ROI, efficiency metric (impact/dollars), key financial indicators
- Tool Recs: Leverage the dashboards connected with the source of data. Export data through Microsoft Power BI, or through an API to dynamically update content in the system.
- Examples & Resources:
- TechSoup’s guide on using QuickBooks
- Xero accounting online software dashboards
- Massive list of Microsoft Power BI integrations with accounting software
- The Michael J. Fox Foundation’s financial reports publicly share their investment growth and distribution of admin expenses
The Michael J. Fox Foundation goes public with its financial reporting.
A QuickBooks Online dashboard exported and visualized with an automatic template in Microsoft Power BI.
Fundraising Donor Dashboard
- What & Why: The story of lifetime donor value and retention can be lost in spreadsheets. Exploring and visualizing donor data can reveal key insights that will inform fundraising strategy.
- Audience: Internal fundraising team, Senior staff
- Frequency: Annual
- Key Metrics: Year-over-year trends, breakdown of retention/gift size/net worth, giving ROI based on marketing/email/ads
- Tool Recs: Max out the configuration of the native dashboards where the data live. For larger periods of analysis, consider exporting, exploring and visualizing data with Fundraising Report Card.
- Examples & Resources:
A visualization of donor retention segmentation via Fundraising Report Card
Nonprofit Volunteer Dashboard
- What & Why: Visualizing the impact of volunteer activity can help motivate volunteers as well as tell the story of impact for a nonprofit. This can also be a helpful tool for identifying areas of improvement.
- Audience: Internal, Volunteer stakeholders
- Frequency: Monthly and up
- Key metrics: Total volunteers, total volunteer hours, hours/volunteer, volunteer training time/retention, volunteer attendance to events.
- Tool recs: Try to use the native analytics that come with the volunteer management tools being used. If these fail, consider doing quarterly pulls of raw data and building template in Google Data Studio.
- Examples & Resources:
Golden Volunteer’s management app visualizes the Golden Opportunities
Sales Dashboard
- What & Why: Keep track of sales performance by region and salesperson, and track projected sales revenue
- Audience: Internal senior staff, Sales team, advisory stakeholders and board members
- Frequency: Monthly and up
- Key Metrics: Sales leads, weighted value of pipeline, segmentation of lead type and sources, close rates, trends over time
- Tool Recs: Try to extend the native dashboards of the database solution. Failing this, Google sheets have decent graphing tools and this format will allow quick integration with Google Data Studio. Microsoft Power BI also has great integrations with all major sales platforms and has robust templates.
- Examples & Resources:
Salesforce’s dashboard visualization on sales via Fionta
Custom created sales projections visualized in Google Sheets. This shows the total weighted value of sales pipeline, weighted value of proposals, number of proposals active, and total backlog contract value.
Staff Performance Dashboard
- What & Why: If an organization uses online project management systems the data may be exported to create a staff accountability dashboard. These can be helpful for managers as well as good for fostering healthy inter-office competition. Whole Whale uses these for our biweekly sprint recaps.
- Audience: Internal staff and management.
- Frequency: Bi-weekly or by sprint/regular project length.
- Key Metrics: Task breakdown by person, department, and project over time, task type segmentation over time, cost and/or time per task ratio.
- Tool Recs: Use the native dashboard of the project management tool that your organization uses. If needed, export to Google Sheets and play with in Google Data Studio. Or us Excel and Microsoft Power BI to build shareable dashboards.
- Examples & Resources
- Asana has native dashboards that show performance by department or project.
Whole Whale’s internal staff activity in the middle of a 2-week sprint, showing tasks completed by person and remaining tasks. This was made by exporting Asana data to Google Sheets, then visualizing in Google Data Studio (because we love measurement).
Analytical Dashboards for Nonprofits
Web analytics dashboard created with Google Data Studio
- What & Why: Create a clean and branded visual of your organization’s web behavior for non-data geeks. This format allows you to extract data from Google Analytics and merge with other data sources for a 30,000-foot view of performance. This can also be dynamically updated with given time frames.
- Audience: Internal, Stakeholders, Public
- Frequency: Weekly and up
- Key Metrics: Segments that include how good/how many to give tables context (i.e., sessions and bounce rate), conversions for business goals, trends over time, behavioral acquisition. Note that Data Studio can pull in a lot more than just Google Analytics data.
- Tool Recs: Ummm, Google Data Studio
- Examples & Resources:
Whole Whale’s Data Studio report, available on… (you guessed it) Google Data Studio
Google Analytics Dashboards for Web Data
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- What & Why: Website data is a treasure trove of insights if you’re able to pull out the right threads. Creating a focused dashboard of the indicators that matter is the first step to monitoring what matters.
- Audience: Internal, advisory stakeholders, Board Members
- Frequency: Weekly and up
- Key Metrics: Segments that include how good/how many to give tables context (i.e., sessions and bounce rate), conversions for business goals, trends over time, behavioral/acquisition. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg: Download our nonprofit Google Analytics dashboard templates for an even deeper dive
- Tool Recs: Google Analytics (GA). Note that other tools can pull in GA data, however as soon as any timeframe or segmentation is applied, those tools can’t account for the unique cookies of users. In other words, things will break and numbers won’t add up due to absolute unique users.
- Examples & Resources:
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Whole Whale’s Google Analytics Dashboard template view for executive level team members
People and Dashboards
For any dashboard solution, keep in mind the staff or department using it. People will naturally make a game of improving any number put in front of them, so make sure that the numbers you share internally are the right ones to improve.
The type of dashboard and metrics used also depend on the internal seniority of the person as well as their ability to process the data. In an awesome dashboard article by Chief Evangelist of Google Analytics Avinash Kaushik, Kaushik examines the need to merge insights, business impact, and recommended actions into data presentations.
This chart below summarizes the balance of access to data and the need for drilling down based on role in the organization. This is why Whole Whale recommends using the right nonprofit dashboard for the job, rather than creating Dashzilla (have we mentioned that we don’t like Dashzilla?).
Image credit: Avinash Kaushik
Nonprofit Dashboard Software
Before buying the Tesla of dashboard systems, consider this advice from Avinash Kaushik about the 10/90 rule. In his article, Kaushik states that for every $10 spent on the analytics tool, roughly $90 should be spent on the people and processes that support it.
A dashboard created in a vacuum without the users to review it is almost sure to fail. Our recommendation is to start with free, low-cost, or native dashboard tools to learn and test how your team needs the data.
Spoiler alert: Based on the flexibility and cost of Google Data Studio, we recommend beginning with it when starting with dashboards. Check out our master guide and template for using Google Data Studio if you’re not sure where to start. More of our favorite tools are below.
Paid Dashboard Tools
Free Dashboard Tools
- (Say it with us now…) Google Data Studio
- Microsoft Power BI
- Zoho
- The good old fashioned spreadsheet: Excel, Google Sheets, or Numbers
- Dash
More Awesome Dashboard Tools for Nonprofits
Finally, please consider the environment before creating a Dashzilla.