Using Dashboards to Cause Nonprofit Board & Staff to Take Action
Changing your board story, our topic of the month, takes time.
It also takes changing staff & board leadership behaviors to shift a board culture.
One of the tools I recommend when I work with social sector boards is to create a board activity dashboard and a fundraising activity dashboard. Creating the dashboards is the easy part.
Deciding what to show on the dashboards is what takes time and intentional conversation.
Step 1: Provide ample time for the board members to answer a few key questions. Refer to this post 5 Questions Every Board Should Ask for some helpful questions.
Step 2: Once the board has determined the ways they will be of most value AND what they want to track, the role of staff is to create a dashboard to support their actions.
Step 3: Make sure your dashboard shows both what has happened in the past AND what actions you want to cause in the future.
Step 4: Review dashboards regularly with time to discuss activity status.
One example of a board governance dashboard that I use in my coaching and dashboard training sessions:
Here are a pair of a fundraising charts I like to share with board & staff to show how many donors vs. how much money is being generated by a specific category of giving:
Click to enlarge
Want more tips for engaging your board? Download Mission Possible: Your Workbook for a Successful Board that includes some of my favorite worksheets and templates to help you create an amazing board experience AND cause board engagement all year-long.
What a great tool. I need to get busy making some graphs!
Or, Jody, Find someone on the board who has this skill and invite their assistance! Your plate is pretty full, as I recall.
Lori
We’ve never really thought about using dashboards to track things like board member attendance but this is a great idea and will be helpful for stepping up our board engagement strategy!
As a visual person, charts and graphs would be a huge help for me. Does anyone have software/generation recommendations??
Matt,
Depending on your CRM (donor database) some have the tools to create pretty nice charts for you. Otherwise you may want to check out http://www.Domo.com OR use the trusty Excel tool.
Thanks for reading & posting!
Lori
Since our board meetings are full of information, having easy to decipher charts would help to convey progress towards the goals the board has identified.