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Balancing Life's Demands

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The Nonprofit Dashboard: A Tool for Tracking Progress

In your oversight, board members, don't overlook these dials
Outcomes, Nov/Dec 2007, Vol. 31, No. 6

It's been said that "if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there." But knowing the destination—even having a road map—while essential, is not enough. What if there were no road signs, speed or fuel gauges, or warning light indicators? No external signals to indicate progress along a chosen path and internal signals to keep the driver aware of the vehicle's speed, condition, and performance?

Like the instrument panel on the dashboard of an automobile, dashboard reports present a quick, comprehensible overview of an organization's status and overall direction. Instead of speed, RPM, and engine temperature, the dashboard typically displays pre-selected, critical measures of organizational performance and mission effectiveness. With dashboard reports that present key indicators in consistent formats, board members can readily spot changes and trends in these measurements. 

The dashboard report helps nonprofit leaders focus their attention on what matters most in their organizations and, in doing so, gain greater insight and ascribe greater meaning to other available data. The learning opportunities gained from defining key performance indicators and tracking, reviewing, and evaluating them allow nonprofit leaders to improve and further fulfill the mission of their organizations.

Maintaining focus and simplicity

Flashy graphic displays in a dashboard format that highlight measurements of tactical or secondary consequence would only succeed in focusing the board's attention on the wrong things. The goal is focusing the board's attention on the right things. Each board must chose what's best in regard to its current circumstances, and refrain from making it overly complicated.

Principles of design

Once the board and staff have defined what it is the dashboard should measure, it is time to choose a format for the report. By using a combination of graphic charts, numbers, and descriptive text, the report takes shape and conveys a story.

The dashboard report helps the board and staff focus and prioritize. Even though a dashboard report presents overall results, it may be necessary to break down some of the components. The key, of course, is not to go so far as to bury the board in excessive detail. Major service categories or business units, client populations, or geographical areas are the types of categories into which operating results might be broken down.

A social service agency, for example, created a financial dashboard that not only portrays actual versus budgeted year-to-date revenues, but breaks down the resulting  total variance from budget by business units to better indicate which ones contributed positively or negatively to the total variance.