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Spoiler alert! If you want an endorsement of any particular tool or platform, you won’t find it here. In terms of dashboard platforms, chances are good that either your organization has already standardized on one of them, or your organization is too small to make the investment worthwhile. Instead, I’m going to focus on how to find the right tool to get the communications dashboard you need, and provide some rules to guide your journey.
In my decade of designing and implementing integrated communications dashboards, I’ve had the pleasure (or not) of working with the following platforms:
Some are great, some were more challenging to work with. I encourage you to look at any and all of them. Personally, I tend to prefer simple and cheap (or free) over expensive and complicated. The point of this article is not to pick favorites, but to help you find what works for your own situation.
Let’s review why communications dashboards are so important…
A communications dashboard reveals relationships between data sets.
The raison d’être of every communications dashboard is to bring together lots of diverse data from a variety of sources in a way that enables the user to visualize and analyze the effect that one data set has on another. What that means for communications is that you will most likely be combining data from your:
- Web analytics platform (e.g., Google Analytics, Adobe, WebTrends);
- Listening data (e.g., Hootsuite, Sprinklr, Sprout, Adobe Social, Brandwatch, Sysomos, Talkwalker);
- Media monitoring data (e.g., Cision, Burrelles, Glean, Trendkite).
- Survey research data (e.g. Survata, Survey Monkey, Qualtrics)
If your goals center around awareness and preference results, if you can’t integrate data from your survey platform, at the very least you will need the ability to manually enter data from your surveys.
If internal communications is in your purview you will need the ability to bring in data from your Intranet and email platforms and/or manually enter that data.
And now a few rules for using these tools that I’ve learned along the way…
Rule #1: You can’t spend your way to heaven. But you’ll never get there without Excel.
As Arthur C. Nielsen, market researcher and founder of ACNielsen, once said, “The price of light is less than the cost of darkness.” And when dealing with dashboards, the price of light can be free.
Over the past decade I’ve created dashboards that cost $1 million to implement and others that used free software. The free ones are a lot faster to get up and running because you don’t have to deal with IT or procurement and there’s almost no paperwork.
The reality is that what you need most of all is Excel. Excel is the universal translator of data. Whatever platform you’re using for social listening and/or media monitoring will have an Export function that will move your data into either Excel or into a CRV format. Excel’s valuable Pivot Table function enables you to easily analyze your data as well as produce charts and graphs to illustrate your findings.
Rule #2: The cloud is nothing but silver linings.
Dashboards simply don’t work if people can’t easily access them and learn from them. Which is why a cloud-based dashboard (think Google Sheets) is essential. It provides the ability to collaborate and share data across teams. Only then will you be able to see the interactions between your various communications efforts.
Many of my clients have one overall dashboard for their entire corporate communications function. If you do too, then you will probably also want individual dashboards for each department, e.g., PR, Digital/Social, Internal, Events, etc. But to get the most insight from your data you will need to make sure that everyone on all the teams can see everyone else’s results.
Besides, if everyone can easily access his or her communications dashboard and keep it up to date, then no one has to sit around and manually update tables in PowerPoint. Trust me, I’ve spent far too many hours doing that. It is not a worthwhile use of anyone’s time. The point of measurement and dashboards in particular is to make insight and analysis easier, not more tedious.
Rule #3: Pictures are either worth a thousand words or very little at all.
Back in 1997, American mathematician John W. Tukey noted that, “The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.” So, yes, one of the advantages of a dashboard is its ability to help you visualize data. Just make sure that you can visualize things in a way that is meaningful.
Too many dashboards have limitations on their graphics. Make sure whatever platform you’re using allows you to modify things in a way that meets your corporate norms and shows your data in a way that is meaningful. At the very least, make sure you can look at all the data over time from all your departments overlaid on each other, so you can see if there are any correlations.
Rule #4: It’s not the dashboard, it’s the data, stupid.
I just completed a communications dashboard implementation that took seven months from start to finish. That’s fairly typical. Some have taken a year or more. What was unusual was that the actual dashboard implementation itself was the shortest part of the process.
It took about a month for everyone to agree on what the right metrics were and what data would appear on the dashboard. Collecting all the data took four months, including pulling articles and coding clips, social media, and emails. Putting together the dashboard using Google Sheets took about three weeks.
The reality is that getting good clean data is always the hardest part of any dashboard. Some clients pick the perfect metric and then realize that the data was never there. Others realize after seeing the data in the dashboard that it is totally irrelevant. Still others have too little data to even chart. (In which case you fill it with dummy data until enough of the real stuff comes in.)
Invariably you will encounter someone with an attitude, who still thinks data is power, and who doesn’t want to share theirs. A handy way to deal with this is to go ahead and put together your dashboard but leave a giant gaping hole where that data belongs. Circle it in red. Then name names and shame the holdout person or department into sharing.
Rule #5: A dashboard is just a means to an end.
Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.
—Aaron Levenstein, Business Professor at Baruch College
Remember that the purpose of your dashboard is to continuously improve your processes and to make steady progress toward your goals. Dashboard implementations can be complex and time consuming. Do not get so hung up on your dashboard implementation that you lose site of the reasons behind the effort. Which is to find the insight behind the data. The communications dashboard should facilitate the finding of insights, not provide distraction from that data. ∞
(Thanks to Astryd_MAD on Pixabay for the image.)
