03/04/2020
By Mohona Dutta | Reading time 6 mins
We have spoken, read, heard about Power BI innumerable times and frankly, it’s one of the high-performing analytics tools in today’s times. It can’t be denied that there are other business intelligence tools in the market, but Power BI has made a place for itself owing to its scalability, flexibility, and data visualization feature.
So, to reiterate, what is Power BI? It is a business analytics application that allows organizations to create captivating dashboards, gain 360-degree understanding regarding organizational goals, organize dynamic reports, and make smarter, quicker, data-driven decisions.
Our blog today is about dashboards, more elaborately the kind of dashboards that can be created through this magnificent tool for nonprofits. We can classify nonprofit dashboards into three kinds:
- Business intelligence dashboards
- Operational dashboards
- Analytical dashboards
Business Intelligence Dashboards
A Power BI dashboard has the ability to track KPIs of departments within your nonprofit — or the association as a whole. These can be revised on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis and can be shared internally, or externally as a report for members, sponsors, donors, and stakeholders.
- Program Bearing Dashboard
This dashboard is made for board members, sponsors, and the people who take an interest in your activities. This is a summary of KPIs and other important indicators about programs and impacts.
With Microsoft Power BI you can give a respite to the budget by laying out the data and once the dashboard is set up, you can take screenshots to make presentations or PDFs.
Annual Dashboard
This kind of report builds a narrative around the major milestones of a nonprofit. They talk about the financial health, audience reach, and development of the organization, overall health of the association and its strategic growth while interlacing it with stories from the field and echoing the nonprofit’s mission and goals.
Now, a lot of organizations go with a designed PDF, custom bootstrap HTML solutions, or long scrolling (parallax) template sites and unfortunately, they are time-consuming. It’s better to use Power BI as it saves a great deal of time and you can create a dashboard that is smarter and more dynamic in nature.
Operational Dashboards
These dashboards exhibit recent and updated data, helping you keep a tab of the various activities, programs, tasks in the nonprofit. They project a view of information that is required on a daily or weekly, such as a rundown of the budget spent for ads, sales interactions, support tickets, staff activity, volunteer schedules, web data, donor and fundraising, or social activity.
There are a few common operational dashboards that can be created with Power BI, let’s take a look:
Fiscal Dashboard
This kind of dashboard talks about the entire story relating to your finances when balance sheets, income statements, transaction receipts don’t suffice. The dashboard created with Power BI will help you visualize your nonprofit’s budget deficits or windfalls and to chalk out a proper tactical fiscal strategy for your organization.
You can export data through Microsoft Power BI to dynamically update reports in the system. You can view the yearly performance trends, breakdown of the cost against the sources, ROI, impact per dollar and the primary financial indicators.
Donor Dashboard
It can’t be reiterated enough that donors are one of the pivotal entities for a nonprofit and their contribution, cooperation can help the organization to a great extent. Now if you use archaic spreadsheets to keep their information, their history of the association, donation details, communication preferences, etc. you may lose valuable time sifting through the pages.
With a Power BI dashboard get the right story of your donor’s association revealing key insights aiding your fundraising strategy.
Volunteer Dashboard
A dashboard that can represent the impact of volunteer activity can help inspire volunteers as well as talk about the influence a nonprofit has on the community. Power BI builds impactful and visually stimulating dashboards and they can help you identify the areas wherein you need to put in an extra effort.
You can view the total number of volunteers helping you with your mission, their schedules, hours, training time and their attendance at awareness events and programs through one single dashboard.
Sales Dashboard
With Power BI you can create a dashboard to keep a track of the performance by your sales team based on the location and the person as well as track projected sales revenue of different program tickets or awareness merchandise. As the tool easily integrates with a majority of sales platforms and has robust templates, you can easily view sales leads, pipeline value, segmented leads and trends over time.
Performance Dashboard
You can create a dashboard with the aid of Power BI to understand how your staff is performing. This can come handy for supervisors and for harboring a healthy work environment.
These dashboards created with Power BI are shareable in nature and as an admin, you will be able to control who gets to view the dashboard. It can talk about the tasks and responsibilities of the members, projects completed by them, task segmentation, overtime and cost per task ratio.
Analytical Dashboards
Analytical dashboards demonstrate data in a way that lets users identify trends over time, uncover segments, operate filters, and search for insights. Power BI can incorporate this information by connecting with Google Analytics. This guarantees clean and consistent data visualization.
Joining the two forces of Google Analytics and Power BI you can create custom reporting for your web data. By strengthening your web data in Power BI, you can discover hidden relationships or patterns that point to completely new openings.
You can ask different questions of your data to reveal innovative marketing ideas and ways to attract new members, donors.
You will be able to view site visitor behavior reflecting the nonprofit’s performance. And putting Power BI to work on your Google Analytics data will help you take business insights to an elevated level.
Remember, these dashboards created will be used and viewed by your staff members, donors, and stakeholders. With Power BI you don’t have to worry about representing data in a clean, attractive and precise manner.
Ensure the data fed to the system is accurate. At AhaApps we can help you with setting up Power BI so that you can achieve your mission faster. Connect with us to know more.
Author’s bio:
Mohona is a Content Writer for the Marketing team in AhaApps since 2019. When she is not busy attending to her creative, technical side, she likes to binge on sitcoms on Netflix. She loves writing poems and reading short stories when she wants to break away from the humdrum of life.