Do you use Microsoft’s Power BI in your daily work? Does your job description include some variation of the words “data analytics” or “dashboard”? No? Same here. But if your job involves understanding and compiling information and working and communicating with other people, the webinar “An Introduction into KPI Reporting Using Power BI” offers a lot of food for thought.

Here are five key points I took away from this insightful and thought-provoking session, led by John Whitney of TMS Global on Feb. 20:

1. The audience is crucial. As prospect researchers, we help to synthesize and prioritize information for key audiences to help them reach their goals. What do they value? What is the service or product(s) that we provide and how can/does it meet our audience’s needs? This can be hard, especially for those of us who get really excited about our shiny tools and what they can do (as Whitney said, “Don’t just build to build!”). Our work has more impact when we take a more balanced approach and think strategically about what people actually need.
2. Less is more. This is kind of related to the idea above. Not every piece of information is relevant for every audience. Whitney suggests honing in on the most important pieces of information and presenting those. Tools like Power BI are helpful in that they can create connections between different data sets, allowing us to condense a lot of data into just one or two views that people can interactively customize.
3. Wireframe your work. In the context of a Power BI dashboard, this means creating a basic visual outline of the content and functionality of the report. Whitney recommends organizing the content into a storyboard format and asking, “What’s the headline story here?” This story headline will make up the top tile in the dashboard, and tiles below will provide context and support for the headline (again, bringing us back to the idea of showing less!). Get feedback on the draft from your stakeholders and iterate. This idea of creating basic outlines of our work, getting feedback and iterating is something we’re all probably accustomed to doing regardless of whether we’re creating dashboards.
4. Patience is key. All the above takes time and you don’t have to do everything at once or be perfect. Understand the needs, wireframe and experiment/discuss. Know your audience well before even getting to the wireframe stage. As Whitney mentioned, when he reports to stakeholders, he already knows what they want to see from months of engagement beforehand (bringing it back to the audience!).
5. There are many ways to do this. An understanding of front-end design is important when it comes to reporting. Equally important to consider is the way data is set up at your institution. The tool(s) you use to prepare data sources for publication in reports and how you share those reports will be determined by lots of factors including the infrastructure and data quality at your institution as well as the structure of your organization.

Finally, there is an appetite in our field for these kinds of discussions. This webinar had almost 200 participants and we could only cover a small portion of the Q&A due to the level of engagement from the audience (so many great questions!). While we can find technical webinars on YouTube, discussions that focus more on the broader how and why of our work — like the one Whitney facilitated — bring so much value to our community. Listen in on the conversation yourself by watching the on-demand recording of this webinar on Apra University.

P.S. — If you’re interested in learning more about web design, Whitney recommends checking out “HTML & CSS: Design and Build Web Sites” by Jon Duckett.