How to Build the Best Public Dashboard

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's webinar on how to build the best public dashboard. Today we are welcoming Marissa Salis, one of clearpoint's senior technical account managers and our resident dashboard expert. Marissa has partnered with over 15 cities and counties to build and implement fully customized public facing dashboards. Interviewing Marissa will be Ted Jackson, one of clearpoint's two founders. The audience will be muted for the duration of this webinar, but we encourage you to submit any questions into the Q and A tab without further delay. Ted, I'll go ahead and pass things on to you.

Thanks. Jenna and Marissa, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Let's start with an easy question. Why are local governments so interested in public facing dashboards?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a plethora of reasons, but really three stand out to us as an organization who have been working in this space for so long. And that is, you know, transparency. It's important for local governments to build trust with all of their community members by increasing really that visibility into all the data that they're tracking as a local government, all the initiatives, all the services and everything that they're providing. And through that, it also holds them accountable. Accountable being that really second primary reason, keeping local governments accountable for all the initiatives and everything that they are providing to their community helps to really drive forward those initiatives and ensures that they're staying on track, that they're utilizing that taxpayer money that is funding all of these initiatives and services and ensuring that, you know, we're giving clear insight to how those are going to all of those community members. And through this, it really opens up that conversation to all of those community members to start to engage with the local government. So through that, you know, civic engagement, it increases the number of like, perspectives that are really interacting with the local government and all of the kind of employees that are driving for those initiatives. Bringing in all those diverse perspectives can really just aid to better serving their community, making better data driven decisions and ensuring that they're really serving their people in the best way possible, you know, and that all is to say, you know, there is really some best practices that you can follow to ensure that this is going to be a community dashboard that actually serves those three primary reasons. Because if local governments are tracking tons and tons of data, tons of initiatives, everything like that, those things all might not be necessarily relevant or kind of important for a community member to engage with. So it's really important to be super methodical on how you select your Data and then present it to a way that's really going to be meaningful to your end users, which is what we're really going to be talking about today.

So yeah, great. So to summarize, we can, with this dashboard we can get better community engagement, we can hold our staff accountable and we can provide transparency to residents and to others about what's happening. So we see a lot of traditional three level dashboards. Why do you think this is so popular? And can you share, share some with us so people know what we're talking about when we say a three level dashboard?

Yeah, yeah. So I am going to go ahead and share my screen and show you all a client of ours that is doing a really great job with this three level dashboard.

There we go.

We should be able to see that now. But this here is the city of Fairfield, California. They are utilizing that traditional three level dashboard approach. And really what that means is there's three levels of pages that they're presenting their data on here. This is the landing page. So you can see here that on their landing page they have a few different kind of links up here that provide some like, additional information as well as these focus areas that center around the, the focus areas that this city has decided is kind of most important for their citizens or in their community members. So really that being, you know, homelessness, quality of life, downtown development, housing, organizational excellence and community engagement. So from here you can see these six different focus areas are the ones that they are, you know, choosing to present on for their dashboard. And as a community member, if I'm choosing to engage with this dashboard, I can select kind of the journey of what data I'm most, you know, interested in viewing and getting a little bit more insight to, you know, what is the city of Fairfield doing with regard to, you know, like homelessness, for example. So if we were to click into this page, the idea behind this like middle level or kind of like focus area level page and let me just zoom in a little bit just to ensure we can kind of see everything. Okay. But this page is really to focus on, you know, the projects or initiatives or the measures that the city council is looking at. So it gives you, as you can see, a little bit more insight to what's going on within this specific focus area. So you can see, as I scroll down into here, I can see a little bit of information about like a description as well as some of those initiatives and milestones and everything that they are doing. We can also see a little bit of the like status indicators or the red, yellow, green. This one might be complete to see, you know, what's. How is this progressing as a focus area for the city of Fairfield? So really provides that quick snapshot, really, how are things going? How are things progressing? And really I can get a lot of information just from this page and I don't really necessarily need to click into another level to understand how things are going. But let's just say if I was interested in doing that, for example, for HM 1.1 develop street outreach, if I was interested in getting a little bit more information for, you know, how is this particular initiative going? I see it's yellow. By clicking into this really kind of initiative detail page, this provides even more information about how this particular initiative is going. So you can see as I'm progressing down into the more kind of details of this, I'm able to choose my journey as a community member for, you know, what information I'm most interested in viewing. And by following this journey of clicking through all of these different pages, I have found myself on this page where I can see all of the different kind of timelines for things as well as a qualitative update for this particular initiative. So this really aids in that storytelling of, you know, where are these tax dollars going? What is being done in this focus area and how is that really progressing? And I, you know, understand where this is at and kind of track this over time as the city of Fairfield is really progressing forward and making updates to their dashboard on that regular basis.

Yeah, so this is really cool. And Fairfield seems to be, you know, focused on showcasing all of their projects. I know in the future you'll show us some, some measures. But even for Fairfield, like, if you go back up to that level one, how did they come up with these six areas? Like, is this, is this the exact six that all organizations have? Or, you know, what makes these six important?

Yeah, I mean, good question. So for the city of Fairfield, you know, they've customized this to meet the needs of their community members. So these six are. May look different for another organization on the east coast or in the Midwest or something like that. So being able to tell that really customized story that's going to, you know, be most relevant to their citizens, allows them to best serve them. If every city was doing all the same six focus areas, you can see how that might not serve every kind of diverse population that everyone is serving as a local government. So these dashboards really provide that flexibility.

It would solve all the benchmarking challenges that local governments have if everyone had the Exact same city and the exact size and all of that. Okay, but let's move on. I want to pick up on one of the things you said about Fairfield's storytelling because I think residents are always looking to really better understand their, their city or their county. And, and it's that, that story that's, that's critical. So, so, so tell me a little bit more about, about how organizations, how local governments do storytelling and what are some of your, you know, maybe share one of your favorite stories that come out of a dashboard.

Yeah, no, I'm happy to. So I'm actually going to dive right into the city of Germantown. They're another one of our clients that does a really great job with their storytelling of their data. They actually utilize a combination of metrics and projects to aid in that story of. Okay, they're tracking all this data and what does that really mean for their community members? So Germantown is really interesting in that they choose very kind of deliberate path for this story and ensure that it really curates to what all of their community members, again, are most interested in. So they chose to include between, you know, 30 to 40 of their most important KPIs. They may be tracking way more than that, but they really chose to focus in on that kind of sweet spot for that number of KPIs, because that's going to be most digestible to those citizens. And they also update these all on a quarterly basis as well. So ensuring that they're updated regularly throughout the year can ensure that we have that consistent data that's being brought in over time to see how it changes throughout the year and year over year. And focusing in on those 30 to 40 or so KPIs ensures that we're not tracking hundreds and hundreds of KPIs that I'm going to pull onto a dashboard because that can be a little bit of an information overload for citizens and community members. So it's really important to select those KPIs that really are going to be most relevant to community members to engage with. So for their, the city of Germantown specifically, you can see as I scroll down here, they structure those in a different way. So similar to how we were talking about how the city of Fairfield chose those six focus areas, you can see that these, these are their key performance areas for the city of Germantown and that they're phrased and worded just a little bit differently, maybe a little bit more, you know, department focused. So we have the City Services and Finance, Economic Development, Education, Education and And so on. And you can see also on this homepage how they chose to actually pull out a specific red, yellow, green status for each of their key performance areas. And I think this is a really unique way to display their story in that as a citizen, when I go into the city of Germantown and I am viewing this, I can see that, you know, across all the key performance areas, we're doing a really great job as a city. But maybe land use and transportation is one that we're not necessarily doing, you know, hitting it out of the park with and through this story, I'm unable to click into this second middle level page and understand what might be falling short under this specific key performance area. So the city of Germantown, as I mentioned, displays both KPIs as well as what they call action plans or their projects that they're working on for each of their key performance areas. So you can see as I scroll down here, you know, they don't have too much information, which again aids to that, you know, 30 to 40 or so KPIs not trying to do that information overload for their dashboard. But you can see here that at the very top we have kind of a more general kind of description of what these KPIs are related to. And then we have all the action plans along with their timeline. So I can get a quick snapshot of how this is really kind of going and progressing and what is the kind of expected length of time that the city is going to be working on these. And then the KPIs that are specifically related back to this action plan and this overall kind of objective, some might say. So specifically, if I were to be interested in looking into why is the travel time for Germantown Road lower and below target. So from here again, I'm choosing my journey. I'm selecting the data that's going to be most important to me. Maybe I live off, live off of Germantown Road. And I'm like, why is the traffic so bad? The time. What's going on here? The city needs to fix this. You can see here that the city has actually been tracking this all the way dating back to their fiscal year 2020, and seeing how that data has progressed over time. And I can see that, yes, my suspicions have been correct. They have increased since 20, the fiscal year 2023, and they've stayed pretty high throughout that time. Now, this data shows me there's been an increase, but with the story that they're telling, I'm not able to gather what's actually going on until I go over into the right hand side to look at that qualitative information that aids into that story. So you can see on their dashboard, they have both a description, an analysis, and an impact. So all three of these qualitative fields are going to aid in telling me why has it increased over the last, you know, few years. And through this analysis, it shows me that there's some construction on this boulevard and it varies from season to season. But once the construction is complete, they're going to take a better look at why is this data increased or why is this time and the travel time here increasing. And if they need to investigate a little bit further once that construction is going. So just from three clicks, I'm able to understand why is this KPI below target what's going on here? And I now am an informed citizen and I'm not going to, you know, continue to question what's going on with my city and why are things not going as I expect them to.

Yeah, I think it's really neat because, you know, when you started at that level one, it was like, okay, clearly there is a problem, which is yellow, not bad, it wasn't red. And then we got into that level two, it was like I was, I was reading it as you were talking about it. I was like, oh, it looks like they're doing all these great things for bikes and stuff like that, but then all these problems for cars, and I was like, maybe they're just taking all the lanes for the bike. So I could, if I was a driver, I'd be really mad at all the bikes. But by the time you got to level three, it's more of a construction that's, you know, should be wrapped up, you know, sometime soon. So then I can feel better as a driver that I shouldn't be angry about bikes there. I should just be, you know, worried more about this road construction. That's a great, that's a great story. Do, do local governments that you work with, like, how do they manage ADA accessibility? Just trying to be available to, to all different types of residents or anyone that just comes to their website.

Yeah, so that's a great question. I'm actually going to dive into the city of Bozeman, Montana because they're a customer of ours that does a really great job of kind of making sure that their dashboard is accessible and really usable across all, all individuals who are part of their community. So city of Bozeman, they choose to actually display their climate plan dashboard, which is kind of interesting. So it's not quite their strategic plan, but it's their climate plan. So it's a little bit different. You can kind of see that their different cities are kind of focused on different things just to kind of point that specific part out. But community members really have varying needs for accessibility and really required Asher board be structured super intentionally and in a super flexible format to really accommodate those needs. And as we're developing really all of our dashboards, we really keep this at the forefront of our minds to ensure that they are ADA compliant and they're really accessible for everyone who might want to access and understand this data. So the first thing that we consider is language barriers. So one thing that we incorporate into our dashboards is the Google Translate plugin. So you can see here that, that if I click into here, it's going to provide me with a bunch of different languages that we can click into. So if I, for example, were like speaking Chinese and that was my primary language, you can see that all of the language here translates then to the language that I'm wanting to digest this information in. And as I click through the dashboard, you can see that it also translates into that language for me to then be able to understand from someone who has that different kind of languaging language requirements and everything. So you can see once I exit out of that, everything translates back as well. So it provides that really dynamic ability to change the language and access it from individuals who might speak Spanish or French or whatever it may be. Additionally, we also consider what device someone might be using using to access the dashboard. So we understand not everyone might be accessing the dashboard from a desktop computer or a laptop. Someone might be accessing it from their cell phone or from even their like iPad or something. So as we're generating and creating these dashboards, we actually utilize something called the dev tools to see how dashboards would look when we're. When we're creating them from a like cell phone first perspective. So you can see this dimensions right here is an iPhone 14 Pro Max. So I can see that as I scroll through this, I can still see all the data and everything that I am viewing. And then I can also click through everything and see again how this dashboard transforms to accommodate the differing screen sizes for someone who's accessing it on a different device. So sometimes websites you have to scroll through and it becomes kind of a pain to have to try to find the information you're locating. But our dashboards really do an awesome job of being dynamic in that way. So that if I'm accessing it from my phone and I want to see, okay, when's this construction going to be up on Germantown? Or how is this climate action plan doing for the city of Bozeman? I can dive in here and really get a little bit more information. Now, something else that we also consider is our, like, the branding and everything that we incorporate into these dashboards. So ensuring that there's high contrast and the words are very, like, legible to everyone can also be super helpful for compatibility with visibility and everything like that, as well as, like, screen readers. Ensuring that all of our images have alternative text and everything so that people who utilize a screen reader can then also access the information. So there's a lot of ways we make it accessible and ensure that it's visible for everyone.

No, that's great. I think a lot of times people think about accessibility and think about, you know, does it have the right headers and subheaders and like you said, the contrast and the screen readability and a lot of those things you can't really see. And that's certainly super helpful for, for a segment of the population. But it's like you've also captured languages and the different screens that you're on because it's always the worst when you go to a website that's not good for a phone and you're trying to scroll left and right and up and down at the same time, you get a little lost. So it's cool to see it. And also cool, I think this one, you know, the Bozeman plan being, you know, like, I think, well, let's start. At Fairfield, we saw homelessness, you know, at Germantown we saw land use. And here we see, you know, efficiency and sustainability. So those. That, that level one is so different for, for each organization. I think it's. I think it's really neat to see all of the differences and I think it really makes a personable plan. And as you, I think, led off in the beginning, not every city is the exact same and what they want to share. So but given all these differences, like, how hard is it to keep updated? Like, what does it take to keep one of these plans updated?

Yeah, good question. So specifically, all of these dashboards that we've been walking through have been ones that we create within WordPress, WordPress. So we have a direct integration with WordPress to pull our ClearPoint data from. So this is just a screenshot I pulled from one of our other clients dashboards just to kind of show what it looks like for updating. So you can see that we are selecting to go into our clearpoint section of WordPress and you can see that we're currently pulling data from June 2024. And really all it is, it's just a matter of selecting the dropdown and selecting the period that you want to pull data from. So if I want to push my next quarter of data, I want to pull September. It's going to be as easy as selecting that dropdown, selecting September, clicking update. Maybe we clear the cache and then push it through and then automatically all the data that we have living within clearpoint then gets pushed into the dashboard. So it takes less than five seconds to push everything, which I think is super refreshing because I think maintaining a dashboard can be intimidating. But Clear Point and the way that we manage them makes it super easy to make it not so much of a lift for our end users.

Yeah, I remember when Fort Collins, one of our clients that's been using a dashboard for, I don't know, six to eight years, they said, you know, they update four times a year, I think, and said it was, it went from two days to make an update to 10 minutes. And I was like, 10 minutes? Why does it take you 10 minutes? It should be, it should be even faster. But he talked about the whole process of also qaing their data before they inside of clearpoint, before they, they published it up.

Yeah, and we also have another way in which we host our dashboards too. So as I mentioned, I've been showing all of our dashboards that are in hosted in WordPress, but we recently have released a feature where we have dashboards that are within our clearpoint site themselves, which town of Davey is one client that we have recently published a dashboard with. So, you know, I think creating a WordPress dashboard can sometimes be intimidating, but this process makes it really easy to just select the data that you're wanting to pull into your dashboard, incorporate your branding and then generate it. And you can do this. You know, I think we created this town of Davie one in less than a week for them and that was a lot of back and forth with our technical team just to ensure we're supporting them through the process and everything. So even generating the dashboard from start to finish and then maintaining it through this specific feature can be super, you know, easy and low maintenance from that end user perspective. So you can see it's a very similar format just incorporating their branding, their data. And you can see it's also dynamic too. So it's pretty cool that we're able to Further make this, make this process even more efficient.

Yes. And I remember Davey leveraged some of our AI features to help help them think through as a team, you know, some of the key elements of their strategy. So it's so great to see them move quickly through that process and then quickly through, through a release process. We did get a couple of questions, so wanted to, to run those by you before I, I get back to the rest of my questions. One was, you know, someone asked if we could share the links and you know, to the public dashboards. And so I'll answer that one when we, you know, after we wrap this up, we'll send out a recording and in that recording we will typically, you know, in the place we'll send a link to the recording and in that same location we will include the public facing links to, to all of these dashboards because they are available and we should make it easy for you to, to get to. But then there was another question about, you know, how do people create the, I'm going to kind of reword. The question is, is how do people create the, the charts? Like, does staff need to use a particular form of Excel or, or other program? So just talk through a little bit about, you know, where this information comes from.

Yeah, so within clearpoint we have our own charts. So there really isn't any knowledge of needing to understand how you can generate charts with Excel or anything like that. So really what the process looks like is we have the information stored within clearpoint. So let's say we have a measure where we're inputting actuals versus target. So for example, if I were to click into here, I can see that they're comparing actual versus goal. I'd input it into a table that looks much like Excel and then it automatically generates the chart according to whatever chart I have selected. So we can do all column chart, bar charts, pie charts, column target with line stacked bar. Like we can get pretty complex with a lot of our charting and a lot of our clients really, really impress me and kind of knock it all out of the park when comes to data visualizations to kind of tell the story of their data. So in terms of generating these, we can really easily brand them and customize them to fit whatever charting you're looking to display on a dashboard list such as yours.

Yeah, awesome. And, and the data can be loaded automatically into clearpoint, even on a schedule. So, so once you, you know where your source data is, you can load it into clearpoint. It produces a beautiful chart once a quarter. You just Change your reporting period and all of your dashboards will be updated, which is great. There's one more question. I'm going to take this one before I give you another one, Marissa. So short break for you. But it's does our public facing dashboards, you know, how does that work with creating hard copy annual reports and things like that? So this is, is like a public facing view that connects to the back to the clearpoint backend. Also on the clearpoint back end. And what I mean by back end is just a place for your, your city staff, your, your local government employees to log in and manage their strategy in that part of the tool. There's also what we call a briefing book creator which can take any of those pages and put them into hard copy format. Most people are doing PDF multi page reports and you can create different reports for different audiences. And some people are also exporting to PowerPoint or Excel depending on the information. So before we run out of time, I think we only have a minute or two left. Do you have any other dashboards you want to showcase?

Yes, I actually do. I want to talk through the city of Fort Lauderdale real quick. I know we only have a few minutes, but I think there are a city that's doing a really great job again of, you know, doing a three level dashboard, specifically choosing focus areas or strategic priorities that are specifically relevant to their organization and their community members. Now when I click into this, you can also see how well they do with all of their branding and everything. So being able to comprehensively include their branding in their community dashboard can also create alignment with their city website. So if you can look at their city website and how they display their dashboard, you can see alignment in that it's really cohesive in that matter and that they also do it in a just a little bit of a different way. So they have measures, descriptions, they have actual data points actually being brought out onto this middle level page. So really I don't even need to click onto this page for a little bit more information. But if I were, you can also see how they also very selectively choose to display different types of qualitative fields as well as incorporate their branding. So kind of how I included just a little bit earlier how we have the different charting you can see here, this is a combination of a stacked bar chart with lines and numbers and everything along with the branding that they incorporate in their website as well. So you can again see how comprehensive they can get with their charting which again is all automatically created for them in Clearpoint. It's just a matter of adding it and then selecting which fields they want to specifically display to their citizens.

Yeah, that's great. The other nice thing about them, if you get to the Fort Lauderdale City Hall, a lot of the same branding you see in this dashboard, especially at the top level, that level one that's also in documents that you would find in their conference rooms. Okay, last thing I know, we're out of time. What are some tips for getting started? Give us one or two.

Yeah, real quick. So I think it's really important to check. Just, just start, just dive right in. So whether it's moving quickly, just create something to share, even if it's just qualitative at first, because I think something is better than nothing. And then it's a story that you can really iterate over time. So as you start to develop your strategic plan as a city, the story that you want to tell to your community members, you can build off of that plan and iterate on that dashboard so that you know it is something that's going to be dynamic and it's going to transform as your city transform.

Excellent, Marissa, thank you so much. This was. This was really great. Sorry we didn't have more time, so we might have to bring you back sometime soon.

Thanks, Ted.