A guide to designing a community dashboard linked to a Clearpoint account. Cover your strategic plan first, know who you're talking to, tell stories with your data, keep the design consistent, and plan how you'll get people to actually use it.
You A clearpoint Community Dashboard is a great way to publish information from your clearpoint account online for the public. But what sorts of considerations should you think through as you're publishing that information? This video walks through a few recommendations for the content, features, style and placement of your community Dashboard. Make sure your strategic plan is solidified before you can display your strategic plan on a community Dashboard. You'll want to have your strategic plan in place. And because the information on your Community Dashboard will be linked directly to your clearpoint account, you'll want to have that strategic plan information configured in clearpoint. Before we begin building out a dashboard, pick and choose the most important element when deciding what goals, measures and initiatives to display on a community dashboard. Keep your audience in mind. How much time will they be spending to go through this information on your website and what is their level of familiarity with performance management? Especially if your strategic plan encompasses hundreds of measures and initiatives, you want to consider how best to showcase your progress in a concise and digestible way. Tell a story with your data when sharing data, numbers don't always speak for themselves. What kinds of qualitative information will you include to help viewers understand your progress? For example, this might be a description of how your data was collected, where your targets came from, what that measure tells you about your progress, or how much impact your organization has over that particular measure. For example, if you're a city but you're reporting out on county or state level data, then beyond your strategic plan, what other features will you want to include in your dashboard site? Your strategic plan information will connect directly from your Clearpoint account to your dashboard in WordPress, but what other features will help citizens to understand the information you've displayed? This might be a legend to explain your status indicators, an about page that shows background information on your strategic plan, or a feedback form where citizens can contact you directly if they have questions. Once you have these elements in mind, you can be sure to incorporate them into the final design of your dashboard. This brings us to our next how should your dashboard look? Chances are are your organization has some style guidelines used to ensure that published materials, including websites, have consistent branding. So ask your communications team for any requirements regarding fonts, logos, images and color palettes that your dashboard might need to adhere to. If you're working with the clearpoint team on the design of your dashboard, we'll make sure to incorporate these elements. Once your dashboard is complete, it's time to decide where to display it online, and this is something that your IT team and communications team can help you think through. Consider how citizens will navigate to your dashboard from your website and what other platforms you might use to raise awareness. For example, will you post to social media or give a shout out to your dashboard on an E newsletter? Thinking through these questions will help raise awareness around your dashboard once you've put in all that hard work to create it. If you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to reach out to our dashboard team@supportlearpointstrategy.com we always look forward to hearing from you. Happy reporting.
