Rethinking The Data We Use To Motivate Board Members

It’s no secret that board members are up to their eyeballs in rough news. While there’s no way to avoid it, that doesn’t mean we can’t play the hand we’re dealt and win. For instance, introducing data to keep them motivated and focused on longer term strategic thinking is a great way to pivot from traditional “how much” or “how big” type of reports. There are even opportunities for expanding their scope of information used for healthy data driven decision making.

One specific area to consider is focusing on user profiles.

For example, when designing holiday cards for my Venture Platform clients, they traditionally include some metrics from their Google Analytics account, such as the total number of users that visited their site over the year.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, for most groups that piece of data tends to induce anxiety, even if they understand it’s a normal expectation in the wake of lower event activity.

Alternatively, focusing on data that educates them about who your patrons are helps keep them focused on mission driven outcomes.

In my holiday card example, I used the organization’s metrics to build a thumbnail of the most common site visitor. All that’s need are two dimensions: age group and gender.

From your Google Analytics dashboard, navigate to:

1. Audience > Demographics > Age
2. Audience > Demographics > Gender

It doesn’t take long to see where you can take this, especially if you start using secondary dimensions. You can begin to confirm or dispel something like the notion that older patrons don’t use mobile (spoiler: in most cases, they do).

If you don’t already have experience using secondary dimensions, the good news is they have a low learning curve. Here’s an article with step-by-step instructions I wrote for ArtsHacker.com:

GA Skills For Creating A Data Driven Culture: Secondary Dimensions