A beginner's guide to impactful reports and dashboards

Pulling a report is not just for analysts. With effective reports and insightful dashboards, you can empower everyone on your team to participate in the decision-making process.‍

Accurate, real-time, and detailed reports and dashboards are a fundamental component of managing the day-to-day operations of your organization, as well as thoughtfully engaging with your community members.

Whether you are launching a fundraising initiative, strategizing for effective marketing campaigns, seeking program registrations insights, or simply tracking the daily KPIs of your respective teams, having effective reporting methods and instant access to dashboard metrics will save you critical time and resources, enabling you and your team to focus on what matters - fulfilling your mission. ‍

What we'll uncover:

• The importance of having all of your data in one system, with a demonstration of building insightful reports and impactful dashboards in Salesforce with Traction Rec
• How to know what type of data is the right data to find the answers you need
• Common questions and challenges of reporting, as seen in YMCAs and JCCs, and how to overcome them, with insights from YMCA of San Francisco
• Rarely used, yet incredibly effective, reporting and dashboard tools

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Highlights

• [3:48] The challenges with reporting and analytics (what you told us!)
• [6:17] Salesforce is growing in the nonprofit world, and its a game change
• [8:35] Starting with the fundamentals, a common language and definition
• [17:59] Demonstration of building a report with Traction Rec and Salesforce
• [47:30] The flexibility of how to share information across your org
• [54:07] Building confidence in your own data

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Key Takeaways

The nonprofit game is changing

The use of Salesforce in the world of nonprofits is growing very fast. Knowing these basics and terminology is going to be as common as the other word processing tools we know of, use and refer to as well.

Building, reading and interpreting reports and dashboards is now a core competency. These are becoming transferable knowledge skills that you can use throughout the career.

The game changes completely when you start using Salesforce. Everything you thought you knew how to do before is now different. This is a big change. But the best part is, the rules of this game are now up to you.

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We're using data to tell our story, so give your story a headline

Data helps us tell our story and provide our measured of impact. The more we can consolidate and create consistent data points and segment, the faster we can deliver information to people to act upon. We don't want to react to old data and miss opportunity.

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The data and tools are now in your hands

Now you're in control because data is available to anyone. So see what you can do. It is a learning process. It is different. It takes practice. But it is the most powerful tool you can use, out-of-the-box in Salesforce.