How do you track program performance with a dashboard?

1 Why use a dashboard?

A dashboard can help you answer important questions about your program, such as whether you are meeting your targets and objectives, what the main results and impacts of your program are, how you are using your resources and budget, what risks and issues need your attention, and how to improve your program performance and quality. Additionally, a dashboard can simplify complex data sets into easy-to-understand charts and graphs, compare different aspects of your program, highlight trends, patterns, and anomalies in your data, identify gaps, strengths, and weaknesses in your program, and showcase program achievements and best practices.

2 How to create a dashboard?

Creating a dashboard involves defining its purpose and audience, selecting the KPIs and metrics, choosing a design and layout, testing and refining the dashboard, and updating and maintaining it. Consider what the main goal of your dashboard is, who will use it, and how often. Additionally, think about which indicators and measures of your program performance are most relevant, how you will collect and analyze them, how you will organize and present your data in an attractive way, what types of charts and graphs you will use, how you will label and color-code them, how to ensure accuracy and reliability, how to solicit feedback from your audience and stakeholders, how to keep your dashboard current and relevant, as well as how to track changes in your program.

3 How to use a dashboard?

Using a dashboard effectively requires aligning it with your program strategy and logic model, which should reflect your program vision, mission, goals, objectives, outputs, outcomes, and impacts. It is important to review the dashboard regularly and critically to identify achievements, challenges, and opportunities for improvement. Additionally, the dashboard should be shared with stakeholders and partners as a way to communicate and collaborate. Finally, the dashboard should be used to inform decision-making and action-planning so that program plans, activities, resources, and budget can be adjusted as needed.

4 What are the benefits of using a dashboard?

Using a dashboard can bring many benefits, such as saving time and resources through automation and streamlining of data collection, analysis, reporting, and presentation tasks. It can also enhance program accountability and transparency by demonstrating performance and quality to stakeholders, partners, and donors. Moreover, a dashboard can improve program learning and innovation by generating insights from data and identifying best practices and innovations.

5 What are the challenges of using a dashboard?

Using a dashboard can also present some challenges, such as ensuring the data quality and reliability. You need to make sure your data sources are credible and valid, and that your data collection and analysis methods are rigorous. Additionally, you need to be careful to not overload the dashboard with too much or too little information; it should be well-designed and organized. Adapting to changing contexts and needs is also important; your dashboard should be updated and revised regularly, while seeking feedback from users and stakeholders.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?