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A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

Board members are busy people. In addition to having multiple responsibilities, directors do not engage on a daily, or even weekly, basis with board activity. As a result, when they do, it is important that they get their information easily and quickly. Board portals in general, and dashboards in particular, are an excellent way for directors and trustees to be informed, and increase engagement.

Board portal dashboards will make the right information available to directors when they need it. And by providing the information in a graphical format, directors can process information more quickly than looking at a spreadsheet.

Board governance dashboards generally are of two types – financial and program-related. Examples of financial dashboards are a balance sheet, profit and loss statement, days in cash (how long funds would be available if no new revenue was generated), and Program Service percentage (percentage of funds that go towards the organization’s mission versus general and administrative expenses).

Some examples of program-related dashboards will illustrate the number of people served by your organization year over year. In a healthcare facility, useful dashboards might be: number of clinic visits, emergency room visits, and hospital admissions for the last three years. A food-pantry could track number of meals served over a specified time period.

To further increase the benefit of dashboards, directors should have access to this information on any device desktop or mobile app. 

We could not write a blog about the benefit of illustrations providing easy to process information without including a few examples:

In summary, to increase board engagement and enable busy directors to process mission-related information quickly, make sure your organization provides them with graphical representations of financial and program-related data.

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