What do I include on a dashboard? How do you guard against cherry picking metrics to look good? How do you select the highest quality metrics? Can you have too many metrics? These were some of the questions that participants raised during a recent webinar hosted by Guidestar and CompassPoint, called How to Build an Organizational Dashboard: Track and Measure Organizational Performance Easily and Inexpensively. The presenter provided a simple example of how organizations can use data to track their progress and share their results using dashboard.

One of the key organizing principles that we find really resonates with clients and makes the idea of measurement and and then the reality of measurement in their organizations much more tangible, palatable and manageable is using outcomes-based thinking to organize the process of measurement. Without the anchor of outcomes, the desired changes that the organization aims to bring about, it is not always easy to discern how all of the things that an organization wants to measure "add up to the whole” and present a clear picture of the organization’s results and impact. Outlining the organization’s outcomes and then identifying the way that the organization will measure their progress toward their outcomes establishes a clear connection and provides a centralized, coordinated and simple way for the organization to talk about its impact.

So, the answers to the questions raised above will be easier to discern once an organization has answered a couple of organizing questions: What are we trying to accomplish? (e.g. what are our outcomes?) How can we measure our progress toward our priority outcomes? (e.g. 2 to 3 practical and relevant indicators per outcome that are available and or easy to aquire).