Qualitative Dashboard?

January 28, 2019 6:35 AM

I'm tasked with making a dashboard for my org, which will show the current status of our accounts/goals/KPIs. The challenge: We have a lot of qualitative updates. I'd like to use something that can automatically pull some things (Asana, Google Analytics, etc.), but can also handle team members adding in arbitrary text updates. What would you use? [Snowflakes inside.]

Many other coworkers have tried and failed at this task, because their solution is too clunky or the learning curve is too steep. I'd like to succeed, despite the dangers.
Needs:
* Can be updated by many people
* Cloud based (we have remote folks)
* Can pull some stats automatically (through Zapier etc if needed)
* Can show graphs/charts for quantitative updates, like showing we're at 15/16 targets for January.
* Can handle qualitative updates, like "Talked to [client] on 1/28 - They are running past legal"
* Easy to use once someone sets it up -- If my boss is initially confused by how it works, it'll die an immediate death.

Are there tools that would match our use case? I've shallowly looked at a few sales-based dashboards, but they seem to exclusively work with numerical goals.

Thank you MeFites!

posted by matrixclown to Technology (3 answers total)

We used something like this at my last job and it worked pretty well. I never had to set it up though so I'm not sure how hard that part was.
posted by dawkins_7 at 1:40 PM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

I’ve been using Geckoboard to do something similar for the past four months. Its ability to pull individual cells in Google Sheets means as well as pulling a grid of cells means you can assign a sheet or sections of a sheet to individuals and then pull what you need into either a single numeric or text based widget or a widget that is a set of rows, cols or both.

I’m using it for individual numeric KPIs, some as totals, some as percentage of a whole, as well as text based data (in my case it’s snow conditions described from several ski resorts). It also pulls in our Google Analytics, Google Ads, Zendesk, Zapier, Pingdom, web based images and all of the usual suspects.

I’m really happy with Geckboard, I like it’s widgets, it’s ease of use and integration, it’s thoughtful nice in the ability to lay out and resize widgets and it’s ability to transform data. My main complaint is the cost per dashboard (roughly $25 per board, per month) is pretty expensive (for my org) and the tier where you can apply custom branding costs even more per board, per month. Also, they don’t have a native weather widget.
posted by furtive at 2:16 AM on January 29, 2019

Tableau Server online would work well for this. You could keep a revision history of dashboards that get published, and you could put the qualitative information in a text object. Not hard either.
posted by oceanjesse at 5:17 AM on January 29, 2019