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Is look and feel the determinant of a great Dashboard?

Well the first dashboards had a very different look and feel (picture of carriage).

They were the wooden or leather boards on the front of the carriage that stopped the mud and stones hitting the driver..

And as the meaning of the word changed car designers worked to achieve a classic look and communicate information effectively

And of course the modern marketing dashboard is nothing if it doesn’t communicate information effectively.

Now look and feel is obviously an important contributor to that… but I’d argue that for any marketing agency your experts
are your greatest differentiator.. The source of the agency’s creativity… the major reason the client picked your agency..

Now your experts gain power from their expertise, and clients want the human connection – not least to answer questions.

So shouldn’t the marketing dashboard for your clients also share the personality and expertise of your people?

How does an Excel spreadsheet do that?

Or a web page full of pretty pie charts?

Of course an obvious answer might be – that’s why we have a monthly meeting…

But how often have you found corporate demands made it impossible for all the people interested in the report to attend.

Deprived of personality your dashboard can become another dry report circulated to the busy executive, so your visibility reduces.

So what kind of content would best share your people’s expertise and get clients excited?

Shouldn’t the meaning and information content of dashboard be changing once again! At least in part to help agencies build better relationships with their clients?

Welcome to a video about online Dashboards that isn’t like the others..

For a start – there’s no visuals of the dashboard…which’ll probably seem odd…

But showing you a screen of what your dashboard could look like would be sensible
only if we’d decided our dashboard should limit your choice to our ideas…

And we think that’s daft.

And we could have shown you pictures of charted trend lines & pie charts…

but we figure that wouldn’t is innovative or worthy of your time…

The different approach we’ve taken is more like the way wordpress and web “themes”.
So it’s not light or dark – but any look and feel you want..

Anything that can be shown on the web (audio, video) and yes even text!! if it makes sense.

No fancy drag and drop editor to stifle creativity.

No pretence of self service, forcing you to find staff capable of being training and accepting yet more workload.

Instead powerful, flexible automated cleansing and customisation of data unlimited by spreadsheet like functionality.

So why not grab some paper, doodle some ideas and arrange a chat about possibilities…
opening up the prospect of really innovative dashboards for you and your clients…

Are your marketing reports mute like grainy silent mime?

Quick extract of Marcel Marceau..

You see charts / spreadsheets aren’t anywhere near as good as Marcel Marceau was at conveying meaning through mime.

Any accompanying commentary won’t be in a repeatable form. Chances are it’s verbal via phone conference, meetings, Q&A. And you know how easily messages get lost as these get sidetracked.

I’m not advocating writing it all out longhand. For many purposes tables and charts are much better. They make it much easier to communicate. But where do you put the soundtrack (the expansive explanations that are really needed)?

Many important corporate stakeholders won’t get to the meeting or hear you. All they have is the report without the sound track..
Worse – people who heard the sound track and thought they understood – will try and explain, putting their spin onto it.. Your clarity, pearls of wisdom get lost… misrepresented even..

And what happens when your contacts are off sick or leave? Evidence of your insights, understanding & hard work are lost to your client.

It’s broken. Ridiculous. It shouldn’t be like this. Not in this day and age?