Nonprofit Metric Dashboard Builder
7 steps. A few afternoons of real work.
A working first draft of your nonprofit Dashboard to help you make great leadership decisions.
Your progress
You signed up because somewhere in your organization there's a real dashboard problem, too many ideas, no clear priority, or a dashboard that exists but nobody actually uses. Good. That means the real work starts now.
This is built as seven steps, and they build on each other, so work through them in order rather than jumping to whatever looks most useful. Steps 1 through 3 are about getting your head around the task at hand, the framework, the language, the why behind it. From there, steps 3 through 6 are about applying it, actually building your own real life dashboard rather than just understanding the theory behind one. By step seven you'll know exactly what's still missing and where to get help finishing it.
Step 1 of 7
Watch the Overview video
A full walkthrough of how these seven steps fit together, including real guidance for steps four through six, where the actual building happens. Watch this before anything else so step four doesn't feel disconnected from step two.
Watch overview videoStep 2 of 7
Learn the framework
This video unpacks the core content and the tools you'll be using, before you read a single page of the chapter. Before you can pick good metrics, you need the one distinction that separates a useful dashboard from a vanity one. It walks through lead measures, what you control, versus lag measures, what you hope for, using real nonprofit examples, and explains why most dashboards accidentally track only the second kind.
Watch teaching videoStep 3 of 7
Read the chapter
Go deeper at your own pace. The full Impact Dashboard chapter from Built for Impact, yours free, no purchase required. Read it before or after the video, whichever fits how you actually process a new framework.
Download the chapterStep 4 of 7
Brainstorm everything
Download the Metrics Tracker and get your whole team generating ideas, not just you. This step works because it has no filter built into it on purpose. You're not choosing yet, you're just getting every possible metric out of people's heads and onto paper before you've started comparing anything.
Download the Metrics TrackerStep 5 of 7
Build your first draft
Move what you generated in the Tracker into the Impact Dashboard Sheet template. This is where the real work starts, and also where most teams first feel how different picking is from prioritizing. Don't expect this to feel finished, a rough first draft is exactly what this step is for.
Open the Sheet templateStep 6 of 7
See what finished looks like
Five real dashboards, from a global relief NGO to a small animal rescue, each mapped to the same three circle framework, missional health, cultural health, and operational sustainability. Use these to see how far your own draft has to go, and to borrow structure ideas for it.
View example dashboardsStep 7 of 7
Get unstuck with a strategist
Some teams get exactly this far on their own and hit a wall, not because they're out of ideas, but because organizing eight or ten measures into one coherent system is a facilitation problem, not a worksheet problem. A ninety minute session with an Impact Strategist, built entirely around the draft you just created.
