 So, welcome everyone, delighted to have you here with us today. You're stumbling into a NetSquared event, or really it's a non-profit tech club Austin event, but we're one of the supporters and I'll be doing the intro here with you today. So I'm Eli and I'm a community manager with TechSoup, which means I get to basically be the cheerleader for local champions of people hosting tech for good events around the world. Today, your host is Sean, who's going to take over from me and make the whole thing beautiful and smooth. So these NetSquared affiliated groups are part of a global network of tech for good meetups. And if you haven't run in yet to our parent company TechSoup, it's a non-profit that helps other non-profits get implemented and use technology. So when I said global, I totally was not kidding. There are these tech for good chapters all over, whether there's one in you're coming from Seattle, there's a group there, Tech for Good Seattle, or maybe you're in Washington D.C. or London, or maybe you're Nairobi. We've got a group close for you and one day when we can all get together in person to have a beer and complain about our boss, that's where non-profit technology nerds will get together as well. So like every community, we have some rules. One, we welcome everyone. Two, we put our community first because we're here to support each other. Three, we're here to build stronger non-profits. So that's our real goal. The technology side is sort of the lens we use to talk about how we can build those stronger non-profits. But ultimately, we're not a tech group, but rather a non-profit focused group. Four, we invite participation. We think that everyone has something to learn and contribute. So we encourage you to get involved, which is either throw something into the chat, or maybe you've got a great idea. You can reach out to us and we'll tell you how in a moment. And finally, because we invite your participation, we also ask for you to bring your kindest and most empathetic self. So before you put something into the chat window, before you ask a question, just ask yourself, have I phrased this in the best possible way that's clearest and most inclusive if the answer is yes, then chat away. So this chapter is run by a group of volunteers. Coming up with events every month is, well, it's hard for every other group, but not for this group. As you'll see, they've got a full agenda going through the rest of the year. But actually, they could still use your ideas. So if you've got a great idea, a presenter who you think should be here at a future event, maybe you want to be taking notes during these events, please reach out in the chat and we would love to put you to work. So I'm going to give you a quick summary of TechSoup. So there are non-profit that helps other non-profits get access to all the core technology, the hardware, the software, the services. And what they do is they've partnered with about 120 of the largest technology companies, the Microsoft, the Google, the Adobe, the Zoom, the product we're in right now, the DocuSigns, and they are basically the go-to place for those companies in kind and donated programs. So it's basically for the fundraisers in the room, the dream, which is what if you could write one grant application and then use that exact grant application word for word for another organization and another foundation and another foundation. And that's kind of what you do with TechSoup. You create your free account to basically prove that you're a non-profit. And then once we've done that validation, you can now use that exact same validation to get instant verification for any of the other software discounts or donations you apply for through our program. So just to give you a sense of what that could look like, say you're a non-profit with 10 staff, I put together a bundle of pretty typical software. And this gives you a good sense of the kinds of savings that you could have as an organization by going through TechSoup. And by the way, did I mention that it's free? So if you haven't yet, I totally encourage you to go and check it out. So this group is currently hosting events that can be found at events.techsoup.org. They're also, of course, on their Facebook page. So I encourage you to go to either of those places if you haven't yet and make sure you join the chapter so you can get alerts about upcoming events because there are upcoming events. Check this out. Here's just four, but actually there is a full agenda going to the end of the calendar year. So definitely sign up because there's more great events coming. And with that, I'm going to get out of the way and turn it over to your host for the day. Eli, thank you very much for that warm setup. And folks, sometimes I forget that not everybody knows about TechSoup because I've been using them for more than 15 years now and they are the real deal. And so really, if you haven't checked them out, check them out because they can save you all kinds of crazy money on your software and they have lots of good information, articles, and groups to help you really get on top of whatever your technology is for your nonprofit. So that's something that definitely everybody who's operating a nonprofit needs to know about. So today we're going to learn about leveraging financial dashboards for success. This is a presentation I've been looking forward to for close to a year because it's been about a year since I met Chad and I'll be introducing him to you in a minute. And so he and I met and then I got to meet Michael, the co-founder of Azul Analysis and they just really blew me away. I love what they're doing. I'm so excited that they get to share that with you today. And so without any further ado, let me tell you a little bit more about who they are and then they're going to take it away. Michael Gardner, he is the president of Azul Analysis. He's been working in nonprofits for 10 years doing operations management and he's based in the San Francisco area. And we also have with us Chad Wolver. He is a nonprofit tech leader, finance accounting nerd, experienced board member, former Peace Corps volunteer. And he's based in Phoenix, Arizona where you may have heard as experiencing an interesting time warp right now. And there's their company, they're going to be telling you more about it and the work that they're doing to make it easy for nonprofits to make their financial information accessible to the board and to management. The people that actually need to be able to understand the numbers because right now it can be kind of murky. And it is the first tool of its kind. You know, ever since I've met them, I kind of understood what they were working at. I kind of have had my ears open and my eyes open and I haven't seen anything really like what they're doing, which is amazing because the need is pretty big and the opportunity for them to do a lot of good in the nonprofit space is humongous. And it is, it's an automated dashboard. It's going to make it simple, make it a lot easier to get those reports to the people that need them and for them to understand the reports. It's going to save time for organizations and help build in that financial transparency, that trust, and that sustainability that we always know it's always a good thing to increase that wherever we are. And so with that, I'm going to go ahead and hand it off to Chad and Michael and take it away, guys. Great. Thank you so much, John. Really appreciate the introduction. Thank you, Eli, for that wonderful overview of Inten and TechSoup. So can you all see my screen, the presentation? Yes. Getting some nods. Okay, great. Yeah, so we're very excited to be here to present about how you can leverage financial dashboards for success. A couple housekeeping things real quick. If you decide to tweet about this or put anything on social media, we have two hashtags up here for you. Hashtag NPE Tech Club ATX and then also hashtag Azul Analysis. That way we can keep track and respond to them and get you some momentum going. So let's get right into it. But before we get right into it, actually, we just want to say a quick thank you to Nonprofit Tech Club Austin, TechSoup Connect, Inten, and then Capital Factory. We wouldn't be here without you. So we really appreciate the opportunity to give us some knowledge. So before we get into dashboards, it's really important for us to define what a dashboard is. There's a lot of misinformation out there about what it is and what it isn't. So we're going to use this definition for the remainder of the session. And the most important thing here is that it uses that we're going to use the most important information. So a dashboard looks at the most important information for an organization and it fits onto a single screen. And when we say screen, it could be a PDF. It could be a document, like a physical piece of paper, but one area that you're looking at, you can see everything at once. So visual display, most important information, achieve particular objectives, single screen, and then you can monitor it at a glance. This was a definition by Stephen Pugh. So we could go on and on and on about why you should use a dashboard to supplement your financials, but we have kind of distilled it into a couple different really important things. And you can see that here. Everything boils down to this. Your audience is composed of human beings and humans prefer to learn and see things visually. That's just the numbers point that direction every single which way you look at it. They are numbers and math adverse, and it's hard to extrapolate messages from text. And if you want them to get the right message, it's even harder to focus people on the right message. And I think we've seen that if you've been in a boardroom or if you've worked with a lot of boards over the years, you see that in board members' eyes when all of a sudden somebody brings up the financials and their eyes just kind of glaze over and they're not paying attention anymore because it's information overload, it's not focus, and that's not how people prefer to learn. So the best way to engage board members and frankly managers of organizations is to use visual representation of data to do it. And the challenge then becomes because you're working with humans, how do you communicate the message effectively? And that's what we're going to teach you how to do, and we're going to hope that you can walk away with a couple of really good pro tips to communicate messages effectively and design a dashboard that works for your organization. And also give you some free tools to use if you don't have the capacity to pay for them. So I'm going to pass it over to Michael to kind of give us an overview and get us started. Yeah, so we're going to outline a couple of things for kind of main points, planning, design, example, and use examples, and then tools that could help you build up your dashboard. And so we're going to start off with the one and only, just like anything else, planning. You got to start there before you start any journey, anywhere, make sure you got a plan to know where you're going. So one of the first things to consider as you're planning out your route is what's your context? Who's your audience? What's the role in the organization? What's their knowledge level? What type of information do they even need? How often is the information being seen? What's their perspective? You know, really think about the audience as a whole that you're trying to present to. It's going to really dictate a lot of what you put on the screen, what you gather, and so on. And so this next slide will kind of help illustrate a little bit more about that. You know, the type of granularity or format of the data will change depending on the audience. So the two spectrums that we have here are the types of financial data presented, you know, financial and managerial from top to bottom. And then the level of granularity, more granular on the left side of this chart with less granular data on the right side. So as you can kind of see, there's there's multiple areas of individuals you might be wanting to present the information to, whether it be a board of directors, maybe your executive director could be potential funders. You kind of see how depending on where these individuals fall, it's really, really going to really going to impact the information you want to share with them. You know, think about, you know, I think the easiest one to explain is the one in the top right community members. They're just looking for the financials. They're not looking for all the dirt and the gritty details. But you can still speak the whole story of your organization just by what you're presenting, based on how you've organized it, considering their your audience and moving forward. So one of the most important things to consider is, is frequency as I kind of previously mentioned. And that will dictate your automation requirements. So one of the examples to kind of easily think about, if it's, if it's an individual who's only going to be looking at your dashboard once or twice a year, it's probably not the best idea to invest in any kind of automation, since you could spend, you know, a couple hours here and there, about once or twice a year and update your dashboard for the individual reviewing it. If it's somebody who's going to be popping in there once a week. So people like to spend the time kind of doing all that stuff. I'm not a fan of it. I like to have a lot of automation to make it a little bit easier. I would encourage it. So that'd be something to consider, you know, because you want when the individual, whoever your audience is, that is reviewing the information, you want to make sure that the information is up to date. You know, it's just think about any decision you make in any context, if you're working without a data information or not updated information, it could send you down a path that just isn't accurate to what's going on with your organization. So considering this is a financial dashboard, you know, it's important, you know, you don't want a board of director or somebody who's making a financial decision for your organization, not aware of the, you know, $10,000 grant that you just received a week ago, because your automation is set up for monthly, despite the fact that they're popping in there once a week to see all of your financial data. So frequency will determine that automation requirement. Kind of goes hand in hand, what's your purpose? What are you trying to achieve? You know, one of the things that's important to consider with a lot of this is, is you aren't just, you know, most organizations, and if you are doing this, I would encourage you to try and think about what change you're trying to instill, what's the message you're trying to get across, you know, what's the purpose? What are you trying to achieve? Are you, you know, trying to encourage lean, you know, lean expenses to help bring down your expenses to help expand your profit margin? You know, are you looking to move financials somewhere else? What metrics matter? What does your audience care about? Think about how that dashboard will impact behavior and then just fill in the holes, find what's missing. Sometimes less is more, but again, it's really all going to be dictated by your audience from step one and now we're moving forward into the purpose, you know, more details of the context of your dashboard. So a couple of considerations to help further get your mind going about the purpose is the knowledge of the users. Are they novice, intermediate, advanced knowledge of finance? You know, if somebody's very knowledgeable of finance, you probably can skimp a little bit of definitions and just show the raw data. For others, you might need to give a little bit of a backstory or a little bit more information. Data integrity. I think it's something that can be a little bit overlooked depending on your operations, but data activity is huge. You know, how accurate is the data on your dashboard? Is it old? Is it new? Is it, is it, you know, reporting the same way? Or you have different qualifiers, you know, all that kind of stuff plays into the data of integrity. Data sources is another thing that's important. You got to map out where the data is coming from. If you have multiple avenues of, you know, data flowing, you want to make sure it's all coming together seamlessly and it's not over-complicating or cluttering up what you have on the screen. Redundancy is another very important one. It's how are you backing up your dashboard for future reference? You know, cloud-based, is it going to be physical format? Is it, you know, are there going to be things that you need to change or reference or look back on? All these kind of things are going to be important to consider as you move forward with how you're going to plan out your dashboards. Cyber security is becoming more and more, no matter what you do. Cyber, you know, we're becoming more and more technologically inclined to run our operations. And so, are your API secure? Are your password secure? Do you have, you know, like what gets talked about a lot in the healthcare world? Do you have your password on a post-it on your computer? Stuff like that is all going to play into your cybersecurity. Distribution is another thing to consider, which is how will this be distributed? Is it going to be in a PDF? Is it going to be in a more interactable dashboard where they might be able to change things as they please? Is it just going to be, you know, a PowerPoint presentation? You know, always consider these kind of things and how you're organizing and setting up your dashboard. And then lastly, it kind of ties into everything else is control and access. Who has control? Who's actually changing or updating the data versus who's just going to look at it? You know, all of this, you know, increases. The more hands-on that can manipulate or change the data or update it, your risk is going to be a little bit higher. So if you're more, want to keep it on a less risky size, keep it in one hand. However, but you might grant access, at least in terms of like kind of like a view-only file type of thing for anybody else. And so kind of wrapping it up with another quote for those, for those two from Steven Few is bringing it back to what I said earlier about wanting to affect behavior. Performance management is most effective when you're able to prevent bad things from happening and improve opportunities for good things to occur. The nice thing about financial dashboards, if you've got them running clean is for some of us who might not be more, you know, have that 98% math anxiety. It is pretty amazing how just numbers and bar graphs and very simple things, which Chad's going to elaborate a little bit more on, can really tell your story and how sometimes if you overdo it or over clutter or put too much on a screen, it kind of gets muddy. Remember, we're looking to find the bad things that are financials to be able to improve them. And we're also looking to reflect on our good things that are occurring to be able to improve and share that across all financial avenues. So Chad's going to give us a lovely examples of design and how to move forward from there. And Chad, before you go, Michael, can I pass on a question to you that seems pertinent to your presentation? Yeah. Andrea asked, please tell me there's a system that creates dashboards for different audiences without requiring their individual creation. This came out right around your first or second slide, the matrix. Oh, right. Yeah. So the answer is there is not a tool that, at least that I've seen that can, unless you have a very customized build that will show data in different ways to multiple stakeholders. We'll talk about some tools at the very end. But the key thing is not every audience that you're going to be talking to needs a dashboard. So think about your external, so your individual donors. They may not need a dashboard. Maybe they'll be satisfied with just an annual report. And maybe that only updates once a year. You put in some effort to make an annual report five or six hours. I don't know. Maybe you longer in some cases, but you take the time to create that report and send out once a year. That doesn't really require a dashboard. But if you're really trying to use a financial dashboard to help internal managers, you need to figure out, okay, well, what do they need to see? It kind of goes back to the first and second step, that concept, the context, and then your purpose of your dashboard, your planning. And you need to figure out what is the audience? Do they really need a dashboard? And then how do you create that dashboard to speak to that audience? Hopefully that answers that question. There we go. Yeah, she replies. That makes sense. Thank you for speaking to it. Well done, Chad. Michael. Perfect. And I just want to emphasize that the quality of your dashboard really depends on and the usefulness of your dashboard really depends on the context in which you present and the planning process that you invest. The easiest way to figure out if your dashboard is speaking to your audience in a meaningful way is to ask them for feedback on it. If you have five or six metrics that you're displaying, you're sending them a PDF, ask them, are these the right metrics? Is this helpful for you? Do you find this interesting? Is this the best way that you want to receive this information? Or would you rather receive something on a dashboard like a browser format? So there are ways to get feedback and continually iterate to improve. That's just something that you should be doing to improve your organization and your programs. You should also use it for your dashboard. Okay, let's get into some design. The interesting thing about design is that it is a very powerful tool. And if you use design correctly, you speak to your audience in a way that is useful for them and makes it easy for them to read, you're going to have a very successful, you're going to engage people very successfully. But if you choose the wrong charts, if you choose the wrong colors, if you choose the wrong way to present the information, it's going to completely distract from your message. And it's something that you don't even realize you're doing. So this is something that's very important. And a lot of organizations do get this wrong, unfortunately. So we're going to teach you some design tips and tricks to help you communicate your message effectively. So I'm going to give you a quick example of how this works. So on the screen, you can see here, I put up a bunch of text. And the question is, how many A's are there? This is a very poorly encoded message because I could change one thing. And I could immediately emphasize how many A's there are by encoding my message differently. You can see by just changing the intensity of the hue of the A's, you can see how many A's are there very clearly. So how you display data is arguably more important than the data itself. So how do you design for impact? This is the question I'm posing to you. And it's really about focusing on the basics. Chart selection, arrangement, and hue and intensity, which most people consider to be color. So let's get into some chart selection first. There's this guy's name, Edward Tuft. He is kind of the founder, the godfather of dashboards. He said, if the statistics are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. So we're going to talk about some charts that we've seen on dashboards that are ineffective or less than ideal. And we want to do this to help you understand how important chart selection is in crafting a dashboard because it's where we've seen organizations go wrong more often than not. So the first one, and they do it because of what Edward said, he said, if the statistics are boring, you've got the wrong numbers. And they use particular graphs to make it more interesting when they really should be changing what they're focusing on. So I'm going to go in the order of least commonly seen from our side to the most commonly seen. And we're going to talk about why they're not good options for graphs. So the first one is an icon icon graph. It is a kind of a fun way of displaying data, but it's not very clean. For example, here, the colors are not encoded correctly. I don't know why there's two different green areas. The designer of the dashboard really tried to make it interesting, but maybe that's the problem. It's just the wrong data. The second one we see sometimes it's a 3D multidimensional graph. This is when an organization is trying to display a lot of data, but it's really too much in one graph. And there's a lot of color on this graph. So it's hard to interpret what exactly is going on. You can also see because it's three dimensional, some data is hidden. So it's hard for people to understand instantaneously what this graph is trying to communicate. The third one is any type of three dimensional graph on your dashboard. I've seen this a lot. I actually saw it this morning on an organization's dashboard. They used a 3D pie chart, which we will talk about in a second, but the depth, this second dimension or this third dimension that you're showing on a graph, it just adds confusion to the actual values. And you could make it much more simple with just a flat 2D graph. And again, in this instance, there's how many colors? There's five different colors on this graph. You could communicate the same message with one color. So it's really about the data and making the data speak for itself as opposed to finding ways to highlight data and make it interesting. This is another type of graph that we've seen. It's a gauge graph. So this isn't necessarily a bad graph. Like you instantly know what it is. You can see there's red, yellow, green, but you can display the same information in a much smaller space. And you can add a lot more context behind the information that's on this graph. So it is relatively intuitive, but there's a better way to display it. The fifth one that we've seen, I actually saw it last week and I cringed was a radar graph. Honestly, it's too much stimulus and it's really hard to understand intuitively what you're trying to communicate and the degree to which the different axes are being displayed. So stay away from radar graphs. And then this one is going to be a little controversial. I know people are going to be very shocked, but pie charts. Michael and I hate pie charts. Please don't use pie charts, even if you're putting labels on the different slices. The reality, even though it's very common, we see it all over the place, the reality is besides the fact that you know intuitively that all the sizes are supposed to equal 100%, it's hard to see the relativity of the slices. And you can see right here, they even broke out one big slice in the even smaller slices. And it doesn't show how big those individual pieces are relative to the other slices. The other thing with this is they've used a lot of colors to describe the different pieces. There's a much easier, more simple way to describe this amount of data, and we're going to show you how to do that. But I want to say something about pie charts. Michael and I just hate them. We see them all the time. We have learned to despise pie charts and we've actually created a hashtag called despise the pie. So if you ever see a pie chart, we want you to tweet it out with this hashtag because we do not like pie charts and we figure that you should not like pie charts either. Okay, but Chad, what can I use in order to display messages effectively? What charts should I be using? I'm going to give you three simple options. Number one, bar charts. We really like bar charts because it's very easy to see and encode meaning within the individual bars. And you want to use this when time value is not connecting the data points, when you want to look at distinct points in time. And it's really easy to put a lot of information in a bar chart and also layer in benchmarks or layer in a budget figure. I'm going to show you how that works here. So you can see this is the bar chart. And we've put in a green line that shows, okay, this is where it should be. And you can see relative to a benchmark how your organization is doing in each of the periods. So stick with bar charts. We like bar charts. The second one is line charts. They're really useful when you're talking about interconnected points in a graph. So a time series. When you want to see trend lines, this is a really good way to describe trend lines. And when you want to compare it to a benchmark or to a budget number, it's really easy to put it in a benchmark line on top of your data. And it still maintains a really easy visual that's very intuitive for your audience. The third one might throw you for a loop a little bit, but it is a very effective way to show a lot of information in a small area. And I'm going to put it on the screen. Nobody freaked out. I'm going to explain it in a second. So this is a bullet chart. This is what a bullet chart looks like. This is actually five bullet charts in one. And you can see that it kind of looks like a bullet shooting out of a gun. And the big dark line is the actual performance. The vertical marker is where the goal is. And then in this instance, we've even encoded the better area and the best area with a simple shading mechanic behind the actual bullet graph. So in a very small area, you can put a lot of information into a dashboard. And this is very helpful, especially if you are designing a dashboard for something like a mobile device. So if you want to show information on a mobile device, this is a really good way to do it. Or if you have a lot of information needed to show on a bigger dashboard, and it's maybe, for example, if you have a revenue and you want to show it by program, this is a really easy way to say, okay, well, these four programs have met their goal for this month, it's year to date, whatever it is. And these haven't met it. So bullet graphs are bullet charts are really easy to use. You can actually do this in Excel. There's lots of information on how to do it. So how do you apply this? Again, stick to your bar charts, your line charts, and your bullet graphs, your bullet graphs, and please never use pie charts to spy as a pie. So once you have the charts that you've selected, so you have your context, you've planned it out with your audience, you know exactly what you want to communicate, you have your charts in line. The next thing is to figure out, okay, well, how do you display the data? And there's some really easy methods to communicate data effectively. So we're going to talk about some quick visual perception, some rules of visual perception. These aren't ours, we didn't create these, it's actually called Gestalt's Principles of Visual Perception. There's a lot of them, but we're only going to talk about three of them. And I'm going to display the first one on the graph. I'm going to show you nine dots on a graph on the page. So this is a classic example of proximity. So this doesn't mean anything, it's just nine dots on a graph. But we've put them close together and created space in between them. So this is a classic case of your brain thinking that because things are close together, they are related, or they need to be seen together in the same context. So if you want to talk about data in a related way, put them close together. The second one here is a, it's called enclosure. So we've enclosed our dots in two different ways. The top one is we've created a line around specific things, specific dots. And you can see that that line excludes data. So it says these five, these five dots here are related and everything else is dissimilar to this. It's not related. On the bottom part, we've done the same thing, but we've just used shading. And this is maybe a little bit softer way, so maybe it's not exclusionary, but it is a way to group data together. And this can be done by creating lines around graphs that should be viewed together on a dashboard and exclude graphs that are independent. So if you just want to group your income statement or your P and L graphs together and put a line around it, and you want to put your balance sheet graphs on another line, you want to put additional metrics that are more qualitative. You can create groupings by using lines or shading. And the last one is similarity. So we'll talk about this in a minute, but the main point is you can see that even if you have to vary what the data kind of looks like in terms of how big it is or how small it is or how it's tilted on the graph or how it's oriented, as long as it looks similar, it will be perceived by the human eye to be similar. And if you want things to look dissimilar, so we've done circles, triangles, ovals, you can see how easy it is for the eye to instantly know that there are three different groups. So just by using proximity, by using enclosure, and by showing similarity or dissimilarity, you make a big difference. The other thing about visual perception is on a dashboard. Remember, dashboard is one page or one screen or one page of a PDF. You have to treat it like real state. And there are certain areas of that real state that are going to be more important, and those areas that are going to be less important. So think about how we read. On the top left hand side, it's going to be the most important data. It's going to be the first thing that people see. And the very last thing that people will see will be on that bottom right quadrant. So you want to put your most important information on the top left of the screen, and everything that is the least important on the bottom right. So again, how do you apply this? It's very simple. All you have to do is keep your audience in mind. So metrics that go together should be shown together. Similar type of data should look similar to each other. You want to enclose group data to show a relation, and obviously the opposite of that is true as well. And then you want to arrange your data in order of importance. The last thing that I'm going to talk about before I give it back over to Michael is we need to talk about color, this idea of color, because color blindness is actually more pervasive than you think. According to color blindness awareness, approximately one in 12 men and one in 200 women in the world are color blind. And when we look at the data, and we know that 53% of board seats are held by men, if you have about 20 members on your board, the likelihood that you have somebody on your board who is color blind or has a color blindness is pretty high. So you need to display data not only the correct way with the type of, the correct type of graph and the correct order, you also need to pay attention to the colors. And when I say color, I'm talking about in your hues and your intensity to maximize the ability to communicate the message. So first thing we're going to talk about is hue. Hue is what people typically think of color. We classify in two different ways your standard hues and your emphasis hues. So your standard hues are on the left hand side, they're more muted. And the ones on the right are your, I mean, your standard hues and then your emphasis hues are more bold and those ones on the right. So if you want information to look, if there's nothing important about the information, or if the information isn't particularly surprising, use standard hues. Use those more muted colors to make everything blend in with each other and look similar. And where there are issues or where there are trends that do need to be addressed, put those lines or those points in emphasis hues. Use a different hue to describe data differently. You also need to pay attention to your background. So again, we put this on here as just an example. If you have a blue background but pink text, it's going to look different than if you have a red background and pink text. So also if you're using shading or anything like that, that's going to make a big difference. The other thing, which is we kind of demonstrated earlier with the bullet graphs is you can actually use intensity of colors to really speak to somebody who has a color blindness. So I'm going to throw an intensity palette on the screen so you can see, you know, how can I change the intensity of a specific color and still communicate the same message. So I can use a darker color to emphasize and a lighter color or a lighter intensity to deemphasize a specific graph or a specific line or specific bar. You can do this again with background as well. So it's the same color circles but different intensity of the background. So you can even use the background to emphasize or deemphasize. So I'm going to show you what this looks like on some bullet graphs. I'm going to encode a lot of information in a small amount of area. So this is an example of using hue and intensity to encode meaning in a bullet graph. So notice how I've arranged the most important information, the year-to-date revenue of this fake organization closer to the top left and the less important information, the breakdown of each month on the right. And I've used different hues to describe the ranges for where it's acceptable, where it's not acceptable, and where they're doing okay. And this could easily replace a budget like a year-to-date with a budget comparison for a dashboard or for board members. And I could shrink this down even smaller and just make it, you know, put it in a quarter of the page and it still communicates the same message because of how the data is displayed. Great. So I know I threw a lot at you. I know there was a lot of information. I apologize. There's just a lot that goes into it. But hue and intensity should be used strategically. Again, use muted hues, deemphasize, to deemphasize, use intense hues to emphasize, create the sameness effect. So use the same colors if there's not a reason to switch it up and use different colors if you need to draw attention to something. And above all, please use color wisely. It's really important to use color wisely to communicate messages not detract from the message. Thoreau once wrote simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. And it's harder than it sounds. But with practice and with multiple iterations, you can achieve simplicity in a dashboard to communicate messages precisely. So let's move on. I don't know, Sean, are there any questions in the chat? Not in the chat that I can see, but I have one that kind of goes with what you just wrapped up. It wasn't clear for me because when you kind of spelled out the whole color blindness thought, that became crystal clear for me. All right, color blindness, this is an inclusion problem. And that became crystal clear. But then you kept on referring, there was still some color in the slides after that. And so could you tease out for me? When would you use color as opposed to just using kind of different shades of blue? Yeah, it's up to you, honestly. I did that one because it's easily recognizable. I think the first bullet graph we did where it was different intensities of gray. So that would be an easy way if you wanted to really get at that inclusion, if that was a key component of your dashboard. And you wanted to really design with that in mind. Okay, thank you. It's really a personal choice, I would say. Great. Well, we're going to pass it on to Michael again. And he's going to talk about some examples. Yeah. And so I'll actually be even able to kind of comment on that a little bit further about using color. So we'll just get right into it with example one. So for the next three examples, this came from a report that Chad was some random recording or what that what it was. But it was reading analysis of something that the key component is they're comparing 2009 to 2019. And we're just going to kind of illustrate how even without really knowing exactly what the point they're making, we'll kind of show you how as we've improved a couple graphs and charts just how it helps paint the picture more. So we got this first one right here in front of us. You know, 2019 is bigger than 2009. I think that's all we can pretty much to do straight from this. You know, and I also kind of feel it's pretty clear why it's not effective. Aside from the fact that you can clearly tell that there is more in 2019 than compared to 2009. But so we wanted to kind of improve that a little bit to just help paint the picture more and all that. So what we did is we updated the presentation into a bar graph on the right. And quick glance, you can see the relativity a lot clearer. You can see how much is actually more. You could actually see the comparison and the size. You know, it's not really replicated on the left side of just how much more there is in 2019. They just didn't encode any meaning basically. So again, this is another way to kind of help elicit behavioral change by showing, oh, wow, look at this amazing work we've done over 10 years. Crystal clear, I can tell, you know, it's about six times more. Whereas in the other side, I don't know how big the small circle is. I don't know how big the big circle is. So that's kind of an illustration of how it's presented and how it can influence the reader and what they're getting. Example two is another great one because it brings in the bar graph. And other than that, I don't know what the heck is happening here. I don't know if the bar graphs are what the percentage is. I don't know if the lines with the numbers on the left, very unclear. You know, I kind of always am a firm believer of don't waste brain power on things that isn't significant. To me, this would be kind of a prime example of it. You know, they try to save plates at base, put it on one graph. Never use multiple accesses. It's way too confusing. Colors don't matter here, even though they, you know, blue line. I mean, but it's just, it's a prime example of overly complicated. Split it up. So we can't, we split them up. And so you can see clearly, oh, okay. So the numbers on the left side of the screen did apply to the number of properties while the percentages were to the percentage of properties. So again, you can see clearly here how just much growth has happened. They have their own rate ranges as much easier to understand. It takes up a little bit more real estate, but again, you could shrink it. You know, it's a perfect example of, you know, a shrink and make it a little bit smaller. But the audience will be able to understand much easier. And we've, and it just enclosed it into, and enclosed both of those charts into one little box to show that they're related and, and, you know, use that data together. So again, simple change of just spacing them out and putting them in their own graph, getting the same message across, except very clearly. And then the last example that we have is another baked good. I don't know if it's a donut or a bagel, but either way, it's a baked good. Don't use it. But again, they're trying to tell a story. And so let's try and just break down what, what the story they're trying to tell. So I can clearly tell that there's a big blue area, which I'm guessing it does say it's the majority of properties. Okay, so is it 51%, 60%, 90% got no clue. I do have a pretty clear green section here that, that does say, you know, it's 25, there, boom, there it is as a quarter. However, and then last we got these, these two 20% split teal yellow, I think that's teal. Who knows, maybe I'm one of the 12 men that have colorblind. This is my example of, of females. I have no, I have no clue which one's bigger. I mean, I, so that's kind of a perfect example to illustrate it is, is it does break it down into the quote, unquote 100%, but it just really makes it unclear. And, you know, when you're trying to make decisions that you're trying to move forward, it's just a waste of energy to try and go, okay, I think teal is a little bigger. Is it 15%, you know, so improve it. And it's very similar to the last one, we just split them up. And even with no color, you can clearly see what's going on here, you can just see the difference between the zero to 25% versus the 75 to 100 and how it compares from 2019 to 2009. Again, remember, all these examples were compared, comparing 2009 to 2019. If you worked off the original three that we, that were on the left side of all these slides, maybe you could figure it out. I applaud you if you could, but it just makes it that much more difficult to figure it out. And so it just, it decreases the chance of behavioral change, which again, remember is the whole goal here for trying to influence change within our organization. We're trying to highlight things. We're trying to, you know, grow and show this is the progress we've made with these renewable energy, clear as it could be this way. So remember, always remember, your goal of the dashboard is to affect behavior. It's not just to show the data. It really is about eliciting change. Make sure you know your context and your audience, purpose of the dashboard, in essence, the behavioral change you want to elicit and how it's designed. Allow your story to be told with little to no words and these little just edits kind of help illustrate that for you. And then lastly, going to swing it back over to Chad for just a couple of tools. And before I go into tools, I just want to just, this is a, I did pull this from some report I read about a year ago, but it is interesting with this graph in particular because they tried to make it simple, but they failed to tell the story. And when you look at what data they're showing on the graph and you display it correctly, it actually asks it, it poses more questions and you don't get that from the donut or bagel graph, whatever this ends up being called. But when you break it out correctly, you can actually see, oh yeah, you made this organization made progress in these areas, but what about the bottom down the second one? Why are certain areas decreasing? And you, it's the same data, but it's just displayed in a way that actually tells the story that it should be telling. So how you communicate the data, again, is more important than the data itself sometimes. Yeah, it's better to have questions about why something's happening, how to improve something versus it's teal bigger than yellow. Yeah. Great. So tools, I know that was one of the main questions was tools. So I'm going to throw some tools up on the screen. There is software out there that can help you in creating a financial dashboard for your organization. Remember though that if you need to refresh it more frequently, it's probably worth the investment to use some sort of automated platform. So in the example of showing it to multiple stakeholders that's getting to a even deeper level of complexity where you need to display different types of data, you might have to go to one of these tiers at the very, very bottom. So let's go from the cheapest, easiest options down, one and not easiest, the cheapest option and we'll go down to the most expensive option. So we have Microsoft Excel, most organizations that we work with who have dashboards, they use Microsoft Excel. It's very easy to create bar charts with data. QuickBooks usually exports to an Excel document and then you can manipulate the data and then you can paste over from multiple periods if you want to do that. There's a little bit more limited functionality in Google Sheets. You can still do a lot of the same graphs. I think bullet graphs are really hard to do in Google Sheets, but it's possible to do in Excel. QuickBooks Online does have limited capabilities for creating some metrics, some charts, but I will say that it's going to be very limited and they are not, and I think everybody knows this, they're not really designed for nonprofits, but so you are not going to be able to get all the metrics that you want out of it. You're really going to have to go to more customized form, whether that's Excel or some of these other platforms. Azul Analysis, which is us, we're going to throw that in there. We'll talk about that in a second. There's also a platform called Fathom HQ, Power BI, which is a more of an enterprise software. It's a Microsoft product and then Tableau. I will say with Fathom, Power BI and Tableau, you're probably, you would be best served to have a consultant come in and help you with the dashboard, especially if you have to have multiple dashboards that display different metrics and have different purposes. That's something that we can point you in the right direction. We are not experienced in those different softwares about we do know people in the same space. So if you want to reach out to us, we're more than happy to put you in touch with people that we do know, but really it's more complex to set those up and really speaks to a more sophisticated organization and will require more investment in actually setting them up. So the last thing, quick plug for our company Azul Analysis. As Sean said at the beginning, we've created the first ever tool to help nonprofits tell a more comprehensive financial story. If you want to learn more, check out our website azulanalysis.com. Also, follow us on our social media. We're on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. And we actually have a very exciting announcement. You're the first group to know this, but we are literally days away from going live for our early access customers. If you follow us or subscribe to our mailing list through our website, you just scroll down to the bottom, you put in your email there. We'll actually be sending out special promo code so you can get access to our automated financial dashboard for a heavily discounted price for our early access. So find out more. Also feel free to contact us if you have any questions or want any advice. We're more than happy to share our time. So here's some references. We, I know we, Eli's going to be putting this on slide share so you can look at them later. And then here is our contact information. Feel free to email us or call us whatever you prefer. We'd love to hear from you. And we're also free to just spitball ideas. We love helping non-profit organizations. It's absolutely our mission and passion. So before we wrap up, we would love to see if there are any questions out there. If there's any burning questions, we'd be happy to answer them. Chad, Michael, thank you both for a great presentation. I love the new look of the dashboard. I got to see it about six or eight months ago and it's come a long way. It was good then, but it's just, it's beautiful now. I love that screenshot that you shared. I'm seeing some congratulations in the chat box. No. And some people saying that they're going to be sharing this. I haven't seen any questions yet. So folks, feel free to pipe in. Just jump in. Take yourself off mute if you have a question or a comment. We have a lot of shy people tonight. Or you guys covered everything and you did, you covered a lot. And I know it can be overwhelming. And I would say, just get your feet wet. That's the biggest advice I have. The reality is some progress is better than no progress. And your board members, if you want to engage them in this, you really need to think about how do you display your financials in a visual format? And that's just something you need to think about because that is honestly going to be the future. That's a great point. I remember having multiple conversations with colleagues about dashboards before. And I think that might be one of the biggest reasons why so many nonprofits still don't have them. It's not a lack of awareness, but it's just, well, I don't know how to do it perfectly. And I can't dedicate a thousand hours to this right now. So I'll just put that off until I have a block of a thousand hours, right? Which we never get. And so your point, I think is very good, even if all somebody does is really just create one graphic for this month, right? Not even a whole dashboard. That's a start, right? Take that into your finance committee meeting and kick it around. And is this helpful information, right? Yeah. I know Alisa put in, hey, Alisa, how are you doing? Is there never, is there really never a good time to use a pie chart? And for color blindness, do you recommend using different colors or different hues of the same color? Yeah. So we are big proponents of never using a pie chart. It's not that it doesn't communicate a message because everybody instinctively knows that the slices are supposed to equal 100%. But we've seen it where the slices don't equal 100% or they equal more than 100%. And if you can't see that when you're actually looking at that pie chart, unless you actually break out a calculator and add all the slices together, the issue we have with pie charts is that there's a better way to display that same data that is easier for a human being to understand. And that's the point of a dashboard is to communicate a message and not have people spend time on understanding what the charts mean. You really want to inspire people to have conversations about what does that data mean? What does the financial picture look like and how do we think about our organization strategically? And that's where a dashboard comes into play. It's about inspiring those conversations. You don't want people spending time trying to figure out what the dashboard is meaning. You want people to spend time talking about how the organization is going to be creating sustainability. So for color blindness, I would recommend using intensity. Everybody can see different intensity. There are several different types of color blindness. So just to be safe, intensity is definitely the way to go. And we just got a recommendation from Chandler Lewis. HBR has a reference, good charts, the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations. We have read it and we also recommend it. And are you able to see Kathy's question and comment? Do we design the dashboard for the least financially sophisticated board member or? So that's really interesting question. So something that I'm going to, it's going to sound like commercial, but I'm going to bring this back home after I say this. So with Azul analysis, we recognize that there is disparate level of board members. And that's really what our dashboard was designed for, is to help board members see financial data and engage board members. And then also help executive directors, CFOs, talk about their financial story in a different, more comprehensive way. And we realize that in order for, because, I mean, boards are changing, right? I mean, they should be changing. We're bringing more youth onto boards. We're bringing, we're trying to make boards more representative of our communities. And that is a challenge because not everybody, and I mean, even now, not everybody is at the same financial level. So we have baked into our dashboards and educate component where you can hover over something and it will provide an explanation of what that metric means or how it's calculated or even simply, is this number supposed to be higher or is this number supposed to be lower? And that way it teaches them how to, it teaches them some financial literacy, for lack of a better word. So that's something that it's a good question. There's not a simple answer for it. But if you are realizing that the data that you're presenting is too much or is confusing more than it is helpful, that's when you need to figure out, okay, well, do I need to take a step back and either educate specific board members to bring them up to speed? Or do I need to change the type of data or the presentation of the data to really help your board or whoever your audience is have a conversation about how your behavior should change? I don't know if that's helpful. I would just kind of echo that and just, you know, encourage, I think that'd be a perfect example or an opportunity to try and simplify it even further. I think because it is, I think they're just, it is one of those, you know, it's one of those things with financials where I think they do absolutely feel very, you know, intimidating, you know, overbearing just by the nature of the impact it can have on an organization for obvious reasons. So I definitely don't want a board member of the dark, but I think that's an opportunity to kind of simplify it if you can possibly further. And I think you'll be surprised at just how much clearer it'll show things because the other piece to kind of keep in mind is, you know, these are tools, these are just more so tools to be able to help present as you share your story. You know, kind of one of the biggest teachings I took in from my, I know from my MBA was PowerPoints is a prime example of it. You don't want to put a bunch of stuff on a PowerPoint, you know, and spend the time reading. It's really kind of there as the background and you're pointing to it and you're really kind of speaking. So kind of also keep that in mind too. But yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if some education could could help a little. But yeah, I would take it as a challenge to see if you can simplify it further. Yeah. And that's like a going back to our very first slide about what is the definition of a dashboard and it really is monitored at a glance. So you want to be able to see, okay, like what is what are these graphs telling me? How is it telling me a story that is easy to read? And again, a dashboard shouldn't be the end all be all a dashboard doesn't guarantee that your board is upholding its fiduciary responsibility. It really should be supplementary to financial statements. So that's something to think about as well. Very nicely put gentlemen, we're technically six minutes over, but I think we can keep on going for people that want to continue that might have another question or two. But folks who might have to leave and had a hard stop a few minutes ago, you know, we're not going to come track you down if you jump off the call either. Good question. No. One last thing I will say I'm Cathy still on or she dropped, but the other thing you can do is just ask your your work members if if you're not sure if this is helpful for them, ask or whoever your audience is just ask say, do you understand this? Is this helpful for you? Would there be is there something missing? Do we need to display different metrics so you can make sense of this? And it's okay to have information on there that not everybody's going to understand. But maybe you move that to the bottom right side of the screen and you put the most important easier to read more fundamental stuff on the top left hand side. So even how you arrange the dashboard can impact the ability for somebody to engage or not engage. Thanks, Andrea. Thank you. Great, folks going once, going twice. I think we're going to wrap up. Chad, Michael, thank you both very much. You know, coincidentally, I was writing an article today, a blog post about dashboards, and you've definitely given me some food for thought I'm going to have to go back and potentially update a couple of things. This is just the despise the pie hashtag. I'm going to have to write a whole blog post just about that. Right? I'll need to get myself to that really special place where I can get all the hate and anger focused into a thousand words or less. But no, this has been great. I love the sensitivity to inclusion and that because very often we don't think about that. It's a big enough task just to like it can be very daunting just to put the whole darn thing together. But we have to be thinking about those sorts of things as well. And it's amazing that yeah, one out of 12 people aren't going to they're going to get lost even if you do everything else perfectly if you're using lots of colors there. So it's a great point. Do you guys have any last minute kind of final thoughts you wanted to share before we call tonight? No. Just want to reiterate our thanks to having us. We really appreciate the opportunity and if anybody wants to reach out or has any questions, you know where to reach us. We are always checking our DMs on our social media accounts that you can reach out to us on email or phone. We'd be happy to talk to you. Great. Well, Michael, anywhere? Yeah, thank you for the opportunity. And it's one of those it's just another one of those things, especially for nonprofits. I know financials can be intimidating and scary. I mean, when you tackle them and take them head on that it can kind of make it a little bit less scary. So definitely encourage that especially as I'm sure we all learned from this past year financials can go madness at any time. So definitely definitely encourage just dive it in. Great. Well, thank you both and thank you everybody who turned into tonight's presentation. Please do tell your friends because this is a great way to really help your nonprofit organization up their game engage your board better engage your your other leadership in the organization that are also because the financial decisions are some of the most important decisions an organization can make and you want them to be well informed decisions. Thank you all again. And good night.