The freedom to explore your association’s data is at your fingertips with an intuitive, interactive and visual data discovery tool. Each person within your association can reach a new level of understanding and excitement about data! Going from static reports to dynamic and robust visualizations is not just a developmental feat, it is part of a cultural shift. Conversations that used to start with “How many people are coming to conference?” can evolve into “I noticed that our level 2 registrations aren’t trending as well as last year.” By encouraging this kind of thinking, your staff can begin to share their observations and make changes which enable your association to become faster and more responsive to your customers’ needs. This ability for anyone to explore data and draw meaning from it is called data discovery. At data-guided associations, all levels of staff can look at their data, uncover the often hidden meanings, and translate that into actionable insight. Here are a few ideas to make data discovery a norm for your staff.
Liberate your Data
- Encourage everyone within your association to view your data – don’t segment data or lock it down to only certain people.
- Automate delivery of critical information. Using the Tableau subscriptions, you can ensure that staff can easily and regularly review critical information with the most recent data right from their inbox (no extra login required!). They can also easily click within the email to go to the interactive dashboard. See the details here.
Intuitive and Visual
- The idea here to is make exploring data part of a natural thought process so that when a staff member has a question or sees something they want to investigate, they know intuitively how to navigate around to find more information.
- Build interactive dashboards to make exploring the data easy by allowing natural navigation from summary level to detail level. Also use easy-to-understand filters.
- Visualizations not only allow the human brain to process information more effectively, it also encourages creative thinking and allows you to draw new conclusions and ask questions you would not have thought to ask before “seeing” the data. It solves the problem of “How can I learn what I don’t know, that I don’t know?”. Because by answering the questions you know you have, new questions will naturally arise.
Stop, Collaborate, and Listen
- In this increasingly electronically social world, people are already used to posting statuses and comments and having everyone see and comment back. This can be extended to data discovery as well. With Tableau, if a subject matter expert discovers something compelling in the data, they can:
- Easily click “share” and send a link to the team. The team can them immediately dig into it and add their own insight.
- Comment directly on the dashboard.
- Set aside time at staff meetings to allow staff to tell a story with their data. See our previous blog, Effective Storytelling for Data Visualizations.
By taking concrete steps to increase the accessibility and availability of data, presenting data in a way that is intuitive and visual, and encouraging collaboration, your association can make the most of a huge, often unrealized asset – your data!