Preparing a live dashboard with Parentkind
By Joana Matos, Systems Data Insight Lead at Parentkind, and Nicole Holgate, Communications Manager at DataKind UK
Creating a branded, up-to-date dashboard that demonstrates impact in a clear format to everyone from frontline delivery staff to the C-suite, is the dream, right?
But none of this happens by magic; a lot of preparation comes first! Knowing what data you want to use is only part of the process, as Parentkind discovered when we matched them with one of our volunteers.
Meet Parentkind
Parentkind exists to empower everyone with parental or educational responsibility to improve the life chances of children, young people, and their communities. They are the largest membership organisation for Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs) in the UK, looking after nearly 13,000 PTAs.
PTAs and Parent Councils allow parents to get involved in their children’s school and education, and develop a home-school relationship for the benefit of all children. Parentkind provides these groups with support and resources that help them support their schools to provide better educational experiences.
Their data background
At present, Parentkind is focused on improving its impact measurement and building its long-term financial sustainability. They want to better capture and present their monitoring data so that they know they are moving in the right direction.
When they first approached DataKind UK, they were using a spreadsheet to track their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). It was a manual, time-consuming process to bring together data from multiple different locations. It allowed them to view KPI numbers, but didn’t visualise their data or show any changes over time.
Joana Matos, Parentkind’s Systems Data Insight Lead, said: “We had a challenge in calculating an up-to-date membership retention rate, rather than relying on static figures in spreadsheets.”
They wanted to move the KPI spreadsheet into PowerBI, connect their data sources to automatically update, and visualise their data. Crucially, they wanted to maintain this themselves by developing their in-house skills and learning how to create useful Power BI dashboards.
Never assume anything
DataKind UK were able to connect Parentkind with Rahul, a volunteer who helped them to set up their KPI dashboarding. However, the project was delayed by technical challenges.
Rahul was not familiar with their specific database, and issues connecting the data in their current systems with the PowerBI dashboard functions prevented the flow of information.
The team also found that they needed to prepare PowerBI further to make sure that Rahul could help them. Setting up the permissions for someone outside of their organisation was a job for Parentkind’s IT support.
Joana commented, “Never assume anything! They may not have seen your system, and you have to be prepared to explain. It goes back to basics and getting the technical side prepared for them.”
Back to basics
As Parentkind learned, several basics need to be in place before analysis can be successful:
Prepare your technical set-up
Check that everything technical is running smoothly. Whoever is responsible for your IT should know what systems and programmes are involved in your project and be prepared to troubleshoot, especially if you’re bringing in a third party to look at your data flow.
Create data documentation
It’s key to know where your relevant data lives, especially if you want to update where it is analysed or stored. You’ll need to dedicate time to explaining the organisation's data structure if you bring in a third party. Volunteers don’t work with your data on a daily basis and are not used to your models or data quality. Keep a record of how it will be processed, for instance, being collected in your database and then uploaded to PowerBI to create your dashboard output. Then if something breaks or needs to be updated in future, you can pinpoint where in the process to make changes.
Have a clear scope
There is a tendency to ‘go big’ when looking at what you could achieve with data, and use the fullest extent of your volunteer’s expertise. Instead, keep your focus on one outcome, and build your output really well. You can always expand it once you know it works for you and your team.
Test and evaluate
As well as setting up the IT foundations, creating your outputs should be iterative. Know who you will need to call on to sanity-check current data, not just who will run your analysis and be the user of your output. Joana mentioned that “We had to bring in our head of membership to check data that was being replicated on another spreadsheet.” After the project, you’ll also need to train people to interact with and understand the dashboard so that you get the most out of it.
A strong foundation
With the technical setup working, everything came together beautifully, as Joana put it: “we now have a Power BI dashboard that connects directly to live data from Salesforce. This dashboard can be accessed at any time and automatically pulls the latest available operational data.”
It lets them clearly track their membership retention, compare past and current performance, and year‑on‑year trends using live data integrated with their database. The project has also boosted their capacity to do more using different data in the future.
Joana explained that “the dashboard provides a strong foundation for building further visualisations and gaining deeper insights from our operational data. This is particularly valuable for informing decisions around membership products and member benefits.”
Targeted data support
Membership organisations and fundraisers like Parentkind can get a lot out of monitoring churn with live data, and having live or regularly updated dashboards to reflect trends and compare impact over time. But as this project shows, success relies upon preparation. It will be great to see how they use their dashboard over the coming years to bolster their mission.
Joana told us, "The Light Touch Support programme from DataKind was extremely valuable for Parentkind, as it helped us focus on a single, clearly defined business need and maintain a tightly scoped objective. We strongly recommend this programme to charities facing data challenges and in need of targeted data support, and we are immensely grateful to Rahul for his expertise and contribution."
