Tips for using the Looker Studio for your impact tracking
For journalists and others who want to track the qualitative impact of their work, the Google Looker Studio can be a valuable tool, helping turn complex data into actionable insights. We at Impact Architects use it as a template for our Impact Tracker workflow and platform, creating a simple and centralized database for qualitative impact data for newsrooms of all sizes.
If you have ideas for the Impact Tracker, let us know in this product suggestion form
In the last 18 months, we’ve had nearly 300 organizations across the globe set up Impact Trackers to complement their work, and in that time, we’ve seen many different approaches to the platform, which is built using a Looker Studio template. And while the Looker Studio is user-friendly, it does involve a learning curve, so we’ve compiled some tips for those getting started:
Ask yourself: What questions do you want a dashboard to answer?
As we often say, tools should come last when building an impact tracker. Before getting to the stage of using an impact tracker in a platform like the Looker Studio, it’s important to know what questions you and your organization hope to answer, then let this help guide how to organize your data collection. Do you want to be able to see what stories or topic areas are generating impact? Provide reporters with individual records of their impact? Produce reports for a specific funder? As a matter of fact, how *do* you define impact as an organization, anyway?
Having some idea of the internal use case for your dashboard will help focus your work. Is your resident data nerd going to mostly use it? Then build your dashboard with complex and detailed views to cut your data in many ways. Someone looking for top line insights? Streamline the presentation to only include the most relevant information with limited filtering options. Both? You’ll want to build different pages with views designed specifically for these different users.
Build a failsafe for your data
In Google products, ownership can be transferred internally within an organization, but not externally. If you have a staff member in your newsroom or organization who “owns” the impact tracker components, make sure you have a redundancy plan in place to transfer ownership in the event that they leave. Downloading subsets of your data at regular intervals, for instance quarterly, can help create a failsafe in the event that you lose access. If you take nothing else from this post, this should be it.
Don’t reinvent the wheel
A blank page can be daunting as you’re getting started. But there are many pre-built templates and community resources available within the Looker Studio. Exploring these, like this gallery or the template impact tracker IA has developed, can help you get started and even inspire ideas for your own reports. And once you get going, you’ll have ideas about how to customize the dashboard to better meet your specific needs.
Create interactive reports
The backend of the platform has a drag-and-drop interface where you can create charts, tables, and graphs. Learning how to customize these visualizations and how to use filters and controls will help you make more insightful and interactive reports.
One tip to create an interactive report: If you’re including links to impact in your tracker that you’ll want to be able to easily access in a report (for instance, a social media post by an influencer, an academic citation, or link to an awards page), use the hyperlink function to make those working links in your external reports.
Align your dashboard with your organization’s branding
Building a dashboard from a template or from scratch means you’ll be starting with predetermined themes. But you can incorporate your organization’s branding by adjusting colors, fonts, and layouts within the Looker Studio. Consistent branding helps in making the reports align with your organization’s identity and reinforce among your own team that impact is important for your organization.
Collaborate and share reports
One of Looker Studio’s strengths is its collaboration features. You can share reports and dashboards with colleagues or stakeholders via email directly from the platform, or embed the dashboard using a simple HTML code, or download subsets of data as PDFs or CSV files. You can share reports directly with others and control their access levels, making it easy to work together on data analysis.
Need more tips to get started? Set up a time to chat with Impact Architects during our weekly office hours, or here’s a free training resource we recommend.
