What Good Looks Like: Reporting
If you cannot pull a report that tells you what is actually happening, you are not behind and you are not alone. It is one of the most common things a development leader runs into, and it is rarely about the dashboard. Good usually does not mean fancier charts. It means a few numbers you trust, defined the same way every time, that you can see without rebuilding them by hand. Most of the way there is agreeing on definitions and one clean view, not a data project, and there is real ground you can cover on your own this week. Here are a few places to start.
Where it stops: you can assemble the view once. Keeping it trustworthy without rebuilding it by hand each month takes connecting the systems underneath, which is the difference between a screenshot and reporting that holds.
Erin Peshoff is the Chief Curator of Vivia Studios. She has spent thirty years inside nonprofit operations, helped raise over $100 million for institutional missions, and built Vivia around the operating discipline most strategic engagements skip.
