I am on the board of a local non-profit (the Boulder Center for Conscious Community). The board includes a shaman, a Presbyterian minister, several therapists, an office organizer and me – a mixed group if there ever was one. As the treasurer, it’s my job to update the board every month on how we’re doing, whether we’re meeting our goals, and so on.
For our mid-year budget review, I designed a beautiful spreadsheet, with columns and rows highlighting our strengths and challenges, and proudly sent it out to the rest of the board. Their reaction, to put it mildly, was not positive. While a spreadsheet is a thing of beauty in my eyes, I learned that many people find the following to be too information-dense:
So I took their feedback and created tables that addressed the concerns of each board member. For the person responsible for renting space, I sent data on our rentals over the last month. The membership committee saw a report on number of members and additional donations from our community. In other words, I created separate deliverables that were relevant to each individual’s concerns. The following are pages that I sent to the person responsible for renting space for events.
|
Month |
Goal |
Actual |
|
Jan-April |
$3,725 |
$4,119 |
|
May |
$1,750 |
$1,196 |
|
June |
$2,000 |
$750 |
|
July |
$2,000 |
$1,009 |
|
August |
$2,000 |
$2,580 |
|
September |
$2,000 |
|
|
October |
$2,000 |
|
|
November |
$2,000 |
|
|
December |
$2,000 |
|
And they loved these reports; they saw what the numbers meant in terms of their responsibilities. The lesson I learned is that people need white space and just the data points that are relevant to them.
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