I’ve spent the last couple of days working through the data behind our social impact tracker.
It’s not the most glamorous work but it does matter. The dashboard shows how our community platforms are performing, so I wanted to make sure the numbers were actually telling the truth.
A few things I’ve changed:
See what’s happening locally
For Living Well Warrington (which uses our AI-powered semantic search), we can now break activity, members and service contacts down by neighbourhood, rather than only looking at the platform as a whole.
Bring important numbers into the light
Things like service contacts, volunteer pledges, unique visitors and business offers and asks were already in the data, but weren’t visible in the dashboard. They are now.
Make popularity more meaningful
Simple view counts can be misleading, especially when an activity appears in several neighbourhoods. We’ve replaced them with a relative popularity measure that gives a clearer picture of what people are actually engaging with.
Be clearer about what the numbers mean
Some figures are monthly. Others are running totals. The dashboard now makes that distinction much clearer.
Keep it up to date automatically
We’ve also built a BigQuery sync that pulls the latest activity and member data into neighbourhood-level snapshots, without someone having to update it by hand.
The bigger lesson for me is that good dashboards aren't really about charts. They're about trust. If a number looks impressive but is misleading, you lose trust. And if an important number is buried somewhere in a spreadsheet, you miss the story it could tell.
So, two days spent getting the right numbers, in the right place, and presented honestly feels like time well spent.
My next job is to roll out the neighbourhood view out across more of our Enterprise platforms (this service is only available to our Enterprise platforms).
