a clear view on transparency: the how's and why's of dashboards for non-profits

Robert SteinChief Information Officer

Indianapolis Museum of Artrstein@imamuseum.orghttp://www.imamuseum.org @rjstein

A Clear View on Transparency

The How’s and Why’s of Dashboards for Non-Profits

TRUST

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The Public’s Trust is a

Delicate Commodity

DISSAPPOINTMENT

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GOVERNMENT

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MARKETS

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BUSINESS

TRANSPARENCY

Trans-par-en-cy:

“The full accurate and timelydisclosure of information”

-Wall Street Wordshttp://www.dictionary.com

What is Transparency?

Flickr Credit: ~marcomagrini

What is Transparency

• Not just open sharing of operational performance metrics– Questions of who what when where and why

are hard to answer• Rather, what can’t we share and why?• What don’t we share?

• Valuation of Artworks• Detailed pricing on competitive revenues• HR / Privacy information

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We seek to paint the perfect picture, but each know our limitations and vulnerabilities…

Trust is broken when our behaviors don’t mirror our public face.

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INTEGRITY

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AUTHENTICITY

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The ongoing discipline of practicing radical authenticity and demonstrating to the public whatever degree of integrity and operational excellence we possess at the time.

Transparency:

How Much is Too Much?

“It would be easy to say it's too much, that it's too arcane, too detailed, too boring for donors to care about.

But remember, one person's boring factoid is another's hobby. Or hobbyhorse. By putting it all out there, the Indianapolis Museum is telling its public that anyone who cares is an insider. Is it possible someone will go ballistic about their electricity use, or their ownership of possibly plundered art? Sure. But it's not likely. And their openness defuses these things -- much more effectively than trying to keep secrets.

If the information is too much, nobody will look at it. Even so, the very fact that they're sharing it makes people respect the museum more. And who knows what info-sated donors might choose to do for an organization they feel trusts and respects them?”

Jeff Brooks, “Museum opens the books to anyone who cares”, Donor

Power Blog, December 3, 2007

METRICS RULE OF THUMB

Will this metric change behavior?

Reasons For Transparency

1. The Reputation Economy

2. The Impact on Mission and Performance

3. Organizational Culture

THE REPUTATION ECONOMY

Reasons for Transparency

REPUTATION

“But here's the interesting paradox: The reputation economy creates an incentive to be more open, not less. Since Internet commentary is inescapable, the only way to influence it is to be part of it. Being transparent, opening up, posting interesting material frequently and often is the only way to amass positive links to yourself and thus to directly influence your Googleable reputation.”

“Putting out more evasion or PR puffery won't work, because people will either ignore it and not link to it - or worse, pick the spin apart and enshrine those criticisms high on your Google list of life.”

Clive Thompson, “The See-Through CEO”WIRED Magazine - Issue 15.04, March, 2007

REPUTATION

“There is no outside world anymore, just a world--one that is blogged, Facebooked, Twittered, and utterly porous. The extent to which we can control our image is directly proportionate to our honesty about ups and downs in a context that we can to some degree define”

“To view a dashboard primarily as a PR tool is to miss entirely the point of Transparency, which is to influence contemporary organizations to act with greater responsibility.“

Maxwell Anderson The Melvin & Bren Simon Director and CEO

Indianapolis Museum of Art

“To view a dashboard primarily as a PR tool is to miss entirely the point of transparency, which is to influence contemporary organ-izations to act with greater responsibility.”

-Maxwell Anderson

FACEBOOKCase Study

PRIVACY

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Privacy

“So which is it? Does Facebook listen to the rumbling and grumbling of everyday Farmville players as its primary strategic compass, or does it do what it as a company thinks is the right thing to do, regardless of users' feelings? Does it measure what the right thing to do is out of commercial concerns or a desire to change the world? Is it in fact trying to change the world, or is it merely reflecting the way the world is already changing? We've heard all these conflicting arguements for months and it's unclear what exactly is going on.”

The Half Truths of Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall Kirkpatrick 5/26/2010

ReadWriteWeb.com

Privacy

Sharpen The Pitchforks. It’s Almost Time For Facebook’s Privacy Wake-Up Call, TechCrunch.com

Judiciary Committee Still Has Questions for FacebookReadWriteWeb.com

Photo Courtesy of Facebook

Closer to Home

• Cleveland Museum of Art• Construction versus Art Purchase

– See Bricks-and-Mortar Morass: Cleveland Desecrates Donor Intent

– And Cleveland Museum Hasn’t Tapped Acquisition Funds for Bricks and Mortar (yet)

Flickr Credit: ~stuart_spivack

THE IMPACT ON MISSION AND PERFORMANCE

Reasons for Transparency

“I don't think it's entirely a coincidence that, at a time when new media technologies are changing the rules of journalism, companies are placing a new emphasis on Transparency. Access to, and distribution of, information is being rapidly democratized and smart companies know to get out ahead of this trend. However, as with many corporate buzzwords (e.g., "quality" and "innovation"), the concept is suffering from inflation as too many companies claim "Transparency" as part of their identity without really walking the talk.”

Mark Hannah, “Transparency as a Principle not a Tactic”PBS.org, January 7, 2009

“

NFP’s spend $’s every year defining strategic plans, but very little on defining metrics which can be used to measure success or failure.

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MEASURING THE STRATEGIC PLAN

What Does Success Look Like?

“Of course, such systems [dashboards] raise a rather vexing challenge: what, exactly, are the few key indicators you would need to watch to monitor your success? It's this question that actually proves to be more effective than the dashboard tool itself. To know what you should monitor, you need to know what you're trying to do, and you also have to define what success looks like (more people? happier people? more art? better reviews? prolific artists?).”

Andrew Taylor, “Keeping an Eye on Dashboards”, The Artful Manager Blog, October 20, 2006,.

What Does Success Look Like?

What Does Success Look Like?

“The root of the problem is that there is no longer an agreed-upon method of measuring achievement… While many challenges beset art museum leaders today, finding a way to measure performance is accordingly among the field’s most urgent… Without generally accepted metrics, arts organizations will have more and more trouble making a case for themselves.”

Maxwell L. Anderson, “Metrics of Success in Art Museums”, Getty Leadership Institute (2004),.

SO HOW DO WE PURSUE EXCELLENCE?

Operational Discontinuities are Rare

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Continuous Improvement– Incremental improvement over time– Popularlized by W. Edwards Deming– Requires benchmarks and

measurements by which to achieve success

Dashboards Can Help Set Benchmarks

“Thus, benchmarking has many direct and indirect benefits: increasing the impact of mission-related activities, raising internal standards, improving performance, attracting more funding, uncovering (and fixing) hidden weaknesses, and overall, improving the public face of the organization.”

Jason SaulBenchmarking for nonprofits:

how to measure, manage, and improve performance

Fieldstone Alliance, 2004, pg 12.

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

Reasons for Transparency

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Once you know what’s important to measure… How do you impart that knowledge to an entire staff?

How do you make a strategic plan more than just the paper its printed on?

Organizational Impact

Kaizen– Two ideographs “change” and

“wisdom / goodness / virtue”– Popularized in Japan after

WWII– Used famously at Toyota to

identify many small changes that together represented a huge improvement in quality.

Organizational Impact

“The organizations that will be truly successful in this environment are those that have integrated Transparency as part of their organizational culture and not just their communications strategy. To the extent that the two are inter-related, the communications strategist has a substantial role to play here.”

Transparency as a Principle not a Tactic Mark Hannah

PBS.org, January 7, 2009

TRANSPARENCY IN PRACTICE

IMA’s Dashboard

Launch: Sept 2007

Goals:SimplicityDeep DivesWorkflowFlexibility

IMA DASHBOARD

http://code.google.com/p/museum-dashboard/

OPEN SOURCE

DASHBOARD BASICS

Since Oct 2007

78 Statistics

135 Users

25,720 Visits

6 Topics

13 Departments

Dashboard Series:Average Daily Energy Consumption

TAKE THEGOOD

WITH THEBAD

AUTOMATION

AUTOMATION

- Keeping statistics up to date can be a lot of hard work.

- Automated data is easy to forget about.

- Robots make mistakes too!

Integration of Automated Statistics

Topics: Dynamically Defined Collections of Statistics

Simplified Editing and Updates

Monitoring of Update Frequency and Expiration

Guidelines for Dashboards

1. Choose a few key metrics

2. Identify and Share areas for Improvement

3. Simplify the Presentation

4. Involve Staff

5. Explain Your Reasoning

6. Describe how you measure

7. Participate in Creating Open Standards

THANK YOU!Questions?