Because Analytics offers many possibilities regarding the creation of widgets and reports, building a good reporting structure may appear overwhelming at the first sight.
Here are some tips to efficiently organize your reporting in Borealis.
1. Identify the purpose of your report
We identify four categories of reports:
| Reports | Goal | Recipients |
| Reports for management |
They usually include high level statistics on the results of the activities performed over a given period |
Executives |
| Reports for team performance tracking |
They are usually based on report filters and allow managers to track the activities performed by each staff member. |
Managers |
| Reports on activities tracking |
They usually give more detailed information than the reports prepared for management. They help managers understand the status of their team's activities. |
Managers and users |
| Reports on data quality |
Very data oriented, they allow teams to identify the data accuracy in the system, to detect incorrect patterns and to ensure long-term health of the system. |
Managers and users |
2. Clarify the detailed objectives of the report
As Borealis offers the option to add many widgets to the same report, it is important to keep track of your objectives. We recommend that you start by listing what you want to measure or represent in that report and determine the relevant information for each of those measures.
An interesting additional step is to review the added value of each widget. Basically, you have to ask yourself what information the widget will bring you and what you are going to do with that information.
Example : I want to identify the five hottest topics of the week per neighborhood => for each hot topic identified, an action plan will be set and sent to the community relations managers for implementation.
3. Determine the widgets that are required for each objective
Determine:
- What is the most suitable format to represent your data (Calendar, Chart, Indicator, Map, Scatter plot, Table);
- What data from Borealis should be displayed in the widget;
- What filters should be applied to your widget (NB: take time to check if your filter should be set in the widget or at the report level, this will save you time!);
- What title you will give to your widget.
You can consult our article about widget creation here.
4. Finalize your report
Now that you have prepared all the widgets, you are ready to build your report. Here are the steps to follow:
- Add all required widgets to your report;
- By right clicking anywhere in your report, add labels to give precisions for your widgets, or to create sections within the report;
- Give your report a relevant title, that reflects efficiently the general purpose of it.
5. Set up governance around your report
Your report is ready, now you need to make sure that it will continue to meet the expected goals. At this point you may want to:
- determine the audience of the report: you can set it as public or private;
- schedule the report to be e-mailed to target audience on a regular basis. Refer to our article Schedule an automated sending of a Report;
- communicate the link to the report, if you do not plan to send it automatically;
- In this case, consider encouraging key users to bookmark a report;
- validate how often the report should be revised to ensure its continued relevance.