How to use the Advantage Dashboard to support your NPO application

Applications to funders require data-backed evidence of reach and impact which can be time-consuming to produce. Advantage Dashboard saves time and helps to find stories in your data which you didn’t know were there.

Here are a few ideas to get you started using the Advantage Dashboard to interpret your Spektrix data, gathering evidence for your application, aligned with the Investment Principles from ACE’s 10-year strategy Let’s Create.

Inclusivity & Relevance

Comparing your bookers to your local population can be a laborious or expensive process of generating one-off reports. Advantage Dashboard provides this information in an interactive and filterable interface, updated daily.

Are your customers representative of your local area? Are your programme streams over performing in certain priority demographics? What are the success stories you can tell?

• Unlock the census: For example, filter for workshops programme and then use the census overview tab to identify success stories – “our L&P programme over-indexes on 16-29 year olds. We have comprehensive reach of the the local South Asian population. Our musicals programme reaches more economically inactive students than…”
  
  
• Use our census mapping tools to quickly identify levels of deprivation by ward, and compare with your coverage of those wards – you can break this down by genre, venue, customer type or date range – have you improved your reach year-on-year? Use these tools to find out.
  
  
• Filter all above by date to show progress year-on-year.
  
  

Ambition & Quality

How is your work reaching your target audiences? What trends are there across your different programming streams?

• Quickly produce attendance figures and booking data by a range of geographical boundaries: wards, parliamentary constituencies, local authorities, and combined authorities. Get all the numbers you need without having to run and re-run reports.
  
  
• Break down attendance by genre to show tickets and income for different programming streams, as tagged in your database – has attendance grown for new writing? Are musicals attracting new bookers? Find the story told by your unique data, beneath the headline figures.
  
  
• Use our frequency segmentation to report on your new bookers – discover where they have come from and what are they coming to.
  
  

Environmental Responsibility

Use the Advantage Dashboard’s out-of-the-box segmentations to report on distance from venue:

• Are your “Champion” segments who visit frequently more likely to live closer, i.e. with less environmental impact from travel?
  
  
• How do certain productions perform in terms of drawing in a hyper-local audience?
  
  
• Tag your customers in Spektrix with this segmentation information, and match back to any survey responses based on method of travel.

Dynamism

“Cultural organisations and individuals are dynamic and able to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the next decade”.

The Advantage Dashboard refreshes daily and allows you to have real-time conversations about business performance, reflect and react accordingly.

Clients have found the Advantage Dashboard helpful in sharing data across their organisations and beyond e.g. with promoters where required. You could use the Advantage Dashboard to:

• Report on year-on-year trends in ticket sales and income using the transactions tab – filter and recalculate by many factors, without having to re-run reports.
  
  
• Monitor movement in average yield – how much more income are you receiving from ticketing sources.
  
  
• Report on different segments of the audience, including the average customer lifetime value which demonstrates your income over time.
  
  
• Investigate whether customers are booking later, and the risk to income as a result.
  
  
• Report on donation campaigns, including performance against specific productions.
  
  
• Implement data-driven processes within your organisation such as pacing meetings, informed price-setting and forecasting, and refined marketing campaign planning

Conclusion

The Advantage Dashboard can streamline your data-gathering process to help you tell the stories that matter in your NPO application.

• For our users, we will be hosting a webinar once the updated guidance is released to go over how to use the Advantage Dashboard across the funding priorities.
  
  
• If you’re interested in joining our network of Advantage Dashboard users, getting you set up is simple and not time-consuming – get in touch for a chat or come to one of our webinars.

Note ACE will be updating guidance for the next NPO round soon, and we will update this post accordingly.