It’s time to acknowledge that having data insights to share with your partners and stakeholders is absolutely essential in today's environment. In a post-pandemic world of uncertainties, it’s becoming increasingly necessary to be transparent about how your DMO is performing and how you plan to reinvest funds back into your destination for the greater good.
Visit Mobile is one destination marketing organization (DMO) that has mastered the art of building trust with its partners and stakeholders through data transparency. How, you ask? By using Simpleview’s Destination Dashboards.
Destination Dashboards is a data visualization tool that consolidates your data into charts and graphs in one centralized dashboard. You can connect all of your data feeds, choose from hundreds of custom graph layouts that work for your unique data, and easily share your data by sending users a link to view content or easily print, download to PDF, or export your data.
We sat down with the team at Visit Mobile to learn more about how they use Destination Dashboards to enhance their reporting capabilities, as well as demonstrate the organization’s reliability.
What was the genesis of the development of data dashboards for Visit Mobile?
We used to have this extremely long performance report. It took a painstaking amount of time from multiple team members to put together to give to our mayor and board to make sure our progress and performance are aligning with our budget. We were working with our Simpleview team and talking about what our options were and that was when Destination Dashboards were presented. We needed to improve the health of our data, what we had at our fingertips, and how our team used the system; we needed to make this work for us as a team to better support our destination.
What types of dashboards are you currently creating for your different community stakeholders, and what are those key metrics?
Our Visit Mobile board of directors and our local stakeholders all receive our performance report or main report. Making data-driven decisions is very important for them — they want to see not only how we are performing this month, but how we are performing this year, and year-over-year. We have much more detailed dashboards on the backside for our teams to digest but the high-level stuff is framed into a landing page on our website so our stakeholders can access the information at any time.
What are the advantages of having a customized dashboard for each of your stakeholder groups?
It absolutely does make the conversation easier. In board meetings, as we’re doing a presentation, we can show them the dashboard and say “you have this at your fingertips.”
Beyond reporting, how else are you using Destination Dashboards?
Before Destination Dashboards, there wasn't one place that Visit Mobile housed our information digitally. We didn't want to have to hold onto reports from five years ago, so Destination Dashboards served as a storage bin for information from all of our vendors. We have data accessible where we can compare performance, and it's stored safely. This is our DAM of data.
Has your funding increased as a result of your dashboard reporting capabilities?
Most recently, we got approved for additional funding mediated out of our city because we responsibly report. We are a trusted, reliable source of data and we can speak behind it. At any given moment we can present what we're talking about and that's a very attractive measure. We were rewarded because we can stand behind our work and reliably show the data.
What's next for your dashboards? What other integrations are you looking to implement?
The Destination Dashboards have been an absolute game-changer for our organization. We will create an entirely new dashboard for our ARP grant funds which will support that initiative and have specific metrics for that new audience.
