SinglePoint dashboards are more popular than ever
Northern Light SinglePoint™ users and administrators love their dashboards. They tell us this all the time, and SinglePoint usage statistics support their stories.
Last month, at our 2024 Customer Summit, an annual gathering of Northern Light clients, attendees provided still more evidence of their affinity for dashboards. In our “feature auction” – we ask conference attendees to rank in priority order new features they’d like to see added to SinglePoint – nearly half of the top 10 most requested features were tweaks to dashboard capabilities.
Dashboards support “browse-to-content” research
Dashboards are a highly visual, “browse-to-content” way to organize and consume content around a topic or company of particular interest to a business researcher or decision-maker.
Northern Light SinglePoint has a rich themed dashboard system that is one of the unique strengths of the platform. Subject matter experts or administrators within an organization can create themed dashboards on business units, topics, technologies, market segments, marketing programs, management challenges – essentially, anything relevant to any group of users.
The dashboard system provides great flexibility and power. There are many types of widgets that can be placed on dashboards including content headline widgets, PDF viewer widgets (with rotating pages), text and graphics widgets (which can be placed in a slide show carousel), graphical analytics widgets that automatically analyze data (with trend charts, bar charts, pie charts, word clouds, network node diagrams), SWOT analyses, battlecards, product portfolio/strategy widgets, bullseye chart widgets, table widgets (can be used of product comparisons), and more. Tableau and PowerBI dashboards can be displayed in SinglePoint dashboards alongside news and other content.
Dashboard content updates automatically
A unique feature of SinglePoint’s dashboard system is that much of the content updates automatically. Many types of content flow automatically into the right dashboard widgets, greatly reducing support requirements for a robust set of dashboards and making it practical to maintain dozens of dashboards with a time investment of just a few hours per week.
For example, a client recently switched to Northern Light from another provider for this reason. The client has 80 dashboards on consumer marketing events, brands, and competitors. A new report might need to be on three or more dashboards. With the competitor’s manual dashboard posting system, the two client portal administrators spent all day, nearly every day, posting reports to dashboards and could never catch up. With Northern Light’s automated system, once a dashboard is set up the content flows into each dashboard automatically. Now the two portal admins have time to discover and socialize research insights to drive marketing success instead of just posting documents all the time.
Quickboards are instant shareable dashboards
Searches can also be turned into instant shareable dashboards – what we call Quickboards. A Quickboard can be made with a mouse click, and it will appear as a dashboard for that user on their Dashboard Directory. Results from the search in every collection in the SinglePoint platform with the associated graphics appear on the Quickboard in a pleasing visual presentation. The Quickboard can be thought of as a personal newsletter that updates every time it is viewed. The user can share their Quickboard with specified other users, who will see it on their Dashboard Directories, too.
The impact of SinglePoint dashboards on content use is dramatic – one financial services industry client saw market research report consumption triple over a 12-month period when they implemented a multiple strategic dashboards strategy.
No wonder SinglePoint clients are so keen to see enhancements to dashboards as a top R&D priority at Northern Light – and they are!