Cross-program reporting

There was nothing to replace

When I started on this, NeighborImpact didn't have an old reporting system that needed fixing. It didn't have one at all. Each of our programs tracked its own numbers its own way, and there was no single place leadership could go to see how the agency was doing.

That made the job less about migrating data and more about deciding what we should be measuring in the first place, and then making it easy for about 20 program directors to report it every quarter.

What I tried first

I looked at dedicated KPI platforms, including SimpleKPI and Spider Impact, and spent real time in Smartsheet. None of them fit. They were either too expensive for a nonprofit our size, or they assumed a tidy grid of numbers when about a third of what we needed to track turned out to be compliance items, simple yes-or-no questions about whether something happened.

The bigger lesson was structural. Form tools add new rows; they don't edit a grid in place. Once I stopped fighting that and designed around it, the whole thing got simpler.

What I built

• Guided quarterly forms in Microsoft Forms, one per program area, with instructions pulled from each program's own KPI documents.
• One data table in Excel, where every submission lands as a new row stamped with the quarter and year.
• A Power BI dashboard that always reads the most recent submission, so leadership sees the whole agency on one screen.

I built it in-house, using Claude and ChatGPT as working partners for the parts that would normally need a data analyst.

What it opened up

Once the pattern worked for KPIs, it worked for other things too. I've used the same approach for enrollment tracking, customer feedback and a Jotform tracker for the agency's 2026 to 2029 strategic plan, which follows 6 goals and 42 initiatives.

I also pitched this as a conference session for NTEN: How we built cross-program reporting in-house without a consultant.