Wanting to create a modern, online dashboard to showcase its key performance indicators (KPIs), University of California, Berkeley Career Engagement (BCE) used Google Workspace products in the summer of 2022 as a low-cost, efficient way to tell its story. 

“This data visualization allows us to have meaningful conversations, share trends and outcomes, and make better informed decisions with our team and stakeholders,” explains Sue Harbour, associate dean and executive director of BCE.

“We have been working to best showcase our KPIs through data visualization. It has changed the way we collect, store, and utilize data. Prior to 2022, we simply recorded program attendance and appointments in an Excel document, which was limited, static, clunky, and out of touch.”

BCE’s objectives for this initiative were to: 

• Develop an effective dashboard to showcase its program and appointment KPIs to staff and stakeholders through strong data visualization storytelling;
• Highlight trends in student engagement across months and years by tracking program attendance, one-on-one appointments, and DEIB partners;
• Track and monitor its growth and improvement regarding its DEIB outreach effort to campus partners and leadership;
• Use a technology that is user friendly, visually appealing, widely accessible, cost effective, and scales based on organizational needs; and
• Achieve a comprehensive understanding of the data available in its CSM platform and how to work with those data sets to perform its desired data analysis.

“We now have a functional dashboard that is available in real time. It’s user friendly and accessible. We share highlights by telling our story through data with our stakeholders and, as a result, hosted a DEIB Open House to share insights with our campus partners and leaders,” Harbour notes.

Harbour says that as accountability for BCE’s services increases, it is important to use data to support CBE’s work.

“Public universities and higher education in general tend to lack funding to pay for products with a heavy price tag to visualize our growing data sets,” she says.

“By using Google Workspace products such as Sheets and Looker Studio, we have been able to record our monthly KPIs to visualize usage statistics, trends, and gaps and effectively track our improvements in DEIB outreach over the last five years.”

Harbour manages the BCE KPI dashboard, including updating it monthly with the previous month's data points, which is supplied by the Career Education Leadership Team. The tabs at the top of the dashboard indicate DEIB partners and the affinity code BCE attached, such as:

• CX/LX = Chicanx/Latinx;
• DSP = Disabled Student Program;
• GENEQ = Gender Equity Center’
• Intl = International;
• INTXN = Intersectional;
• XFER = Transfer; and
• Gen = General programs.

The second DEIB tab is charts, BCE OP is data capturing Outreach Partners that make up the affinity codes, and BCE PT is latest information the team began to capture, which includes the internal BCE staff who coordinated or provided support to the program.

BCE tracks trends in service delivery via the BCE KPI dashboard. For example, it can see that September, October, and March through May have the heaviest traffic for student appointments with fill rates being as high as 84%. In addition, September, October, and February bring in the most attendance for programs and workshops.

For tracking DEIB outreach efforts, the dashboard shows that during the 2018-19 academic year, BCE offered 32 programs to students within affinity populations that were attended by a total of 864 students. In 2022-23, BCE provided 113 affinity events to 5,095 student attendees. This shows a 253% increase in programs and 490% increase in attendance.

“Our dashboard originally was designed to track programs and appointments,” Harbour notes.

“However, once we saw its potential, we began to add more descriptive data points, including our DEIB relationships, staff participation, and campus partners to provide a rich and robust tool that continues to help us tell our story. We will continue to use and share our KPI dashboard with stakeholders and leadership as a means of accountability for the work we do to support students' career development.”

She explains that data that support your work and show gaps in service delivery areas are necessary to ensure equitable access for all students.

“It helps if you are curious about where staff time goes and peak times that students need services. If you don't have a data analyst on staff, do what you can to advocate to create this position. The data analyst is pivotal in understanding how the data needs to be captured in order to be clean, clear, and concise,” Harbour says.

“We know that as accountability for our services increases, it’s important to use data to support the work we do. Storytelling through data visualization is so important in our work. Anecdotal stories sound great, but data that back up the story you are trying to share can be used to advocate for more resources and, more importantly, assist in relationship building.”