Somewhere between TQM and Six Sigma, a new term began to make its way through corporate America "the Dashboard". With all the data and statistics being tossed around by corporate information systems, CEOs realized that they needed to figure out what data they should be paying attention to, and what they could safely ignore. The idea was that when you are in a car driving down the road you have five or six gauges that help you determine where you're going, how fast you're making progress toward your destination and if you have sufficient fuel (resource) to get to where you want to go. Initially dashboards were seen mostly in corporate board rooms with metrics on them like "sales wins relative to goal" "revenue per employee" or "administrative costs per member per month." The idea is that harried CEOs wouldn't have time to actually study the numbers themselves, but they would have a series of gauges that would tell them whether they were on or off track. What dashboards forced managers to do was to set parameters to define excellent progress vs. what constituted warning signs vs. real problems. Soon dashboards were making their way out of the CEOs office and down into the organization, landing on the desks of sales, manufacturing and eventually marketing and communications.

Over the past three years we've designed nearly a hundred such dashboards for communications professionals. This work has involved developing and testing questions that help communications professionals articulate their definitions of excellence. Furthermore, we have persuaded them to look beyond the easy measures of clips and hits and get them to design metrics that are tied to business performance and organizational mission. The purpose of this paper is to outline the techniques we use to help define their priorities as well as to discuss specific examples of how it has worked for different organizations, including non-profits, governmental agencies as well as corporations and PR firms.