Data Dashboard for Public Libraries

In an era of increasing emphasis on using data for organizational storytelling, have you ever wondered… how? At the most basic level, data storytelling is about taking compelling numbers and stats and building them into an appealing narrative about your organization, founded in data and complete with pictures: data visualizations. For many libraries, staff capacity, time constraints, and lack of expertise can make it challenging to find, use, and translate that data into a story. WiLS wants to help with that with an annual subscription to a public library data dashboard!

The dashboard automatically provides visualizations for dozens of Annual Report metrics and basic community demographic data pulled from federal and state census sources. To help libraries make sense of their data in context, we provide data averages from a “comparison cohort,” a set of similar libraries. Annual subscriptions also include an hour of time with WiLS’ data analyst to teach you the basics of how the dashboard works and help you identify the ways you might use your data to support organizational storytelling about your library and its services.

Subscriptions for individual public libraries are $315 annually and public library systems are eligible for reduced bulk pricing for multiple libraries.

To learn more, explore a demo version (also below) to see a few sample metrics from over 50 data points in the full dashboard, or reach out to Kim Kiesewetter at kim@wils.org.