Release Objectives

The primary objectives for the Cobalt Power BI Release were to:

1. Deliver a series of ready-to-use dashboards with interactive visualizations so that our clients can report and act upon the data with ease.

Expected Benefits

The Cobalt Power BI release will be considered a success if the following criteria are met.

1. Four dashboards are created for a corresponding module of the Cobalt Product (Membership, Engagement, Events, eCommerce).
2. Power BI reports can be added to D365 online environments and used without additional customization needed.
   1. The purpose of not making any customizations is to allow for as universal of an implementation process as possible.
3. Staff can interact with the embedded Power BI reports, filters, and visualizations within their D365 environment.

Supported CRM Versions

D365 On-Premises

• Not Supported. Power BI report functionality requires D365 Online.

D365 Online

• The latest version of Dynamics 365 Online.

Cases and Background​

Membership Dashboard

The Membership dashboard provides a snapshot of the membership counts of the year, and join, renewal, and average tenure trends over a given amount of time. The dashboard aims to provide answers to questions about the average member, membership activity, YTD renewal and join history, and offers insight into current membership trends.

When a staff member interacts with the dashboard, they will be able to filter based on join date, contact demographic details (age, gender, education) and member type. They can additionally filter based on the visualizations in the dashboard itself, which allows for a more nuanced analysis of their membership data.

Features

Events Dashboard

The Events dashboard that was implemented in this release allows clients to see a snapshot of event registrations and identify registration trends over the course of several years. The dashboard visualizations are mirrored between quantity (count of registrations) and monetary (amount of sales) to allow users to get a comprehensive picture of the data.

Staff members who interact with the dashboard will be able to filter based on the event’s begin date, contact demographic details (age, gender, education), and the name of the event itself.

Please note that for the purposes of this dashboard, Events refers to Classes and Meetings together; not the Event entity. This is due to the generally popular usage of Classes and Meetings to track events and allows for more granular reporting in comparison.

There is a known limitation in this dashboard where clicking the Event name in the “Top/Bottom 5 Events” chart will not filter the Registration Sales and Average Registration number.

Features

Engagement Dashboard

The Engagement dashboard is a snapshot into how engaged an organization’s contacts are and allows staff members to gain insight into their user base’s average and median engagement levels, the distribution of engagement levels over time, and the most common forms of engagement.

Staff members who interact with the dashboard will be able to filter based on a contact’s membership’s Last Renew date, contact demographic details (age, gender, education), and the member type of the contact. These filter options allow for actionable insight from clients when analyzing their membership engagement rates.

This dashboard utilizes out of the box Engagement functionality, but will require clients to configure the dashboard’s Engagement Segment to define each segment category. Engagement Activities are the primary table (entity) used – as such we recommend clients to create corresponding records in their CRM environment in order to utilize this dashboard.

Features

eCommerce Dashboard

This release added an eCommerce snapshot dashboard. It provides an overview of the sales made in a year, and trends over the last few years to answer questions about best (and worst)-selling products, average orders by quantity and sales, and customer trends. The eCommerce dashboard utilizes the Sales Order as the primary table for analysis.   

Staff members who interact with the dashboard will be able to filter based on the sales order’s date fulfilled, contact demographic details (age, gender, education), and the status of the order. The status is set to Fulfilled by default. Please note that filtering by product will not filter any of the Order-based charts due to the way that the data model relationships are created.

Features