Best Practices

Impact DashBoard Essentials: Your Digital Project Questionnaire for Economic Development

Simplify your ED project data gathering process.  Questionnaire responses are often hard to read, incomplete, and confusing.  The Data Form feature within Impact DashBoard Essentials simplifies the process with a customizable, digital project data questionnaire.   How Impact DashBoard Essentials Works Create a … Read More

Our Economic Development Impact Detailed Report

In a related post, I explained what type of information was included in the Summary Report in Impact DashBoard. Impact DashBoard includes a one-page Summary Report for each taxing district in your analysis but the Detailed Report, consisting of 10-15 … Read More

Our Economic Development Impact Summary Report

K.I.S.S. – Keep It Simple, Stupid. This a principle we’ve come to appreciate over the years. Reporting on the impact of an economic development project can get technical but in developing Impact DashBoard, our economic development impact model, we have … Read More

ROUNDUP: Impact DashBoard Confidential

A big thank you to everyone who was able to tune in to one or more of the webinars in our series, Impact DashBoard Confidential. During the webinar series, several Impact DashBoard users shared insights on how they use the online … Read More

A Word of Advice for Amazon HQ2 Communities

High-profile location projects like Amazon HQ2 magnify the importance of some economic development basics. Most important piece of advice I give to local governments, which doesn’t necessarily hold in the case of Amazon, is to get absolutely clear on the … Read More

Business Retention & Expansion – SCORE Counseling

There is no template for Business Retention and Expansion – there are always different issues, people, businesses, and many more unique features. However, across the board, communities need to give extra TLC to their small businesses who can use all … Read More

Taking Control of Data

You hear the ting a new email flying into your inbox. You quickly check it, hoping it is a company looking at moving into your community or even a message from the governor’s office exposing a new project lead. You … Read More

Board Meeting Rabbit Holes

This was not how you envisioned the board meeting going. By this time, you expected to be getting kudos from the board and feeling on top of the world after presenting this really big economic development opportunity. You expected to … Read More

Prepare Yourself, Prepare the Board

As an economic developer, your board can be a strong catalyst to progress or a minefield to tiptoe through. In fact, your board can even be both! Either way, when a board member calls, you always answer. While working at … Read More

Riding State-of-the-City Enthusiasm

As January draws to a close and we realize that we are almost 1/12th of the way done with 2017, many people look back at the progress (or lack of) that they have made on their new year’s resolutions. Similarly, … Read More