Visualizing Change: A Nonprofit Dashboard Refresh

The Challenge

More Impact, an Australian consulting firm supporting nonprofit organizations, was undergoing a major rebranding effort. As part of this transformation, their existing Tableau dashboards — integrated directly with Salesforce — needed a complete visual overhaul to align with the new brand identity. The dashboards were functionally adequate but visually outdated, with poor readability and a user experience that didn’t meet modern standards.

Adding significant complexity, the underlying Salesforce database contained 15 million records across roughly 350 custom fields. Any dashboard modifications triggered data refreshes that took up to five hours. This meant that a traditional iterative approach to dashboard design — make a change, preview, adjust — was impractical. The solution needed to be designed carefully upfront and validated through prototyping before touching the production environment.

The technical constraint was particularly challenging: with 15 million records across 350 custom fields in Salesforce, the dashboards were extremely sensitive to design decisions. A poorly constructed filter or an inefficient join could trigger multi-hour refresh cycles, making the dashboards useless for day-to-day operations. Previous internal attempts to update the dashboards had been abandoned after developers spent days waiting for queries to execute. The project needed a partner who understood both dashboard design best practices and the performance implications of different design choices at this data scale.

Our Approach

We developed a design-first approach that separated visual design from data operations:

• Design System Creation: We worked closely with More Impact’s branding team to create a comprehensive Tableau design system aligned with their new visual identity. This included color palettes, typography rules, chart styling guidelines, layout templates, and interaction patterns — all documented for consistent application across all current and future dashboards.
• Prototype Development: Rather than modifying the production dashboards (and triggering 5-hour refreshes with each iteration), we built prototype dashboards using test data that matched the Salesforce schema. This allowed rapid design iteration without impacting the production environment or consuming hours of refresh time.
• UX Optimization: Beyond visual branding, we improved the dashboard UX: cleaner information hierarchy, better use of white space, improved filter placement, and simplified navigation. The goal was to make dashboards that nonprofit staff — who are not data analysts — could use intuitively.
• Implementation Guide: We delivered detailed specifications and templates that More Impact’s team could use to apply the new design system to their production dashboards, including guidance on managing the data refresh process.

We conducted usability testing with nonprofit staff who would be the primary dashboard users. Their feedback revealed several UX issues that weren’t obvious from a design perspective — for example, the default date filter range needed to match their typical reporting cadence (fiscal quarter, not calendar month), and certain metrics needed context labels explaining what they meant in nonprofit-specific terminology. We incorporated all feedback into the final design system, ensuring that the dashboards would actually be adopted by the team rather than sitting unused because they didn’t match real workflows.

Results

• Clean, modern, and intuitive dashboard interface aligned with More Impact’s new brand identity.
• Significantly improved readability and UX — designed for nonprofit staff, not data analysts.
• Comprehensive Tableau design system enabling consistent styling across all future dashboards.
• Prototype-based approach that avoided production disruption during the design process.
• Implementation guide enabling More Impact’s team to apply the new design independently.

Technologies Used

Tableau, Salesforce integration, design systems, UX prototyping, data visualization best practices.

Project Screenshots