Salesforce Dynamic Gauges for Visualizing Goals

It’s that time of year! Hot chocolate, holidays, and end of year reports. You worked all year, pushing yourself and your organization to meet your goals. Now is the time to for your nonprofit to make the extra effort and really show how much amazing work you have accomplished.

Salesforce is here to help with a new dashboard setting that allows you to easily visualize goals. Learn how this trick can help you prepare your year end report, and set up for next year!

You may already be familiar with the Dashboard “Gauge” component. It allows you to show a total from a report, and define if that number is good or bad on a scale with a helpful needle, just like the gas gauge in your car’s dashboard. Gauges are a great way to track progress to a single goal, like how much money your annual appeal made. In October 2021, Salesforce enabled you to set that goal by referencing a field on an object, instead of just entering it manually.

In our example, we’ll set up a dashboard gauge to track our fundraising progress toward our Annual Fund goal.

The “Expected Revenue in Campaign” field, on the Campaign record, represents our organization’s goal of raising $10,000 from our annual appeal. This Campaign record also tells us that we have raised $8,655 so far (in the “Total Value of Won Opportunities” field), as seen here:

It’s great that we’re tracking this information, but that page isn’t the most interesting to look at! Let’s make it easier for our whole team to follow our progress by visualizing this goal, using a dashboard gauge component that looks like this:

Here’s how.

1. Our first step is to enable the new feature “Enable Dashboard Dynamic Gauge Charts (Lightning Experience Only)”. To do this, go into Setup, search for “Reports and Dashboard Settings” in the quick find, and select that option, then click Save.
   
   
2. Next we need to create a report of the Opportunities that we want to summarize for our gauge. Start with an Opportunities report type:
   
   
3. Add a filter to include only “Won” Opportunities, and then also filter and group the report by “Primary Campaign Source” (so that we’re only including Opportunities that belong to our Annual Appeal Campaign):
   
   
   
4. Summarize the report by Amount, and then save it:
   
   
5. Next we’ll add our new report to a dashboard and choose “gauge” as the display option. (If you don’t see the gauge as an option, check that you followed the steps above – you may not have grouped by “Primary Campaign Source” in your report!).
   
   
6. Now switch the gauge mode from “Standard” to “Dynamic”:
   
7. Identify which object you want the goal to come from (“Campaign”), then choose the specific Campaign record of Annual Appeal, and select the field that stores your goal, “Expected Revenue in Campaign”. Make sure that your selected Report Metric is “Sum of Amount” (not “Record Count”!).
   
   
8. Lastly, select a few more options to make the gauge easy to read. You’ll probably want the “Display Units” to present a full number versus a rounded/abbreviated number (like “$8,655” instead of “$9K”), and to show the percentage toward your goal as well. Click “Update” and then “Save” on your dashboard.
   

The best part is that if we raise the goal on the Campaign, the scale of the gauge will automatically update without any manual editing!

Now that your Dashboard is created, you can add additional gauges for all the other goals you want to track. To add multiple goals for separate campaigns, just repeat the steps of creating a report and filtering to a specific campaign, then add those reports to your dashboard.

For further information, check out these articles from Salesforce:

Dynamic Gauge Charts in Lightning Experience Dashboards (Beta)

Automatically Tune Your Dashboards to Your Business Goals with Dynamic Gauge Charts (Beta)