Many of us in the marketing career field have heard of or even used Tableau, but when it comes to the pet industry, many marketers may wonder how this software can help visualize the data they wish to showcase for the brands they are currently working with or would like to work with in the future. I want to share how Best Friends’ Animal Society used Tableau to help them with their cause.
Best Friends Animal Society started using Tableau in 2016 for data visualization. Around the same time, Jami Delagrange, who became manager of Visual Analytics, fell in love with data visualization and paired it with her love for animals in her new role. She put this passion into building the Pet Lifesaving Dashboard. We can view the video walkthrough of this dashboard in this article, which shows how Tableau’s visualization tools were used to create this data-enriched dashboard with Best Friends employees, business partners, and more.
Pet Lifesaving Dashboard
The video shows how, with the click of a button, we can visualize data about different nations, states, communities, and shelters. Clicking on a state instantly shows us how many no-kill communities that state has, as well as how many pets entered shelters, how many pets were saved, and how many were killed. By clicking on a community inside of a state, we can deep dive and see a narrower focus showing specific shelters inside that community. We can see the communities’ percent save rate, how many no-kill shelters they have, how many are nearly no-kill, how many are not yet no-kill, and more. If we want to take it one step further, we can click on a specific shelter and see their dashboard. We can see the total number of pets that entered the shelter, how many were saved, and the percent save rate. We can even break down the difference between dogs and cats alongside a summary of the specific shelter and its status.
This dashboard helps Best Friends with their community engagement and awareness activity and finding new homes for pets. They can also communicate with their partners to keep the data updated and available for easy access among the partner networks. In this case, Jami built the dashboard, and Tom Pierre helped with monthly maintenance and support to keep things efficient and up to date.
The Technical Turmoil of Tableau
Jami shared that she found Tableau’s “pixel-perfect” aspect to be her biggest struggle. This feature includes the use of containers and paddings and allows for the cleanest experience for Best Friends and partners. Text responsiveness and mobile design can also become struggles. Still, once these more challenging features are mastered and used alongside other features of Tableau, like the aesthetic use of lines, colors, shapes, and highlighting of different elements, they make for a visually appealing and effective data visualization.
The Future of Tableau
The Tableau Conference 2024 shared with its attendees and users the new features like Tableau Einstein Copilot and a full suite of AI-powered features to help users better handle today’s data. The new features they shared included Tableau Pulse, Shared Dimensions, Prep Enhancements, Viz Extensions, Einstein Copilot for Tableau Catalog, Line Buffer for Geospatial Analysis, and Migration SDK Improvements. Check out this article to read more about the conference and other future enhancements coming to Tableau.
Do you have data that you would like to analyze in an artistically efficient way that you can easily share with coworkers, or other business partners in order to help increase productivity or marketing efforts for your business? Are you interested in using Tableau for your pet industry business? You can check out their pricing here and the perfect packages for your specific needs. If you would like to learn more about Tableau and its available features that can be utilized to help your business succeed, here is an article from Tableau sharing why you should choose this software for your data visualization needs.
