How Displayr helped Cygnal cut report creation time in half

Challenge

Wasting too much time trying to create appealing data presentations

As VP of Data & Analytics for Cygnal, Matt Hubbard knows the value of good data presentation. And so do his clients: in recent years, the standards for visualizations in the data industry have gotten much higher, he says.

“The industry is moving towards telling stories with data, making it more accessible, more understandable,” Matt explains. “You need to make it come to life, so it’s not just a percentage on a PDF.”

Matt needed to create visual presentations so that his clients—political candidates and CEOs, decision makers who didn’t necessarily work with data every day—could understand and interact with their data at a glance.

We had some competitors that were producing presentations out of SPSS that were extremely ugly. Sending those out to clients looked horrible, and that just wasn’t the brand presentation we wanted.

As a workaround, Matt and his team tried using PowerPoint and retrofitting macros to produce the different kinds of tables they wanted to show. But that solution was extremely time-consuming and tedious to create and update, and Cygnal didn’t have the resources or people-power to do that for all of their clients. This also didn’t solve the problem of interactivity.

“We wanted the ability to visualize summary results of a survey question, and the ability for those questions to be explored with crosstabs or filters,” he explains. “Say for instance you’re asking about a favorite car brand. We wanted to show the overall results, but also by sex or age grouping, all on the same slide. And we were able to do that in PowerPoint, but it was incredibly time-consuming to create the tables that created those charts.”

Matt and his team needed a solution that could save them time and help them automatically produce interactive, meaningful, and aesthetically-pleasing data visualizations for their clients. Matt knew that with the right tool, he could create the kinds of reports that would wow his clients and outshine the competition.

Solution

Easy-to-use reporting software built for survey data that offers striking visuals, dashboards, and PowerPoint automation

Matt and his team were already using Q, another Displayr product, to analyze their data. So when he began looking for dynamic visualization and dashboarding solutions, Displayr was a logical choice.

“When we compared it to alternatives in the marketplace, we found that Displayr’s functionality is much better than others. It made it a lot easier to visually create what we wanted for our clients.”

Displayr made it easy to create beautiful, interactive presentations and dashboards in a fraction of the time. And with Displayr’s automatic data updates, which connected their entire reporting and analysis cycle, Cygnal could prepare their reports ahead of time and update them before sending to clients, which was a huge time saver for their team.

“It’s basically an all-in-one statistical package with presentation tools,” he says. “It’s very easy to drag and drop to create the different tables that we want. It’s saved a lot of time.”
With minimal effort, the Cygnal team could now give their clients beautiful visual PowerPoint and PDF presentations as well as interactive, live dashboards. The added value has been fantastic for their clients, Matt says.

“We don’t give our clients a Displayr dashboard every time, but when we do, it’s very helpful because it becomes like a second deliverable,” he explains. “They can use the dashboard to interact with their data and create custom tables. They feel like they’re getting a lot more value out of the project than just a typical presentation.”

And if Matt ever has a question about Displayr’s functionalities, he knows he can always count on their customer service team to help.

“I can’t give enough praise to the Displayr support team,” he says. “We are very much huge fans of Displayr for not only the product’s capabilities, but the level of service that the company provides.”

Result

50% less time spent on presentations, and added value for their clients

Now, Matt estimates that his team saves at least 50% of the time they used to spend creating data visualizations for their clients.

“It’s at least 50% faster than just creating a PowerPoint presentation,” Matt says. “In some cases, I think it’s even higher than 50%.”

The beautiful presentations they create help them stand out, and the interactive dashboards they can now offer give their clients more value than traditional, static PowerPoints.

“Displayr really helps us stand against our competitors,” Matt says. “It has definitely helped us close a few deals.”

In fact, he likes Displayr so much, he tries not to brag about it to other data science firms.

Displayr enables us to not only meet our clients’ expectations, but really go beyond them with our visualizations. I like the competitive advantage it gives us, so I try not to let too many competitors onto it.