Daniel Waisberg asked an interesting question in the web analytics yahoo group recently, “just got curious: when you send a Web Analytics doc, do you add a cover page? Suddenly it looks to me like a barrier to conversion (i.e. reading)…”
I replied back, “We don’t do cover page internally. Cover page is only for consultants. 
”
This got me think more about the so-called “million dollar slide” . The idea is for whatever project / presentation, you need have one page of executive summary which basically tells the audience, especially executives what are the key takeaways.
The format I usually follow is like this and we call this “answer first” internally at Dell.
- Situation: what’s the context for this project?
- Challenge: what challenges/difficulties the business is running into?
- Solution / recommendation: what specific solution / recommendation for the business, both in short term / long term?
- Monetization: what’s the estimated annualized revenue / margin upside the business can expect from these recommendations? If the executives see millions $ upside, they will surely approve to move forward with the recommendations!
I think this is probably a very good format that we should do more as the web analyst community. As analyst, we love data, charts and tables but sometimes we forget our audience. What do they want to learn? How we can make it easier for them to understand what we want them to do? I don’t think we are doing that enough and we should certainly make this as part of the gene of web analytics.
Got your million dollars slide? What is the specific format you typical use for the executive summary?
