The Latinas in Data will be hosting a Power Platform Bootcamp, an online event Feb 23-24 to teach women all over the world — especially Latinas in Tech — how to use all the fun Microsoft apps that every company on the planet is using to crunch its BIG FAT DATA and create visuals like this:
Ya, it’s pretty basic, but I am learning. Here are the baby steps, aka Recipe, for anyone who wants to use “Power Bi on a Mac,” which is a cloud-based version of Power Bi, to create intelligent data visualizations that help marketers assist CEOs make decisions to improve their bottom line.
Step 1: Download Microsoft Fabric Softener, haha, JK
Microsoft Fabric is the SaaS platform that serves a free version of the Power Bi app….
No wait! That’s not right.
Step 1 is actually: Create a Free Power Bi Account
Ugh! Another pinche account! I’m GenX peeps, I may still have my Friendster account somewhere on a server farm, far, far away that’s now feeding an LLM to generate AI content. Sticks tongue out. Dang-it.
Step 2: Open cloud-based Power Bi
Well, the interface doesn’t look too different from Google Studio which creates dashboards that are connected to Google Analytics (which measures traffic to websites). I’m familiar with these dashboards so I am not intimidated and create a VERY basic data visual to show the web traffic of Georgic Media client Urban Alliance.
Cool. So…there is a practical application for Power Bi. But how is it better than Infogram, which I have been using for our main Georgic Media client NASHP.org for at least five or six years? Uhhh. Well, I found an article that compares the two, and then I uploaded Femmebot 2.0 to TikTok with a poll asking folks if Power Bi is better than Infogram. Power Bi got one vote. OK. Fine. Now what?
Step 3: Decide why you need to do this workshop:
1. To promote TheFemmebots.com to an international audience of Latinas in Data and Latinas in Tech, which is the audience I’ve been trying to court for 2 decades (16 years, according to LinkedIn).
2. To find an audience for all the other novels and blog posts I’ve been writing since 2007.
3. For my Dad. I would like to show him how I’ve been applying my brain toward work for almost 30 years. He is typical Latino machista who only sees the outside of women. It is very, very difficult for him to understand that women can have logic and reasoning skills like he does — especially since he’s mostly seen the emotional side of me reacting to his often macho comments.
Step 4: Create a Pitch to third client (lowest hanging fruit) using new Power Bi skills with the help of Latinas in Data.
On Monday, Dec. 11, I meet with Latinas in Data member Lucrecia Krause, who works with Hewlett Packard as a High Performance Computing & AI NonStop Enterprise Solutions Architect Project Manager.
I showcase my cloud-based version of Power Bi and the simple data visualization I had created for client UrbanAlliance.org.
Lucrecia praises me, almost like a mother would, and says, “Great job with your first visualization!” She also gets really excited about my learning journey. At this point, I’m still really nervous about it, but I’m determined to keep going.
It’s *really cool* how I can upload a simple spreadsheet showing the web traffic of my client, and Power Bi creates several different types of visualizations with bullet-pointed text conclusions to the right:
- Sum of Pageviews trended up, resulting in a 13.90% increase between January 2023 and November 2023.
- Sum of Pageviews started trending up on April 2023, rising by 30.68% (3035) in 7 months.
- Sum of Pageviews jumped from 9,894 to 12,929 during its steepest incline between April 2023 and November 2023.
Lucrecia says, “Yes, that’s the power of the built-in AI that analyzes the data in different ways.” Then she shows me the power of tree map charts.
Boom chakalaka! And then I know, in that moment, it will be a tree map chart that will allow me to show insightful data to another client that is interested in renewing its contract.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, I barely sleep trying to crunch the data, but eventually I learn from Mailchimp’s analytics that the 2022 and 2023 monthly newsletters were more successful because the majority of them went out on Mondays after 4pm and Thursdays between 9am and 2pm. I create a tree map chart in Infogram instead of Power Bi because I’m still more comfortable with the Infogram platform:
By Wednesday afternoon at 2pm I am able to present the information intelligently to the client. I am able to present solid facts to support my mission to “upsell” them. I’m feeling quite proud of myself when they say, “Hmmm, Mondays and Thursdays were the most popular times for our clients to open our newsletters? That’s all good to know.”
I’m excited because all the work I put into crunching the data with these apps will result in getting paid more for my services. But then the client says: “The only thing is, we’ve never seen any results from marketing.”
We interrupt this Power BI workshop for Mac with a commentary on the J-O-B of communications and marketing…
Marketing is good for visibility (which is important to our bottom line) but it doesn’t generate the HARD ROI of actually making the money we need to run this business, so companies don’t like spending a lot of money on marketing efforts.
Hmm. If this data is so valuable, why not apply it to support TheFemmebots.com?
It’s a Pivot!!!!!!!!
OK, so the idea for a while has been to apply everything we did for the clients to TheFemmebots.com.
The amount of time and energy we spent on TheFemmebots.com marketing was not equal to the amount of time and energy we spent on clients. If we want the marketing to directly impact the bottom line, ie PAID SUBSCRIPTIONS, we will need to do the following in 2024, Q1:
- Add a Tag to the Subscribe button like we did for “Apply Now” on Urban Alliance.
- Add a Subscribe button to all newsletters in 2024.
IF there were 89 visitors to the homepage of TheFemmebots.com in Q4, THEN which percentage can we convert those visitors into PAID subscribers?
IF the annual subscription to TheFemmebots.com were $10, THEN the maximum amount of revenue would be $890.
Womp womp. We can see now why the clients don’t want to pay much for these beautiful data visualizations!! LoL
OK, IF the annual subscription to TheFemmebots.com were $30, THEN the maximum amount of revenue would be $2670.