Frequently Asked Questions

Spider Impact is software that helps large organizations reach their big-picture strategic goals. All of your performance data is up-to-date in one place so everyone knows where you are, where you’re going, and how they can help.

Using Spider Impact means everyone in your organization has access to the latest data they need to make strategic decisions. Meeting preparation is a snap, completely eliminating tedious slide-building work. Initiative tracking predicts whether your projects will finish on time and under budget. Reports and Alerts tell you the second a KPI takes a turn for the worse. Industry-leading data visualization communicates your performance with dashboards, maps, and infographics. Powerful Business intelligence allows you to explore underlying data.

All of this power is wrapped in clean, web-based software. It’s easy to get started, and it’s easy to use.

Spider impact is used throughout the world in a wide variety of industries, governments, and nonprofits. We’ve highlighted some of them in our customer success stories.

Spider Impact was designed to be methodology agnostic. It works great with KPIs, balanced scorecards, earned value management, and many, many more.

We maintain translations of Spider Impact for the following languages:

• English
• Arabic
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• French
• Turkish

If you’d like to translate Impact into another language, we can provide you with a spreadsheet of all phrases in the software.

We’re a team of performance management enthusiasts, software developers, and support staff based in Washington, DC. We’ve been helping organizations improve their performance since 2004.

No, there’s nothing to download or install. Impact works on all modern web browsers, including iOS and Android devices.

You can do either. Most organizations choose Software as a Service because there’s zero IT footprint with cloud software. Other organizations prefer the flexibility of hosting Impact on-premises in their own data centers.

Very. Regardless of whether you’re using Impact in the cloud or hosting it on-premises, you’re using software that regularly passes 3rd party security audits. It’s the same software that is currently operating on classified military networks.

Yes. For commercial customers we offer fully certified SOC 2 and HIPAA compliant hosting for an additional cost. For US Government, Defense, and National Security customers we also offer Spider Impact for Government.

SaaS users start at $125 per month, getting significantly cheaper the more you buy.

Please contact us for customer hosted pricing, as well as for regional pricing.

If you have 10 or more licenses, you can choose either a yearly or monthly subscription. Fewer than 10 licenses is yearly.

It’s easy to add data to Spider Impact. You can update everything right in the web-based software, or build custom forms for data collection. Impact can even email KPI updaters when it’s time to enter their latest KPI values. If your data already exists somewhere, however, you should use built-in data integrations to set up automated data flows.

Spider Impact can use web service connections or Zapier to pull data from thousands of online apps like Salesforce, Stripe, Google Analytics, and Jira. You can automatically import data on a schedule or when specific events happen.

If your data isn’t in another app, it will often be in the form of a spreadsheet. In these situations you can manually upload Excel or CSV files, or schedule them to be pulled from an (S)FTP server. If your spreadsheet is in the cloud, you can schedule the import from Google Sheets.

If your data is in a database, you can schedule imports from SQL queries. Spider Impact supports a wide variety of databases including Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, IBM DB2, SAP HANA, etc.

Regardless of the data source, Spider Impact has powerful transformations and mapping to clean and combine your data as it’s imported.

See the Importing Data section of the knowledge base for more information.

If you have 10 or more user licenses, you can export just about every screen in Spider Impact to a variety of formats. The options vary based on the type of data being shown, but they include:

• Excel
• PowerPoint
• PDF
• Word
• PNG Image
• Email
• Print

If you have 25 or more users, you can share live Dashboards, Strategy Maps, and Forms with people who aren’t using Spider Impact. You can share a URL that shows the live content, or you can embed the live content in other websites. They’ll always see the latest data, and you can manage what you’re sharing in Administration.

Spider Impact tracks three types of data:

• Scorecards break your big-picture strategy into small, measurable pieces. At the lowest level are KPIs with goals. Every KPI is measured regularly and it gets a color and score based on whether it reached its goal. Spider Impact then rolls those KPI scores up the Scorecard tree to see if you’re reaching your high-level strategy.
• Initiatives are similar to KPIs except they have a start and end date. You update them regularly with percent complete and money spent, and Impact predicts whether they’ll finish on time and on budget.
• Datasets hold low-level data, and are often direct exports from systems of record. You can explore Datasets with ad-hoc analysis, and you can use them as data sources for other areas of Impact, like KPIs or Dashboards.

These three types of data are often interrelated. For example, you can create calculated KPIs based on values from either datasets or an initiatives. Or, when you can put an initiative in place to improve a poorly performing KPI, Impact will tell you if that initiative is actually improving the KPI’s performance.

• Charts show data from Scorecards, Initiatives, and Datasets in a visual format. You can choose from traditional chart types like bar, line, pie, and area, or you can show more advanced visualizations like treemaps and polar charts. You can even show your data using infographics like pyramids, funnels, cycles, timelines, and filled containers.
• Reports show show data from Scorecards, Initiatives, and Datasets in a table format. Spider Impact has a full-featured report writer that allows you to choose columns, formatting, row grouping, and row filtering. You can show low-level details, or aggregated totals. You can also schedule reports to be emailed on a regular basis.
• Dashboards show the performance of multiple things at once so you can see your performance at a glance. You can add all kinds of objects to dashboards like charts, reports, gauges, performance bubbles, text, and images. Dashboards in Impact are based on a freeform canvas, giving you freedom to drag, drop, and resize objects to create any appearance or layout. They also automatically resize to fit displays ranging form boardroom projectors to mobile phones.
• Strategy Maps are similar to Dashboards and show a visual representation of your strategy. Arrows connect performance bubbles, and you can click on any bubble to drill down for more information.
• Briefings are a collection of Impact screens like Dashboards, Reports, and Scorecard Overviews. When you start a briefing, it’s a lot like a PowerPoint presentation because you step through slides in full-screen. The difference, however, is that the data is live. At any point you can click to drill down for more information, and with another click you can resume the presentation right where you left off. Live data also means you don’t have to build a new presentation for every meeting because your slides are always up to date.

One of the biggest advantages of managing your performance with Spider Impact is that you’ll know immediately when something takes a turn for the worse. Impact has built-in Alerts like notifications for owners of red KPIs, or letting you know when someone replies to one of your comments. Users can also set alerts on individual KPIs they choose.

Another handy tool for keeping an eye on performance is scheduled reports. You can create reports showing all red or downward trending KPIs for an organization, and then schedule them to be emailed every week or month.

Finally, Bookmarks can be useful to get an overall feeling for how things are performing. Many executives have 3 or 4 summary dashboards in their Impact bookmarks that they view every week.

Spider Impact uses normalized scoring to make different types of objectives and metrics directly comparable. Every KPI’s actual value is converted into a standardized score between 0 and 10 based on thresholds you define, like goals and red flags. This means you can easily compare performance across your organization, regardless of how different metrics are measured.

Scores then automatically roll up your scorecard tree. Each level receives a weighted average of the scores below it, giving you a clear picture of performance at every level of your organization. You can adjust these weights to reflect different priorities, and there are flexible options for customizing how scoring works.

For detailed information about scoring calculations and configuration options, see the Exploring How Scores are Calculated article in our knowledge base.

Larger deployments of Spider Impact can have thousands or even tens of thousands of similar scorecards. The easiest way to manage these is with templates.

The idea behind templates is simple. You create an organization with a scorecard, and then you create things like dashboards and reports based on the scorecard. You can then copy that organization as a template as many times you want. All of the references between the scorecard and its visualizations will be automatically updated for every templated copy, and any changes you make to the template source will automatically show up in the templated copies. Many organizations use this technique to manage large numbers of similar scorecards from just a few templates.

Although you can’t edit templated copies, you can add to them. For example, you could have a common set of templated KPIs for every employee scorecard, and then add additional KPIs to some of the employee scorecards. Or, you can create reports and dashboards for just a single templated copy.

Templates also have many advanced features to make large deployments easier. You can create rollup KPIs that automatically aggregate values up an organization tree made of templated copies. You can even create multiple organizations automatically from dataset values.

All of this is just scratching the surface of what you can do with templates. For more information, see the Organizations and Templates section of the knowledge base.

For full Spider Impact documentation, the online Knowledge Base is the place to go.

We also have a collection of online training videos that walk you through commons tasks.

Finally, we can get you help from experts so you can get the most out of your Spider Impact investment. Our consultants and partners work with you to ensure a successful implementation, and our trainers lead virtual and in-person classes.