Same Data. Different Story: What IP&R Professionals Told Us About Better Council Reporting
As corporate sponsors of the 2026 Integrated Planners Conference in Tamworth, hosted by LG Professionals NSW, we wanted our session to do more than talk about better reporting. We wanted the room to experience the challenge for themselves.
So, as part of our Becoming a Local Government Data Storyteller session, we ran an activity called The Great Council Reporting Makeover. Eight tables of IP&R professionals were given exactly the same quarterly performance report and asked to look at it through different audience lenses.
The council was fictional; we called it the City of Bayview, but the reporting challenges were deliberately familiar. The report included:
Operational Plan actions sitting under traffic lights
Major projects
Performance measures
Financial information
Community satisfaction results
Risks and exceptions
In other words, plenty of data - the kind of information commonly found in council quarterly performance reporting.
We asked each table to read the report through a particular lens: CEO and Executive, Audit and Risk, or Community, and answer a simple question: what are the three things your audience actually needs to know?
What came back told us something worth sharing more widely. Nobody asked for more KPIs. Nobody asked for a longer report. And nobody asked for more data. What they asked for, again and again, was more meaning.
A status isn't a story
The clearest theme of the day showed up almost immediately. When participants hit an action or project marked red or amber, simply knowing it was "off track" or "at risk" wasn't enough to satisfy them. They wanted to know why it was off track, what had actually happened, how significant the issue was, what impact it was having, what was being done about it, and what getting back on track would look like.
One participant put it simply: always ask yourself why, and include it in the report.
Traffic lights still matter. They focus attention and tell a reader where to look first. But a red light only points at a problem; it doesn't explain it. The conversation across the room kept circling back to a natural shift in how quarterly commentary could be structured: what happened, why, the impact, the response, and what's next. That's roughly the point where status reporting stops being a scoreboard and starts becoming a story. And storytelling wasn't only about exceptions: participants also wanted achievements and good-news stories to be easier to see, so reporting showed where progress should be recognised as well as where attention was required.
Connecting activity to impact
We built a few deliberate tensions into the Bayview report - places where two pieces of information didn't sit side by side comfortably. For example, council's road resealing program was on track, yet community satisfaction with road condition sat below target. More than ninety per cent of customer requests were being resolved within target, yet satisfaction with responsiveness was also below target.
Participants noticed straight away and started drawing lines between information that lived in different parts of the report. One table wanted to know how the actions on the page were actually delivering the outcomes council had promised. Another wanted reporting that showed how the day-to-day work was contributing to the bigger, longer-term goals sitting behind it.
That distinction is worth sitting with. Completing an action tells us something was done. A performance measure might tell us whether something changed. It's only when the two are read together that we start to understand whether the work is actually contributing to the outcome it was meant to achieve; and for IP&R reporting, that's a meaningful difference, not a technicality.
Less reporting, more focus
Perhaps the most interesting finding was what participants didn't ask for. Nobody wanted another twenty pages of data. Instead, the Post-it notes going up around the room called for a one-page, easy-to-digest summary; fewer pages and less unnecessary detail; snapshots of priority works; clearer trends; better visuals and infographics; a stronger executive summary; and, more than anything, a sharper sense of what actually mattered.
One participant summed it up well: reduce the volume of the report; tell the story concisely.
So the challenge may not always be collecting more information. It may be deciding what deserves the reader's attention in the first place.
For a CEO, that might be an emerging organisational risk or a decision that needs to be made. For an Audit and Risk Committee, it might be the significance of an issue, an emerging pattern, or assurance that appropriate action is underway. For the community, it can be much more practical: why is the aquatic centre late, when will it be finished, and what will it cost?
Same council. Same quarter. Same underlying information. Very different conversations.
The audience changes the story
That turned out to be one of the clearest lessons of the whole exercise: the report itself didn't change; the audience did.
The tables gravitated towards different questions. CEO and Executive participants focused on exceptions, emerging risks and decisions; Audit and Risk looked for significance, trends and assurance; community-focused tables wanted to understand impacts, projects, expenditure and what council was doing when things weren't going to plan.
One participant's takeaway was to think about the different audiences reading the report and what each of them actually wants to know. Another proposed something more specific still - a summary tailored to the audience reading it.
This doesn't mean building an entirely separate reporting process for every audience. It means recognising that one set of underlying data may need to support several different conversations. What a CEO needs to make a decision isn't necessarily what a resident needs to understand whether council is delivering on its commitments. Good reporting starts with knowing who's going to use it.
Reporting should help someone act
The final theme to surface, and perhaps the most telling, was action. Across almost every table, the same questions kept coming up: what are we doing about it, what's the plan to get back on track, what are the next steps?
One CEO table reduced it to its simplest form of all: what decision needs to be made?
That's a useful test to apply to any performance report. If an issue is significant enough to be reported, does the reader come away understanding what happens next? That next step might be a decision, an intervention, further investigation, a risk mitigation, or simply continued monitoring - but the report needs to make that clear. Without it, reporting risks becoming an exercise in documenting performance rather than using performance information to actually improve it.
From reporting data to telling the story
Towards the end of the workshop, we shared five principles of good data storytelling with the room
Start with the story, not the data - focus on what matters rather than everything you know.
Connect plans, projects and performance - show how activity contributes to strategic outcomes.
Provide context, not just status - explain why something has changed and what it means.
Tell the story for your audience - different audiences need different conversations.
Finish with action - make clear what needs attention, a decision or a response.
What was particularly interesting was that we didn't need to convince the room of these principles. Through the exercise, participants had already arrived at them. Their discussions and Post-it notes independently called for more context, clearer connections, sharper audience focus, less unnecessary information and stronger links between performance and action.
Perhaps the simplest lesson from the whole exercise was also the most useful one. Better data storytelling doesn't necessarily mean more data, more measures or more reporting.
The room wasn't asking for more information. It was asking for more meaning. Sometimes that simply means making the story already sitting inside the information easier to see.
So before the next quarterly reporting cycle begins, it might be worth asking one question first: what's the story we're trying to tell?
