Public-sector marketers often work with mountains of data, large expectations, and thin budgets. How to make sense of all that data without hiring expert researchers, buying expensive software, or burning hours trying to make Microsoft Excel answer what seems like a simple question?
(Don’t get me wrong–I am a big Excel fan, but it has it’s limits.)
Public-sector marketers need a free, easy tool that can access data wherever it is, in whatever form, and enable fast, usable analysis and visualization. In other words, a way to spend 80 percent of their time analyzing data, not collecting and managing it.
Qlik Sense Desktop is now free for personal and individual business use. As the company describes it on their website, Sense Desktop is “a Windows application that gives individuals the power to create personalized, interactive data visualizations, reports and dashboards from multiple data sources with drag-and-drop ease.”
The best way to get a sense of what Sense Desktop can do is watching the 3-minute video embedded in this post. You can also read more in the Sense Desktop data sheet.
I hope to start using Sense Desktop in future posts to crunch publicly available data for new insights to share.
(Qlik offers enterprise versions of Sense for a fee. Their ploy is to get individuals hooked in hopes that their organizations will buy in. They certainly aren’t the first company to take this approach to viral promotion. Use the free version to your advantage, and upgrade only if and when it makes sense.)