Stephanie’s Note: So so often I get emails from readers asking for examples of how full reports can incorporate more graphic design while still maintaining credibility and seriousness, especially for more conservative audiences. Sid’s report is a nice example of how well-considered images can boost engagement and appeal. Nice work,…
Stephanie’s Note: Readers are always asking me for more examples of a 1 page research or executive summary and Chari Smith of CRSmith Consulting has a really nice one here that is visual and yet doesn’t involve a single graph! I have a long history of working with the…
Conference season has begun (does it ever really end?) and I’m thinking again about the swag. You know, those freebies given away by vendors or fellow evaluators. I am personally not usually excited about the heaps of easily breakable plastic crap, but if done well evaluation swag can make a…
I’m fresh out of a weekly discussion forum on evaluation. We talked about some of the same topics that always seem to arise: the importance of knowing your client’s organizational culture, the perils of unclear boundaries, the stigma of bad evaluation. Something struck me this time about that last point:…
Data visualization (or information visualization or infographics) isn’t just a sweet way to display your evaluation findings. It is a critical pathway to helping clients actually remember what you said. Blame the brain. Visual processing of information is the dominant method among all the senses – it is called the…
I had the awesome opportunity to host our local wine guru – Terry Stingley – at The Evaluation Center this week. He spoke to us about how to evaluate wine. We, of course, were thinking strictly about how to apply these notions to program evaluation. I learned so much about…
It had perhaps less than six words per slide. It had high quality graphics. It had a systematic and consistent placement of elements. But something about the presentation today still bugged the kernel of a graphic designer inside me. The presenter had clearly read some basic literature on slideshow presentations…
Evaluation use is a hot topic, but no one is looking at the role of graphic design. Guidance on graphic design of evaluation reports in the literature of our field is sparse. Typically, discussion of use of evaluation findings (or lack thereof) focuses on types of use (i.e., conceptual, process,…
or How Semantics Constrained a Field
Our discipline is stricken with too many values. I’m speaking semantically, of course. We use the word “values” to mean many things, including personal values, cultural and organizational values, criteria (or dimensions of merit), general and specific values (in terms of standards), monetary value (or worth), and in the action form as valuing (or judging). A conflation of terms hinders the discipline’s ability to be accessible others, particularly our clients and stakeholders, and unnecessarily confuses beginning evaluators, and perhaps even those who are more experienced.
Last year at about this time I was knee deep in survey redesign. I had joined this awesome project that has been conducting an annual survey for over 10 years. The surveyed parties are grantees in one of NSF’s program streams. Nice as they are, they’d been quite vocal about how the survey doesn’t meet their own evaluation needs, is difficult to complete, is too long, etc. I sort of empathized… until I had to complete the survey myself.
