Delightful, strategy-shifting, and totally free ideas for your next data viz

When the Evaluator is Evaluated

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.

Read More

WTF HCZ?

We are big fans of the Harlem Children’s Zone around these parts. Like many others, I’m sure part of it is romantic – we aspire to see a social program work as well as HCZ appears because we love Harlem and we love magic bullets. If it works there, it…

Read More

Why Proposals Fail

Summer, as you  know, is proposal season. I’ve been up to my neck (literally – these proposals are huge) in stacks of papers, reviewing ideas seeking support from various federal agencies. Regardless of the agency, some proposals seem to fare less well for common reasons. Here’s my breakdown (and strictly…

Read More

Oil In My Backyard

Right now, the midwest’s largest oil spill in history is flowing through my backyard. The pipeline, taking oil from Indiana to Canada, burst sometime Sunday or Monday this past week (3-4 days ago), sending 840,000 barrels of oil into a creek, that flows to the Kalamazoo River, that flows to…

Read More

Rachel Maddow Probably Loves Evaluation.

Without a TV in my home, I haven’t been privy to the awesomeness that is Rachel Maddow until last night, in my hotel room in Little Rock. She was speaking with Richard Holbrooke, US special rep for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Maddow had recently visited Afghanistan to report on the front…

Read More

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Reading a decent book, came across a great point: The book is Start With Why and it really labors on the fact that great businesses lead with their WHY right out front, not their WHAT (or their HOW). Okay, but how does this relate to evaluation? The author discusses how…

Read More

Confession of a Qual Lover

Sigh. For better or worse, I am known as the qualitative person around here. While I do, admittedly, have a strong fondness for qualitative work, I know better that to think it is the right tool for every job. Yet, my reputation precedes me and I’m often asked to defend…

Read More

If It Ain’t Broke

I found the cutest old-man optometrist. He puttered around the room, in cute old man fashion. He had a little cute old man mantra: “if it ain’t broke…” Him: Are your contacts working okay for you? Me: Sure, I guess. Him: Well, if it ain’t broke… Me: But aren’t you…

Read More

Don’t Even Try

I love being on the other side. I am in the midst of reviewing evaluator letters of interest – miniproposals – to evaluate one of my work projects. Rarely am I in the position to need the evaluator. Usually I am the one submitting my ideas and credentials. The pile…

Read More

Vocabulary Quiz

This post has been a long time coming. In the not so distant past, I tried to publicly criticize (I know, I know…) how authors of an evaluation book mis-taught formative and summative. Not such a big deal if they are personally in error, but a much larger offense if…

Read More