Megan Greeson and Adrienne Adams on Multimedia Reports

I am Megan Greeson, an Assistant Professor of Clinical/Community Psychology at DePaul University. I conduct collaborative, utilization-focused program evaluations with community-based organizations and I also teach a graduate seminar course in Program Evaluation.

I am Adrienne Adams, an Assistant Professor of Ecological-Community Psychology and Program Evaluation at Michigan State University. I use collaborative evaluation approaches to help human service organizations build evaluation capacity and foster organizational learning.

We are interested in helping community organizations engage with program evaluation and evaluation findings in order to promote ownership over the evaluation process and findings, and to increase evaluation capacity and use. The ways in which we communicate with communities about evaluation and evaluation data matter and can improve their retention and understanding of important material.

Hot Tip: Multimedia reports (involving text, audio, and video components) can be a great way to reach evaluation stakeholders from a distance. The addition of audio and video to a text-based report can draw attention, create a connection to the evaluator, and help stakeholders interpret difficult technical topics.

Hot Tip: Since multimedia reports can be viewed or heard on a variety of devices at times and locations most convenient for evaluation stakeholders, they can be a good way to reach busy stakeholders with little time to digest a written report.

Hot Tip: Audio and video components can be easily edited to tailor parts of a presentation to individual sites or stakeholders, or to correct presentational errors, like “ums” or animation glitches.

Hot Tip: Adding a worksheet or activity that the audience completes while watching the presentation can assess retention and/or encourage a plan for use.

Rad Resources: Jing, Camtasia, and Adobe Presenter are tools that can be used to create presentations that involve text/figures, audio, and video components.

Jing: http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html  (FREE!)

Camtasia: http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html (Free trial)

Adobe Presenter: http://www.adobe.com/products/presenter.html

Rad Resource:  Attend our demonstration “Technological Tools for Creating Multimedia Evaluation Reports” at AEA 2013 to see how we have used these tools in our own work.

This contribution is from the aea365 Tip-a-Day Alerts, by and for evaluators, from theAmerican Evaluation Association. Please consider contributing – send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. Want to learn more from Megan and Adrienne? They’ll be presenting as part of the Evaluation 2013 Conference Program, October 14-19 in Washington D.C.