My name is Susan Kistler, the Executive Director for the American Evaluation Association and regular aea365 Saturday contributor. Over the past year, we’ve had quite a few requests to share the behind-the-scenes of AEA’s projects as they have application outside of the association.
Get Involved: Vote! We’re hoping to develop a ‘how to’ series, drawing on lessons learned from AEA’s own programs. Potentially, we’d incorporate posts on aea365 with video tutorials. But, where should we start? Which of the topics would you most like to see covered in 2013?
If you are receiving aea365 via email and cannot see the voting widget right below this sentence, you may need to click back to the aea365 site to cast your vote. And, we always welcome comments with suggestions for other ideas or things that you would particularly like to see as part of the series.
Details for each option:
- Video Slideshows: We created video slideshows from the pictures from AEA’s photobooth at Evaluation 2012. Here’s an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syzazSkBhRI. These are great for engaging stakeholders or as part of a reporting plan for evaluations using photovoice for data collection and reflection. We can share the free tool, how to create shows from your own photos, and tips for incorporating text and non-photo images.
- Twitter: The innovative evaluation team was all over the 2012 AEA conference, encouraging people to use Twitter and share lessons learned with the hashtag #evalAHA during #eval12. Twitter is great for connecting with certain stakeholders, and getting the word out about a project or product. We can show you how to set up a Twitter account, how to find and subscribe to twitter-based content, and how to share a stream of Twitter reflections with the world like we did on the Evaluation 2012 homepage at http://www.eval.org/eval2012/default.asp.
- Webinars: AEA delivered over 40 Coffee Break Webinars in 2012. Three of our most popular are the International Series that is publically available at http://comm.eval.org/coffee_break_webinars/CoffeeBreak/InternationalSeries. Webinars are great for providing training, distance-based reporting and meetings, and promoting your consultancy’s services. We can share the tech tools we use, how to prepare, deliver, record, and share, and how to avoid the many pitfalls we’ve encountered.
- Blog: aea365 is AEA’s free Tip-a-Day blog by and for evaluators that you are reading at present. We can share how to set up a blog for your consultancy or evaluation project, how to make it easy for readers to subscribe, how to monitor key indicators, and tips we’ve learned along the way.
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.