Hello, I’m Alexey Kuzmin, president of the Process Consulting Company based in Moscow, Russia. My company’s specialization is program evaluation and evaluation related services. I have two evaluation blogs – in Russian and in English.
Rad Resource – Evaluation Space This is my English blog. Its focus is evaluation – no surprises. The blog concept could be described as sharing thoughts related to my professional life. Everything that appears in my blog is somehow related to what happens to me and my company. New content is posted at least twice a month, and usually – more often.
Hot Tips – favorite posts:
- December 29, 2009 A New Year Post This is the most read article. It is about things that I like and don’t like in my profession. Interestingly, I never expected that it will become most popular.
- Speaking of high quality evaluations… (June 17, 2011) and Comments on the previous post (June 20, 2011) These are two inter-related posts. In the first one I shared a pretty strange evaluation ToR that I received, and in the second one I described what quite a few colleagues from around the world thought about that ToR.
- Use of proverbs in evaluation: “A word is enough to the wise” (March 31, 2010) I always found it challenging to describe lessons learned by the program. Once I tried to use proverbs to do that. It worked fine for the client and was fun for me.
Lessons Learned – why I blog:
- This is a neat way of sharing what I consider important in evaluation profession and to be explicit about my values while doing that.
- My company website has a link to this blog, so clients can get acquainted with my company and then look at my blog to get better acquainted with me. Those who find the blog first and then decide to learn about the company can easily do that as the blog is indeed linked to the company website.
- Next year I will celebrate my 25th anniversary in consulting business and 20th anniversary of my company. It has been quite a journey. Blogging allows me to share experience, which might be interesting and even useful – at least for some people.
Lessons Learned:
- Blogging allows you to be yourself and show who you are.
- Blogging makes you more visible and helps to network.
- Blogging allows you to learn and to share experience.
- Blogging can help you get new clients (I had such experience).
- Blogging is an easy way of keeping record of important thoughts, resources and events. I converted my blogs into PDF books and use them as a resource for my training activities and professional writing.
This winter, we’re running a series highlighting evaluators who blog. 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.
Blogging is an excellent way to get the word out. Not only that but your business can be found online when you use long tail keywords. In addition to that, people will see the value of you sharing information and will ultimately do business with you. Our property management software blog gets red very frequently and we’ve gotten some leads from it. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks David!
Alexey,
It is interesting to read about your surprise at what blog posts became popular. I find the same thing with my blog. I really have only a faint idea of what will take hold and what will not. Of the many topics I do cover, evaluation is consistently among the most popular.
This reminds me of a story my doctoral thesis advisor told me many years ago when I was a student about two papers he wrote early in his career. One was his crowning achievement that encompassed all of his best thinking and many years of effort and one was on a assessment tool that he developed because he couldn’t find anything else — a means to an end. Forty years later, his means to an end paper is one of the most highly cited in his field and his “magnum opus” hardly made a dent.
I feel the same way about blogs. Thanks for sharing yours!
I, too, particularly liked your last point about blogging as a way to record important thoughts, resources and events. We are always encouraging our client organizations to do that so that they create organizational history on each project which can be tapped for progress and final evaluation reports!
Thank your for the comment Robin. I think it’s a great idea to encourage clients to blog in order to ceate organizational history. Will try to implement it. Do you find it easy to convince them to do that?
Thanks Alexey. We use the aea365 archives all the time for reference when people ask questions at AEA. But also the content from other blogs as well. I’m so grateful to all who have helped to build the knowledge base. I love your idea of using the blog as a source for training materials. One can also go in the other direction – having developed training materials, share them via blog. Love it!
I agree. AEA knowledge base is outstanding. And it will keep growing
Thank you for sharing from your decades of experience. I too appreciated your” lessons learned” section.
It is very pleasing to know that you liked the “lessons learned”. Thank you for your feedback. If I could ask the readers of my blog (currently about 40-50 a day) to do one thing for me I would ask them to leave comments/feedback more often 🙂
Hi
Congrats on your ability to stay in the game so long. I can appreciate it.
I enjoyed your recommendation to use proverbs.
I also liked your idea about converted your blogs into PDF books. Tell us more about how you do that – just copy paste or some other tool to make it easier.
Thanks for the contribution.
-David
Thanks David. I used free software to convert my Russian blog (Livejournal) into PDF book. I believe that it depends on the platform you use for blogging. There must be such option for Blogger, but I will not be able to figure that out until I return from Kazakhstan. Unfortunately Blogger and other popular blogs such as Livejournal are not available from here. Interesting limitation for bloggers, is not it? Will write more after February 3.
This is an interesting challenge that appears to be of general interest. I did a quick Google search (export Blogger site to Word/PDF) and see that Blogger has an export function on its “Settings/Basic” screen . WordPress also has its own help information and there is a free/donation web site that offers a service for capturing blog posts and converting formats. No more impediments to ‘gathering our thoughts’ and sharing our legacy. DD