Hello, I’m Glenn O’Neil, founder of Owl RE, evaluation consultancy and co-author of the Intelligent Measurement blog.
Rad Resource – Intelligent Measurement: The blog focuses on issues and trends in evaluation, with a particular focus on communications, advocacy and development. Blogging since 2006, we average about one post per week. Our blog has on average some 10,000 readers per month.
Hot Tips: Favorite posts: Here are four recent posts from the past year:
- The voices of affected populations in evaluation: In this post I explained an interesting approach to using video in evaluation from a project I was working on.
- 5 handbooks on communication evaluation: Sometimes I group together similar resources that I found interesting as I did in this post.
- Evaluation the lowest priority for US non-profits: It can happen that in reading a report or another blog post, something jumps out of interest that I can blog about, as was the case in reading this report.
- Seven things an evaluator should avoid saying: This was my attempt at humor – awkward things I’d heard other evaluators say that made me literally squirm in my chair…
Lessons Learned: Why I blog: I’ve used blogging to position myself as a specialist in evaluating communication and advocacy programs – and I certainly think it has worked – blogging increases your online visibility and makes it more likely when someone is searching in your area of expertise that your blog will appear in the results.
Lessons Learned: What I’ve learned:
1. Have a reason to blog. It may seem basic but you want to blog for a reason – for example, to position yourself as an expert, reach out to a specific community, to share advice with a client base, create a new sales channel, etc.
2. Set a target to blog regularly – for most it can’t be daily but once a week is a good target.
3. Link your blog to other social media to increase your “reach”. I use WordPress and they have a “sharing/publicize” function that links easily with your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts – so that every time I publish a post it also gets “pushed” on these other social media.
4. Don’t be disappointed if there is not a lot of interaction around your blog. Most people seem happy to read without leaving a comment – but don’t underestimate how many people are reading and remembering you!
This winter, we’re continuing our occasional 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.
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