Bloggers Series: Stephanie Evergreen on the Stephanie Evergreen Blog

I’m Stephanie Evergreen and I blog on the aptly titled “Stephanie Evergreen’s Blog.” Clever, huh?

Rad Resource – evereval.wordpress.com: At this point in its evolution, my blog describes and demonstrates how to visualize data and communicate better as evaluators. I like to think I post new ideas weekly.

Hot Tips – favorite posts: I’ve been posting for about two years. Here are some of the highlights:

• 11/08/11 – Releasing the Evaluation Report Layout Checklist: The checklist I talk about in this post was developed as part of my dissertation and I was keeping it pretty close, only sharing it if people asked me to do so via email. But handling those email requests got cumbersome, so in this post I made the checklist publicly available.
• 10/06/10 – My Graphic Design Circa 2005:  I deeply believe an evaluator should be self-reflective, so I’m happy to make fun of my own bad graphic design. This post features presenting and reporting I did several years ago and all of the ways in which I probably impeded the audience’s ability to comprehend my words.
• 05/03/10 – Nix the Table of Contents: This post exemplifies the somewhat controversial ideas I have about evaluation communication and why I began a blog as an outlet for them.

Lessons Learned – why I blog: The subtitle to my blog is Evaluation Unsanctioned, which explains my impetus for starting to blog in the first place. I have so many random thoughts about evaluation and how evaluators communicate that I needed somewhere appropriate to put them. None are lengthy or scientific enough for a journal article. The conference is only once per year. With a blog, I can give my wayward thoughts a home on a regular basis. This is also how I prepare for ideas to include in my workshops on data visualization and reporting. The blog gives me both a testing ground and a forum to script out my talking points.

Lessons Learned: Post around conference time. When I look at the graph of the number of views of my blog over time, I see major spikes in viewing twice a year that line up precisely with my workshops at the AEA/CDC Summer Institute in June and the AEA annual conference in November. That leads me to believe it is helpful to direct people to the blog as part of my blatant self-promotion and to have some fresh content for people to see when they get there.

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.