BLP Week: Kate Rohrbaugh on Useful Topical Interest Group (TIG) Tools

My name is Kate Rohrbaugh and I am Co-Chair of the Business, Leadership, and Performance TIG along with Michelle Baron.  I’m a Research Team Leader at a consulting firm in Virginia leading a group studying capital project organizations and teams in the process industries.  Today I’d like to talk about the renaming of our TIG and the tools we used to conduct this work.

When I accepted my current position five years ago, I had to rethink my AEA TIG membership because I had been a faithful member of educationally related TIGs, which were no longer relevant.  The number of TIGs at AEA can be overwhelming at times, but it also offers a wide variety of “homes” to evaluators regardless of the content area.  In my new position I turned to the Business and Industry TIG where I found a small but dedicated group of professionals.  I “lurked” with this group for a year, and within a short time (since it was a smaller group), I was able to take an active role in the leadership of this TIG.

In discussions with the leadership of the TIG and at AEA, we determined that the name of the TIG was unnecessarily limiting both presenters and audience – evaluation issues in for-profit organizations are relevant to a wide variety of evaluation professionals in both private and public sectors.  For this reason, we canvassed the membership and working closely with the AEA staff and board, identified a new name for our TIG.

Rad Resources

  • AEA maintains a list of members in each TIG and faithfully protects AEA membership from unnecessary contact, but this was a great source for contacting our membership about the desire to change the name of the TIG and solicit ideas for renaming the TIG.
  • To canvass our membership, we turned to the old faithful Survey Monkey which met our simple needs for collection and analysis.
  • To discuss the results with the TIG leadership located across and outside the United States, we turned to FreeConferenceCall.com, which is exactly what you think it is.

We are excited about the AEA 2012 in Minneapolis and hope to see lots of new faces at our presentations and business meeting!

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating the Business, Leadership, and Performance TIG (BLP) Week. The contributions all week come from BLP members. 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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