I am Beverly Tremain, President and Owner of Public Health Consulting, a research, evaluation, and quality improvement service organization. David Fetterman and I use an empowerment evaluation approach in tobacco prevention programs, specifically helping the Minority Initiative Grant Office (MISGRO) and tobacco prevention non-profits in counties throughout the State of Arkansas. In all of my projects, I work for the client to realize their own power in finding resources and tools to help them do their job.
Hot Tips: To get better at finding and using resources, there has to be a need to use them. Just learning about a tool without an intended outcome (e.g., to help write a grant) makes it harder to retain and apply. A true consultant helps others help themselves. Here are my helpful tools:
Rad Resource – Skype and ooVoo for Video Conferencing: David Fetterman and I use Skype and ooVoo to communicate across the country. We routinely use it to communicate about our empowerment evaluation in Arkansas, ranging from data collection efforts to the politics of the assessment. We recently used it to complete a proposal for work in Nigeria.
Rad Resource – Dropbox for File Sharing: Dropbox is an online virtual file cabinet where you and a client can share files. It’s free.
Rad Resource – FreeConferfenceCall.com for Free Reservationless Conference Calls: Ever need to talk to two people at the same time? Get a free subscription to revervationaless calls. You have your own dedicated number for others to call in and a code. They have 1-800 numbers also
Rad Resource – Partner for Social Networking Analysis: The social networking analysis tool is designed to measure and monitor collaboration among people and organizations. The tool is free (sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation) and designed for use by collaboratives/coalitions to demonstrate how members are connected, how resources are leveraged and exchanged, the levels of trust, and to link outcomes to the process of collaboration.
Rad Resource – The Checklist Project: One of my favorite! This site provides evaluation specialists and users with refereed checklists for designing, budgeting, contracting, staffing, managing, and assessing evaluations of programs, personnel, students, and other evaluands; collecting, analyzing, and reporting evaluation information; and determining merit, worth, and significance. The site’s purpose is to improve the quality and consistency of evaluations and enhance evaluation capacity through the promotion and use of high-quality checklists targeted to specific evaluation tasks and approaches.
The American Evaluation Association is celebrating CPE week with our colleagues in the Collaborative, Participatory, and Empowerment TIG. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our CPE TIG Colleagues. 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.
Thanks Beverly for the great resources.I have used Conference Calls for conducting online meetings and webinars. It has provided with high quality service and made it a successful seminar.
Bev, great list of resources. We also use box.com for posting shared documents.
Mary
Beverly, thanks for reminding us of the checklist project! I uploaded your post last week and it prompted me to add the checklist project as one of the items shared in the session I just gave at the summer institute.
Thanks for the list of resources Bev.
One thing I like about ooVoo is that you can record the exchange and use it as a training tool very easily.
Take care and best wishes.
-David