LAWG Week: The Potential Impact of Twitter on Disseminating Evaluation Findings by Tania Jarosewich

Hello, my name is Tania Jarosewich, owner of Censeo Group, a northeast Ohio program evaluation firm that supports educational agencies and nonprofit organizations in evaluating their programmatic efforts. We northeast Ohio evaluators are excited to welcome you to Cleveland for Evaluation 2018.

Check out the Rad Resources below for a list of Cleveland-focused Twitter feeds. Why Twitter? Well, it’s an easy and quick way to learn about upcoming events and a good place to learn about new evaluation results and research findings.

Welcome to Twitter displayed on tablet
Max Pixel Creative Commons Zero – CC0.

It’s easy to post a link and quickly share information with followers, but is Twitter an effective way to share work and build knowledge in the evaluation community? Research about the impact of tweeting on article or report downloads and citations has been equivocal. One study found a correlation between Twitter activity and higher citation rates in the area of ecological research. However, other studies have not found differences in the number of citations based on whether or not the author is on Twitter. Although there might not be a clear correlation between Twitter and citations, there is a benefit of using Twitter to disseminate evaluation or research findings. Twitter users who have a large following and compelling or interesting findings, have a greater chance of sharing findings with an audience wider than colleagues who would read a scientific journal, for example increasing visibility on Google searches. Tweeting about a project or finding, a relatively quick task, could amplify the message and communicate with a wide and varied audience.

Rad Resources: Add these Twitter handles to your feed to get a sense of what is happening in Cleveland and find places to visit during the conference.

Destination Cleveland @TheCLE

#HappyinCLE @happyincle

Cleveland Magazine @ClevelandMag

Cleveland Foundation @CleveFoundation

Downtown Cleveland @DowntownCLE

Cleveland Scene @ClevelandScene

West Side Market @WestSideMarket

Cleveland Metroparks @clevemetroparks

Rad Resource: Jayne Corso, the voice behind the @aeaweb Twitter page has written a number of AEA 365 posts about evaluators who tweet

Hot Tip: use the #Eval18 hashtag to tweet about or follow tweets about the AEA 2018 conference.

We’re looking forward to the fall and the Evaluation 2018 conference all this week with our colleagues in the Local Arrangements Working Group (LAWG). 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 contribute to aea365? Review the contribution guidelines and send your draft post to aea365@eval.org.

1 thought on “LAWG Week: The Potential Impact of Twitter on Disseminating Evaluation Findings by Tania Jarosewich”

  1. Thank you for sharing your experience using Twitter as a tool to disseminate research to your followers.

    Do you know if there is direct engagement with the articles/reports you are posting? You discussed the issue of citations and that using Twitter may not result in a direct correlation to citations, but is there a way to track the engagement with your content at all? Or are you able to provide sufficient detail in the Tweet itself that the user could get the point of the article there?

    I believe that we are in more of a headline society when it comes to social media so I do wonder if there would be sufficient detail in a tweet to make the use of Twitter effective in communicating results and findings.

    I wonder if there is a way to turn the findings into some sort of visual medium, ie. a video, that might engage an audience more effectively on a social media platform when posted? This would hopefully allow you to keep track of views and view times using the analytics tools available using a site like YouTube.

    Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

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