Michelle Baron on AEA365 Postings

My name is Michelle Baron, and I am the aea365 coordinator beginning on July 4. Thanks to John LaVelle and Susan Kistler for a fabulous coordinating job so far. Thanks to them, we have over 500 subscribers and a seamless process of posting our Tips, Tricks, Resources, and Lessons Learned. Beginning in July, we now have a team of seven highly motivated individuals (including John and Susan) who will be reaching out to you and your colleagues for ideas over the coming year.

Got Tips, Tricks, Resources, or Lessons Learned? Share them with us by sending a draft post to us at aea365@eval.org.

Hot Tip: Here are some contribution guidelines to keep in mind. These can also be found on the aea365 website at http://tinyurl.com/38kqxwj

• Submissions should be written in first-person prose.
• Make them short – approximately 250-400 words (and absolutely no more than 450!).
• Focus on topics that will be of interest to a range of evaluators, not just on the work that you’re doing.
• Include a 2-3 sentence introduction to you and the general theme of your Tips, Trick, Resources, or Lessons Learned (e.g. I use a lot of logic models in my work, so I’ll be sharing a trick on helping stakeholders envision their program through logic modeling, as well as a website that helps me create interactive logic models).
• Include a description of the The Tip, Trick, Resource, or Lesson Learned and how it’s useful.
• Include an active weblink to the Tip, Trick, Resource or Lesson Learned (where appropriate).

Hot Tip: Check at the aea365 archives to get a feel for the style and breadth of content of contributions – and to view the wealth of information shared to date.

Cool Trick: Consider what you do on a daily basis that other evaluators may benefit from. Do you use new techniques to streamline your data collection and analysis? Do you have captivating presentation styles to help stakeholders immediately see the benefit of evaluation? Do you use tried and true methods that bear repeating? Jot that information down, and in just 250-400 words – voila! You have something of great value to the evaluation community!

Questions on posting, or unsure your ideas will work for a post? Contact us at  aea365@eval.org.

On behalf of the whole aea365 team, we look forward to a wonderful year of valuable information!

This contribution is from the aea365 Daily Tips blog, by and for evaluators, from the American Evaluation Association. Please consider contributing – send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org.