Happy Thursday, AEA365 community! My name is Liz DiLuzio. When I’m not curating the blog, I can be found teaching anything from one-day workshops to semester-long courses on tons of topics related to data analysis.

A student of mine recently applied to a MEL position where the first round of the selection process was a practical timed exercise in Excel. She wanted to know, based on my experience in the field, what topics I thought she should review before completing this exercise.

How’s that for a fun question?

Here’s what I told her.

My name is Quisha Brown and I am a nonprofit consultant and co-founder of Humanistic Care, LLC, an organization offering culturally responsive solutions to tough challenges faced by nonprofits serving marginalized people. I’m also the Author of “Racial Equity Lens Logic Model & Theory of Change” as well as the newly released short and simple guide “Using the Progressive Outcomes Scale Logic Model to Evaluate Systems Change: A Housing Industry Case Study”. This blog post discusses strategies for how to stop reducing people of color to numbers by focusing evaluation on their real life stories rather than quantitative data.  
Program evaluation is an essential part of providing quality afterschool programming to youth and their families.  Evaluation becomes more powerful and impactful when all of the stakeholders are involved in the evaluation process (O’Donoghue, Kirschner, & McLaughlin, 2003).  But how do organizations providing youth programs involve young people in program planning and evaluation?

Hello! We are Kim Firth Leonard, Leonard Research & Evaluation, LLC, and Oregon Community Foundation, and Sheila B. Robinson, Custom Professional Learning, LLC, co-authors of the text Designing Quality Survey Questions (Sage, 2018). We met on Twitter and now have been writing about survey design together for 10 years via our blogs, working with clients to design surveys, teaching survey design workshops, and presenting about survey design at conferences, including AEA.

Hi! I’m Stephanie Mui, Assistant Director of Program Evaluation and Planning at Good Shepherd Services. For the past seventeen years, I have been the internal evaluation for their afterschool programs. 

Program evaluation is an essential part of providing quality afterschool programming to youth and their families.  Evaluation becomes more powerful and impactful when all of the stakeholders are involved in the evaluation process (O’Donoghue, Kirschner, & McLaughlin, 2003).  But how do organizations providing youth programs involve young people in program planning and evaluation?

Hi! We are representing AEA’s Local Affiliate Collaborative (LAC) as active members of our local affiliates, Gulf Coast Evaluation Network (Steve) and Chicagoland Evaluation Association (Casey and Sheila). Before each AEA conference, the LAC organizes a pre-conference retreat where affiliate leaders come together in community. For many, it’s a conference highlight!

We organized this year’s retreat and want to share our experience. It was hosted in the Greater New Orleans Foundation’s headquarters, where we facilitated roundtables asking how affiliates can prioritize three complementary values: equity, trust, and self-care.

My name is Zachary Grays and I am your Membership and Operations Manager here at the American Evaluation Association! The American Evaluation Association is pleased to share the transition of AEA365 to a new RSS and email service provider, Follow.it. AEA365’s previous email and RSS provider, Feedburner (powered by Google), has quietly been ending their maintenance to the product and its features over the course of 2022. With that, we’ve been working tirelessly behind the scenes to transition to a great new service that would still deliver the features you have come to know and love. Enter Follow.it!

Greetings, AEA365 community! I’m Liz DiLuzio, Lead Curator of AEA365. While I am a bit biased in my belief that AEA365 is a treasure trove of wisdom and communication for evaluators around the world, there are a number of other ways to engage with your fellow evaluators. Why not try something new this year?

Happy New Year! This is Elizabeth Grim, AEA365 Curator and sometimes blog contributor. I’m not one for new year’s resolutions, but I do enjoy thinking about learning goals. One way I do this is to consider what professional development and networking opportunities align with my vision for the year. Planning my learning early helps to ensure that I am aware of proposal or registration deadlines, and gives me something to look forward to!Between the AEA Topical Interest Groups, AEA Local Affiliates, and other professional associations, there is no shortage of evaluation conferences, trainings, and events. Below are just a few examples of events to look forward to in 2023.

Hello! This is Elizabeth Grim, AEA365 Curator and sometimes blog contributor. I’m here to answer some of the top questions we receive about AEA365.