My name is Susan Kistler, the American Evaluation Association’s Executive Director and aea365 Saturday contributor. This week, a colleague asked about resources for evaluation of communications.
Rad Resource – Making Health Communications Work: On AEA’s listserv, EVALTALK, Pam Kelley recommended this free guide (more of a book, it is over 250 pages of assistance and resources) from the National Institutes of Health. It walks through the full health communications process and includes an extended section on Assessing Effectiveness and Making Refinements including a subsection on Communication Research Methods.
Rad Resource – Are We There Yet? A Communications Evaluation Guide: Developed by Asibey Consulting for the Communications Network, Are We There Yet is a beginner’s guide for evaluating strategic communications in the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors. There is also an hour-long webinar with the guide’s authors that elaborates on the guide.
Rad Resource – Intelligent Measurement: Glenn O’Neil’s blog focuses on measurement and evaluation of communications. Glenn has written about his blog before on aea365. Glenn consistently provides guidance, resources, and insights related to evaluation generally and evaluating communications specifically.
Other resource suggestions? Add them to the comments.
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It’s not heavy-duty evaluation, but I found this guide very useful while at a grassroots org with few resources.
http://www.fenton.com/resources/proving-your-worth-10-ways-to-measure-your-impact/
Great set of resources out there. One of the areas where is enormous traffic, yet very little resources in terms of evaluation is social media communication. To this end, there are no good clear evaluation tools out there, but many sites that discuss the key metrics. For the uninitiated, I recommend http://www.mashable.com for news and resources on social media.
Another resource related to health is the CDC’s Social Media Toolkit: http://www.cdc.gov/socialmedia/Tools/guidelines/pdf/SocialMediaToolkit_BM.pdf . It has some evaluation resources, too.
For communications related to health more broadly, The Health Communication Unit in Ontario has a great database of presentations and resources at: http://www.thcu.ca/infoandresources/resource_display.cfm