Welcome to our September roundup of new and noteworthy evaluation news and resources – here is the latest.

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Virtual conference resources

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Conference season is upon us! Ordinarily most of us would be looking forward to hopping on a plane to meet up with our peers in some exotic (and sometimes not so exotic) place. Instead, we are forced to join yet one more Zoom meeting from home. Below are some resources for presenters and attendees to make virtual conference season an enjoyable one.

 

Amplifying your message with help from Duarte

Duarte (@duarte) is a firm of expert communicators. I took the Duarte VisualStory workshop years ago and have been singing their praises since. Not only that, I continue to use the workbook and resources that were included as part of the workshop. It may be too late to register for one of their workshops in time for your upcoming conference presentation, but they do offer individual and team trainings as well. Besides their courses and training, they have a resource section on their website where you can access a number of guides and tool to make your presentation a memorable one. My favourites are:

Slidedocs template

Your presentation shouldn’t be a list of narrative and text for people to look at. What goes on your slide should be a visual aide that enhances what you are speaking about. The problem is if people are interested in what you are saying then they will want a document to read and reference afterward; hence, the age-old, “can I get a copy of your slides?” If you are designing your slides correctly they should be a useless reference for people after the fact – all the meat and details should come from you and not text on a slide. To bridge this gap, Duarte suggests a Slidedoc, “a visual document intended to be read and referenced instead of projected.” The Slidedoc template can be downloaded for free – it guides you through how you can design a Slidedoc for your presentation that is visually appealing and user friendly.

Diagrammer

One aspect of an effective presentation is using visuals to show relationships and linkages between information. Another important aspect is having a cohesive look to each of your slides. Duarte’s Diagrammer is a visualization system that contains various diagrams to communicate relationships all with a consistent colour palette (think SmartArt on steroids.) It is free to download, and you can modify as much or as little as you want. See below for a sneak peek of some of the available designs.

Creating Potent Presentations

If you are an evaluator you are likely more familiar with the presentation resources the American Evaluation Association has developed under its Potent Presentations Initiative (p2i). This initiative was developed to explicitly help evaluators improve their presentation skills. The initiative has a series of free checklists and worksheets you can download, along with webinars and slides to help you craft a presentation that effectively delivers the message you are trying to get across. Sheila Robinson (@sheilabrobinson) and Stephanie Evergreen (@evergreendata) are a few who have developed resources. I find the Messaging Model Handout particularly useful when planning a presentation. Don’t be that person who spends the entire presentation talking about the background and methods and then frantically flips through the results and next steps because you ran out of time!

Public speaking tips for evaluators

Now that you have designed a perfectly crafted presentation and corresponding reference material, you need to actually deliver the presentation. Check out Ann Emery’s (@annkemery) recent blog with Isaac Castillo (@isaac_outcomes) where they talk about public speaking. His advice for not running out of time with your presentation: prepare half as much content as you think you need.

 

Facilitating a virtual workshop

What about if you’re conducting your first virtual workshop? Workshop guru Stephanie Evergreen (@evergreendata) recently posted a blog outlining five shifts workshop facilitators should consider when moving online. It covers everything from filling up dead space, adjusting slides for online audiences, break times, and the importance of interactivity. In this blog she also directs readers to Mike Morrison (@mikemorrison) who has some sage advice on conference posters.

 

Your poster needs to change – here’s how

Mike Morrison’s (@mikemorrison) twitter profile reads “trying to speed up science with #UXDesign.” If you look at his manifesto video he talks about how academia has an antiquated and ineffective way of sharing knowledge and proposes how this needs to change. One place to begin changing how knowledge is presented and consumed is changing those oh so horrible conference posters. Check out his entertaining video on YouTube, “How to create a better research poster in less time (including templates)”. He provides a funny overview on why they are so horrible, but more importantly walks us through how to reinvent our posters so people actually want to look at them and can take in the key learnings.

 

Attending a virtual conference? Make the most of it

If you are not presenting or facilitating a workshop at a virtual conference, then maybe you are attending one for the first time? If so, check out EvaluATE’s recent blog that talks about making the most of a virtual conference, but from an evaluator’s perspective. In this blog Lyssa Wilson Becho (@LyssaBecho) talks about how we can put on our evaluative thinking hat to define what it is we want to get out of the conference; from there, we can be more intentional about making those outcomes come to fruition.

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New and Noteworthy — Courses, Events and Webinars

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October 2020

Most Significant Change (MSC)

Sponsor: Clear Horizon Academy
Date: October 12
Venue: Online course 

Evaluation 2020

Sponsor: American Evaluation Association
Dates: October 27 – 30
Venue: Virtual Event 

Participatory Evaluation: Community-Based Assessment + Strategic Learning Practices

Sponsor: Tamarack Institute
Date: October 20
Venue: Virtual Workshop 

November 2020

Using data analysis and visualization to drive social impact

Sponsor: Clear Horizon Academy
Date: October 12
Venue: Online course

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