Every Day is Thanksgiving Day!

Americans are celebrating Thanksgiving today, and while my personal practice is to give thanks every day, today certainly feels like the right day to share thanks to all who subscribe, follow, read, and comment on this blog.

In addition to my wonderful family and friends, good health, and other gifts, I have been blessed with the opportunity to enjoy my work. It hasn’t always been this way, but for many years now, I have truly enjoyed my work. I generally get up in the morning, look forward to going in, and take great pleasure and pride in the work that I do. In fact, most days I consider it fun. 

Seven Simple Strategies to Engage Any Audience

I love PowerPoint! I especially love well-designed slides, and I have fun putting into practice what I’ve learned about slide design.

Once you have visually appealing slides that encourage your audience to focus attention on you and support your content…AND you have appropriate  content that is important, interesting, or imperative to your audience, how will you deliver it in an engaging way? 

Put me in, coach…I’m ready to survey! (cross post with actionable data)

Sheila here, writing with the wonderful Kim Firth Leonard of the actionable data blog.

This post highlights some favorite recommendations from our collective experiences in crafting survey questions. It is also a continuation of our earlier co-authored posts (here and here). 

Evolution of an Evaluator: Kylie Hutchinson

Evaluations, workshops, podcasts, tweets, mobile apps, concept maps and Christmas Carols. What do these have in common? One of British Columbia’s most interesting evaluators!

Back in September I had the opportunity to talk with Kylie Hutchinson of Community Solutions Planning and Evaluation. I was familiar with her popular Adventures in Evaluation Podcasts with James Coyle, and her famous evaluation Christmas Carols. Most likely, my introduction to her work was through one of her many aea365 posts. Kylie has been a frequent contributor on topics ranging from needs assessments to effective reporting techniques to presentation tips. A recent aea365 post introducing two new resources particularly caught my interest – a newly released Evaluation Glossary Mobile App, and a Working Typology of Evaluation Terms – and I wanted to ask Kylie how these came about. 

1st Blogoversary!

Image credit: ginnerobot via Flickr

It’s November 4, the first blogoversary for Evaluspheric Perceptions! I want to take this opportunity to express my sincere appreciation for everyone who has visited, subscribed, liked, and commented on posts on this site. You have encouraged me to do exactly what I proposed to do one year ago today – that is, to explore the beauty and complexity of the “evalusphere” and continue learning, evaluating, and educating. It’s one of my most exciting, challenging, and rewarding journeys, and I love writing about it.