My apologies! I accidentally put the internal links to all of the blog posts below in yesterday's posting. Here's the corrected update. Thanks, Jason Forney, for letting me know, and thank you everyone else for being patient with me :)
I know this is cliché, but I’m a bit flummoxed on how 1) our blog has only been around one year and 2) we’ve really been doing this blog for one year! Writing these posts on how to make evaluation more useful to evaluators and clients has so quickly become integrated in our work, that it feels like we’ve been doing this for much longer than a year. On the flip side, I clearly remember brainstorming with my colleagues just over a year ago about filling a void we saw in the evaluation blogosphere.
Writing these posts have caused each of us to be more reflective on our individual and team practices and even act more intentionally to make evaluation useful. On a personal level, the fact that we are doing a better job evaluating our own work…I deem that a success of this blog.
I’m happy to see that people are referring back to our posts weeks after they’ve been put online. While some posts are particularly relevant to a timely event, most are more ubiquitous and can apply at any time you choose to read them. Please take some time to review some of our more popular posts (listed chronologically):
- Week 2 – What are evaluation use, usefulness, utility, and utilization?
- Week 18 – Miss America
- Week 25 – A note on positivity
- Week 28 – Make evaluation FUN!
- Week 41 – Brick building
- Week 44 – Using evaluation results in collective impact work
- Week 47 – Reflections on our responsibility for facilitating use
On a more global level, the traffic to the Carpe Diem blog online has had a fairly steady increase since its inception, which makes us think that more people are reading our tips. Of course, taking that theory of logic to conclusion, we hope more evaluators are integrating the tips into their practice, which would lead to increased use of evaluation findings by clients and more user-friendly evaluations in general. We would LOVE to hear from you on how you’re using what you’ve learned through this blog. Please post comments below!
We have all had a blast sharing with you this past year, and we look forward to continuing that work moving forward!
DR. TACKETT’S USEFUL TIP: Keeping current on thoughts in the world of evaluation through blogs, journals, conferences, trainings, etc. is crucial to continuing the work of improving our field. We all need to own some of the responsibility for doing that!