How it Started – SECPI Resources

I started working with SECPI (Strengthening Evaluation Contracting Partnerships Initiative) at the end of last year. In addition to running regular open monthly gatherings and other webinars, SECPI also features a resources page with a variety of posts, webinar recordings, journal articles, and pdfs.

The original website design used a simple approach to illustrating individual resource pages. Each one has a basic textured color block with the name of the resource. These featured images together then become the main visual feel for the main resources page.

The Problem – Everything blends together.

This is a pretty common problem with many resource websites. By giving every resource the same visual treatment, every resource ends up feeling the same before the click. There are color differences to show that some of these resources might share common traits or categories. But a simple color change is just a subtle cue and isn’t enough of a signal when resources are radically different.

The fix you can see in the grocery store.

I started writing a series of cartoon illustrated blog articles to help unhide some of SECPI’s stories and recommendations that currently only exist in PDF. While I could draw comics for EVERYTHING, it would be a little over the top for this particular site. We would also end up with the same “everything blends together” problem. So I decided to take a different strategy.

Instead of the color blocks we’ll just take screenshots of the actual resource. The goal of the illustration will be to simply show what’s inside, just like food packaging. But as you’ll see, when we pull it all together we get a completely different look.

Journal Articles

For the journal articles I took a screenshot of the main article page and put it alongside the cover of the journal.

PDFs

For the PDFs I wanted to get the cover, but it’s usually internal pages that give the best insight on what you’ll find inside.

Group Webinars

The webinars have been engaging and well attended with different voices and faces. A lot of webinar illustrations use the title slide, but I find it far more interesting to just take a screenshot mid-recording.

Blog Articles and Video Presentations

With articles I grab the top of the article and also pull in any interesting images. With presentations, I follow the same process as the group webinar but grab a screenshot of the presenter.

Multi-Media

For the gathering space webinars there are both webinar recordings as well as recap articles. So for this one I just show both together.

Where Canva comes in.

I used Canva so that the actual featured images would be consistently sized (PowerPoint would work just as well for this). I used a little computer monitor frame for the webinar screenshots and added a little shadow to provide just a little depth. I didn’t need any fancy graphics for this approach.

The Final Result

The final feels very different from the original. Instead of seeing just a bunch of color blocks we actual see a wide range of resources with webinars, articles, and pdfs. And with all the people pictures, the page feels alive in a way it didn’t before.

To see the final for yourself, go check out the SECPI Resources page.

I. Moving Beyond Performative Dissemination

I believe that most evaluation teams write reports with the best of intentions. They work late nights cleaning data, discovering insights, drafting narrative, and obsessing over clarity. Most people don’t get into research or evaluation for the money, they do all of this because they care.

I also believe that most evaluation managers and organization leaders direct reporting efforts with the best of intentions. They know that design and simplicity matters when it comes to report design. So they actively encourage creative professional development, testing alternative approaches, and bringing in outside help when the budget allows.

But here’s the big problem.

You can design beautiful reports. They can feature great data storytelling, be short and to the point, include engaging charts, graphs, maps, and other illustrations. They can be works of art that garner internal praise and win design awards.

And they can still sit on the proverbial dusty shelf, barely read and hardly ever used.

The simple truth is a beautiful report is just a performance. It’s only effective for the people who attend. And in most organizations, attendance is exclusive by default.

II. Placebo Reports

When a report looks good, it can act like a placebo. The evaluator feels successful because they have something beautiful to share. Leadership feels successful because when they open that beautiful report, it feels like something a leading organization would create.

It’s not a coincidence that an organization’s communications team, the one most associated with that organization’s brand, often takes on the responsibility for sharing the report. Beautiful reports become show pieces, ugly reports barely get shared.

But is that really the goal of dissemination? To make an organization look good when set against its peers?

If not, have you attempted to understand HOW someone might use the insights you share? Do you know if all the audiences you wrote the report to serve have a chance of actually experiencing your work? Do you have the evidence in hand to show examples of use?

My guess is probably not. Not because it’s impossible, but because it’s just not how traditional reporting systems were designed.

III. The Report Factory

What’s the most environmentally friendly car you can buy? A luxury EV, small battery EV, plug-in hybrid, or a cheap gas car?

That question has a fundamental flaw. While the most environmentally friendly car might be a small battery EV, it would be better for the environment if you simply walked, biked, carpooled, took public transportation, or even worked from home.

So what is the best report format for delivering information to your audience? An infographic, 1-pager, slidedoc, visual report, executive summary, technical report, or web page?

That question has the same flaw. Because while any of those might be true, your audience might be better served with a presentation, a webinar, an email, or even a conversation over a cup of tea.

Most dissemination frameworks and advice answer the first question. They assume that the goal of an evaluation or research project is to produce a report. And the goal of dissemination is to share that report. It’s a factory model, built before the internet was a thing, and it’s holding us back.

IV. Theory of Use and Insight Ecosystems

Rakesh Mohan is a former Director of Idaho’s Legislative Office of Performance Evaluations. When he held the role he would regularly take visits to the state capitol, roaming the halls and connecting directly with policymakers. Like all the best evaluators, for which there are many, Rakesh did tons that just would never show up on a traditional dissemination plan.

I know a lot of evaluators who are deeply connected to the communities who might have an interest in their work or find it useful. Connected in the kind of way that information can get shared via text message or during coffee breaks, not just through formal reporting.

When I talk about dissemination systems change, I’m not suggesting that we need to create something completely brand new. Because the best insights already spread organically through word of mouth. But if we’re willing, we can use our dissemination budgets to help strengthen this process and make it more effective. To develop and grow our insight ecosystems.

Recently, working through a dissemination challenge with one of my big federal clients, I developed a framework that I call Theory of Use. Instead of starting with a report, we identify specific audiences and key insights. Then we examine how (or if) the two connect. The result is practical insights on how we can strengthen the insight ecosystem.

V. The Path Forward: The Dissemination Audit

If you really want to improve your dissemination systems and make your work more useful, resist the temptation to start with training. You also don’t need to hire a hotshot graphic designer or illustrator.

Start with a dissemination audit.

• Step 1. Look at real resources you have shared in the past (or resources you are about to share).
• Step 2. Identify your audiences (I like to use my five audience framework) and determine whether or not all of those are actually reached by your current dissemination system. My experience is that we usually have mechanisms to share insights with clients and peers. We are less likely to have good mechanisms that reach our community, influencers, and the public.
• Step 3. Identify some insights. You don’t have to identify ALL of your insights for an audit, start with a few. Think about the desired outcomes of sharing each of these insights with your different audiences.
• Step 4. Based on your dissemination products and general actions, how likely is it that you will actually connect your insights with each audience? If dissemination has already started, do you have any concrete evidence that anyone has connected to and used your work?
• Step 5. Pull all your findings together and use it to spark conversation on how to improve your dissemination systems.

And finally, if you have a budget, just hire me to do it for you. I offer a dissemination audit for $3K and if you hire me for any additional transformation services, I take the cost of the dissemination audit off the cost of the service.

It’s a multitasking problem.

Writing is hard. Design is hard. Doing both simultaneously — in the same document, on the same deadline — means you’re doing neither as well as you could. And it doesn’t matter how good you are. Even experienced designers produce worse work when they’re splitting their attention between content and layout.

The fix is simple: split the tasks.

Write in Word (or Google Docs). Design in PowerPoint (or Canva). When you’re writing a word processor offers better tools for editing, tracking changes, and collaborating on content. Design first tools, like PowerPoint and Canva, are far better for layout, visual hierarchy, and producing something that actually looks well designed.

Template Design First.

For most data folk, design is the thing that comes after your write. And that’s fine if you’re writing a long report you don’t really expect most people to read. As someone who writes and designs (and illustrates) I find it far more effective to start with the design using dummy text and sample images.

Quick note here: the way I approach templates with my clients has changed a bit since I originally created the templates I share below. Now-a-days I focus on limiting the number of textboxes/graphical elements, often by group things together. This makes accessibility and compliance work far simpler.

Writing Worksheet Second.

Once you have your designs, you can take the dummy text you used and put it into a Word document. This will then become writing worksheets you can pair with each design. Use these writing worksheets like you’re an old school newspaper editor. There is a certain character count for each block, the writers goal is to hit that (more or less).

Usage starts with writing.

With actual use, once a template is chosen, you can then go straight into the writing part. Just remember that writing too little, writing too much, taking out sections, or adding new sections in can quickly break your design.

Sample Templates:

Here are 6 different templates so you can see how it works. The PowerPoint is the design, the Word Doc is the worksheet. Each one is downloadable.

One Pager – Fact Sheet

A simple fact sheet that layers information. The main points should be included in the first big paragraph while the quote and the photo should engage the reader.

One Pager – Fact Sheet – WorksheetDownload

One Pager – Fact Sheet – DesignDownload

One Pager – Six Block

A lot of one-pagers feature what are essentially big bullet points. This one treats each point like its own separate thought with a specific illustration.

One Pager – Six Block – WorksheetDownload

One Pager – Six Block – DesignDownload

One Pager – Left Sidebar

This kind of one pager template is useful for case studies, tutorials, or interview highlights where the sidebar is used to provide tags, terms, categories, etc.

One Pager – Left Sidebar – WorksheetDownload

One Pager – Left Sidebar – DesignDownload

One Pager – Photo Illustrated

This one pager puts photographs front and center. The text block acts like a large caption.

One Pager – Photo Illustrated – WorksheetDownload

One Pager – Photo Illustrated – DesignDownload

Executive Summary – 3 Pager

This template is just a simple 3 page executive summary. It features a sidebar on each page and ends with a takeaway block.

Executive Summary – 3 Page Sidebar – WorksheetDownload

Executive Summary – 3 Page Sidebar – DesignDownload

Executive Summary – Magazine

This template mirrors a contemporary magazine format. It is highly visual and very readable.

Executive Summary – Magazine – WorksheetDownload

Executive Summary – Magazine – DesignDownload

I created this guide because I disliked pretty much every resource I could find about dissemination. I think they teach you the wrong way to do things simply because it sounds right. But sounding right and being right are not the same thing.

Everybody is welcome here, but I’m assuming you’re probably some kind of academic, researcher, evaluator, scientist, public health worker, or some other type of highly educated person.  Because most other people don’t use the word dissemination, they just talk about sharing stuff, comms, or marketing.

Prefer to peruse my method gallery than read this guide? [Click Here]

Trust me, I’m a cartoonist.

Most of these kinds of guides were written by groups of people with PhDs and grant money.  I, on the other hand, am just an indy consultant with no university affiliation and zero funding.  

Now I do have an MA and have also spent over 20 years as a researcher and evaluator. The first half of my career involved lots of data collection grunt work, analyzing stuff in SPSS and Excel, and helping write boring reports that nobody will ever read.

But over the last 15 years I’ve also drawn thousands of comics and published hundreds of blog posts.  I’ve developed websites, managed online communities, built online courses, organized virtual summits, led many webinars, created infographics, designed dashboards, edited videos, and all sorts of other stuff you might just call comms work or marketing.

In other words, I have a weird mixed background that gives me a unique perspective on how to do a good job of sharing stuff with people in the digital age.  

There is a huge disconnect between how research and evaluation is shared and how everybody else shares their work. It’s time to evolve.

Five basic rules before we begin.

Rule #1: Everybody is overwhelmed.

This is your boss, the people you think might be interested in what you have to share, the people who are not interested but you think should be interested in your work, etc. This also includes me and you. Humans have never had as much access to information as they do right now, and it is messing with our brains.

Rule #2: No audience is a monolith.

There is no one perfect way to disseminate anything because every person we are attempting to reach is unique. But we still should group people together based on similar characteristics because we don’t have unlimited time and money.

Rule #3: The status quo predates the internet.

The way most orgs disseminate right now mimics the way organizations disseminated before the web. And the most used digital format, the PDF, came out in 1993, before Social Media, before YouTube, before Wikipedia, and even before Google.

Rule #4: Dissemination is work.

Most orgs just assume dissemination happens at the end of the research/evaluation/resource development process. Or people assume that the comms team has it under control. But often it’s neither. Effective dissemination only happens when there is intent, someone with the skills necessary to follow through, and an actual dissemination budget.

Rule #5: Every choice you make decides who you reach and who you exclude.

Most exclusion is unintentional but it’s still an outcome of our choices. The format you pick, the platform you post to, the reading level you write at — each one opens a door for some people and closes it for others.

My Four Phase Dissemination Framework.

I’m not going to give you a one-size-fits-all dissemination strategy.  Instead, I’m going to give you a bunch of useful methods grouped together into four different phases.  Your job will be to string together a set of methods based on your own audiences, insights, experience, budget, and context. That set of methods becomes your dissemination strategy.

The four phases are really quite simple: Plan, Design, Communicate, Evaluate.  

Phase 1: Plan

For the last decade I’ve worked mostly in program evaluation.  One of the first things evaluators do when working with a new project is to figure out how the project is supposed to work.  We don’t tend to take the same logic into our dissemination efforts.  Thinking about how dissemination is supposed to work can really make a lot of your reporting decisions easier to make.  

First things first, dissemination is NOT actually about sharing reports.

It’s about sharing insights.

Most dissemination advice treats “the report” like it’s a culmination of all of our work.  But most reports are just a hand-picked collection of insights.  Some are useful for some audiences and some are useful for others.  By treating the report like it’s THE representation of our work, we miss a huge opportunity to better shape our efforts.

For example, it is entirely possible that your dissemination efforts would be better served by having a simple direct conversation with a handful of the right people than by creating the fanciest of fancy reports.

Treat your dissemination strategy as a way to share insights (the actual product of your work) with the audiences that can use them.

Plan Methods.

• Five Audience Framework
• Theory of Use
• Dissemination Budget
• Single Source of Truth
• Audience Needs Assessment
• Product Bundle
• Dissemination Plan

Phase 2: Design

The biggest design mistake I see research and evaluation teams make is in putting all of their reporting time and effort into building a single technical report.  It’s better to take some of that effort and apply it to the creation of different products.

I’ve found through experience that it takes just about as much time and effort to create a collection of infographics, simple slide decks, blog posts, and even short videos as it does to completely redesign a long technical report.  Which activity do you think will better serve your audiences?

Design Methods.

• Simple 1 Pager
• Simple 3 Pager
• 25 Page Slidedoc
• Micrographic
• Social Media Carousel
• Single Panel Comics
• HTML Executive Summary Landing Page
• HTML Article Style Report

Phase 3: Communicate

There is a kind of magical thinking involved in a lot of reporting activities.  The belief is that if you create a report, and post that report to your organization’s resource page, it counts as reporting.  That if it’s important, people will find it.

That wasn’t true 20 years ago, and it’s definitely not true today.  People are so overwhelmed with information that even the best stuff is easy to miss.  It’s why the best insights don’t just need to be valuable, they need to have a champion.  Someone willing to put in the extra effort to deliver those insights to the people who can use them.

There is also this belief sometimes, especially in larger organizations, that sharing our work is somebody else’s job.  Maybe you have a really good communications team or marketing team.  But rarely do they care as much about your work as you do.  And sharing your work is often just a very small part of their overall role.

Communicate Methods.

• Audience Building
• Audience Magnets
• Audience Borrowing
• Social Objects
• Newsletter Writing
• Search Strategy
• LinkedIn Strategy
• YouTube Strategy
• Webinar Strategy
• Content Calendar

Phase 4: Evaluate

The best dissemination plans are the easiest to evaluate. Evaluation is just checking on how well your strategy is working.  And how you might be able to make it better.

Status quo reporting methods (so many PDFs!) could only provide you with limited data.  Usually you just knew how often your resource was downloaded.  Analytics for HTML reports, social media content, video content, and newsletter content is far richer and can give you a more detailed view of the user experience. 

Evaluate Methods.

• Google Analytics
• Search Analytics
• Social Media Analytics
• Newsletter Analytics
• UX Evaluation
• Page Recording
• Readability Testing

Some words of encouragement.

Our work needs champions for it to spread.

Right now there is a gap between the technical products developed by research and evaluation teams and the sharing done by most org comms teams. Because dissemination usually happens at the end of a project, the expert team behind the work is often ready to move onto the next thing. The comms team is the face of an organization, responsible for building and serving the org’s audience.

There is rarely sufficient budget or time dedicated to dissemination budgets. Usually it’s tied in directly with technical report writing, technical report copyediting, and technical report graphic design. By the time all of that is done, the budget is drained and the contract is in its last days. At the moment it should ramp up, it fizzles out.

So we get what we pay for. Millions of dollars put into research and evaluation that is likely archived but never adequately shared.

For the people who really care, it can be discouraging. That’s me, and I’m guessing you because you made it this far. But while the effort you put in during a time when everyone else is checking out is often thankless, it’s not futile. Little bits of process improvement here and there can have a huge impact on who gets to see our work and who gets excluded.

I believe in you. Now go share some stuff.

Now it’s easy to bash the organizations, but the truth is that our research and evaluation frameworks rarely do more than pay lip service to dissemination and reporting.

We can do better. This Theory of Use is my attempt to fill the gap.

In this post:

• Starting with Insights not Reports
• Building a Simple Theory of Use (Insight, Audience, Outcome)
• Step 1. Identify Your Insights
• Step 2. Consider Your Audiences
• Step 3. Determine Your Target Outcomes
• Step 4. Putting the Theory of Use pieces together.
• Step 5. Turning your Theory of Use into a Dissemination Plan [Updated]

Starting with Insights, not Reports.

In research and evaluation we tend to treat reports as if they are the singular end-products of our work. A product that packages all of our questions, methods, findings, and recommendations together so that they can then be distributed.

In other words, the report has become a proxy for our work.

You’ll see this in all sorts of textbooks, guides, and frameworks. The report is the culmination of our efforts, and the thing to be shared.

This might have been useful at a time when publishing was paper and reaching others required travel or postage. But now-a-days publishing can be an email, a YouTube video, a LinkedIn post… you get the idea. We don’t have to wait until we have all our ideas bundled together before sharing them with the people who need them. And even if we do want to wait, bundling everything together makes it harder to effectively share our work with others through modern channels.

As such, using the report as a proxy for our work holds us back from making an actual impact.

So I want you to change your mindset. The report is not the product of our work. Insights are the product of our work. And insights are generated throughout the research and evaluation process.

By focusing on insights, our reporting and dissemination process is fundamentally altered. With that in mind, we just need an approach to take these insights and turn them into outcomes. And that’s what I call my Theory of Use.

Building a Simple Theory of Use (Insight, Audience, Outcome)

My Theory of Use is built with three parts.

Step 1. Identify Your Insights

Think about the importance of research and evaluation questions. They center our work and allow us to choose appropriate methods. Because we know the specific questions that need answering it’s easy to identify where our methods and tools are lacking.

Questions are the atomic unit of evaluation/research design.

In much the same way, insights are the atomic unit of evaluation/research dissemination. If we understand the insights our work has produced, then everything about reporting becomes easier.

So your goal, before you can even think about what dissemination products to choose, is to identify insights. Whether you already have a final technical report or are just starting a new project, here are some places to look for good insights to share.

1. Primary Findings

What the evaluation or research was specifically designed to discover. The answers to the evaluation or research questions.

2. Recommendations

Actionable guidance derived from the findings. Usually directed at the client but potentially relevant to other audiences too.

3. Secondary Findings

Things discovered that weren’t the focus of the original questions but emerged from the data. These can be significant but are rarely disseminated properly.

4. Surprising Findings

Results that contradicted expectations, assumptions, or conventional wisdom. Frequently the most interesting and field-shifting insights. They can be buried because they’re uncomfortable.

5. Negative Findings

What didn’t work, what had no effect, what made things worse. Enormously valuable to the field. Systematically underdisseminated due to client pressure and publication bias.

6. Process Insights

What was learned about how the evaluation or research was conducted. Valuable to organizations building evaluation capacity and to evaluators designing future studies.

7. Methodological Insights

Innovations, adaptations, or lessons about what methods work in what contexts, with what populations, under what conditions. Critical for peers. Almost always buried in methods sections nobody reads.

8. Contextual Insights

What was learned about the setting, community, or system that wasn’t directly about the program or research question but matters for understanding the findings or designing future work.

9. Unknown

What the data contains that hasn’t been fully explored yet. Released for transparency or future discovery.

Step 2. Consider Your Audiences

Insight quality is dependent on the audience. Just like one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, one audience’s insight is another audience’s boring block of text. To keep things simpler I like to use a five audience framework, but you can always get more specific if you have the time.

Audience 1. Client

Every project has someone holding the purse strings — a funder, a boss, a commissioner. They need accountability, completeness, and defensibility. They are almost always your primary audience by default, even if you pretend otherwise.

Audience 2. Community

The people closest to the work — research participants, program staff, partner organizations, community members whose lives and experiences generated your findings. They have a claim on the work that no other audience does, but they’re often the least served.

Audience 3. Influencers

Community leaders, policymakers, decision-makers — the people who could actually act on your findings. They’re busy, skeptical, and driven by decisions they’re already trying to make.

Audience 4. Peers

Other researchers, evaluators, and practitioners doing work like yours. Sharing with this audience contributes to a body of knowledge that makes everyone’s work better.

Audience 5. Public

The broadest and most uncertain audience. Not every project warrants a public audience — and pretending otherwise wastes effort and oversells findings. But when your work genuinely affects people’s lives, this audience deserves a real strategy.

Step 3. Determine Your Target Outcomes

Use means more than simply being reached. Measures like PDF downloads and social media likes seem like vanity metrics, because they’re really just measuring interaction. Outcomes go deeper than that, here are some basic types of reporting outcomes.

1. Awareness Raised

People know something exists or happened that they didn’t know before. The floor of dissemination. Necessary but not sufficient on its own.

2. Questions Answered

People who came with specific questions get meaningful responses. Particularly important for community audiences who have a direct stake in what was found.

3. Mindset Shifted

People see a problem, population, or situation differently. Doesn’t require immediate action but creates the conditions for change later. Often undervalued as an outcome because it’s hard to measure.

4. Behavior Changed

People do something differently as a result of encountering the insight. The most direct form of use but also the hardest to achieve and attribute.

5. Decisions Informed

People in decision-making roles make better choices because of what they learned. Distinct from behavior change because it operates through formal authority rather than individual action.

6. Policy Supported/Challenged

Insights contribute to the development, defense, or disruption of policy at any level. Requires reaching the right people at the right moment in the right form.

7. Theory/Practice Informed

The field learns something that changes how practitioners work or how researchers think about a problem. Slower moving but potentially the most durable form of change.

8. Transparency/Unknown

The data exists in the world, accessible to whoever needs it, for whatever purpose emerges. Honest about the limits of what we can predict or control.

Step 4. Putting the Theory of Use pieces together.

Now let’s pull everything together with a hypothetical program evaluation. Let’s say you are evaluating an after-school literacy program. We always start with the insight, but we’ll also include a source column just so we know exactly where the insight was derived.

Step 5. Turning your Theory of Use into a Dissemination Plan

[Update] When I first put this out I suggested you could adapt the Theory of Use into a Dissemination Plan. But after trying it a few times with clients I decided to take away the suggestion, here’s why.

In practice, this Theory of Use works really well at identifying blind spots. By pairing the insights with your audiences you quickly see which groups are being served, and which are not. It forces you think not just about the tools needed to reach the audiences, but whether or not you have the capacity to do so.

We rarely ever start from scratch. There is usually a set of deliverables or standard report formats. The question you can answer with a theory of use, is whether or not your current set of dissemination products is actually serving the audiences you intend to serve.

Final thoughts.

I designed Theory of Use to complement the evaluation and research frameworks you already use — not replace them. Utilization-Focused Evaluation gets us to intended use by intended users. Developmental Evaluation gets us to real-time learning. The CDC framework gets us to step six. Every major framework we have points toward use and then goes quiet at exactly the moment we need the most guidance.

Theory of Use is what happens next.

If you know of a framework that already does this well, I genuinely want to hear about it. Because I’ve been looking and I haven’t found one. And if this is actually the gap it appears to be, then we have a lot of work to do.

Our work is too important to disappear into a pdf archive. The insights are already there. Let’s get them to the people who need them.

I remember several years ago talking to a friend in the data visualization world. A few months earlier they had created a set of visuals for a new report. And they shared that report with me so I could give it a look.

It was a beautiful pdf. Well written with clear charts and well-made arguments. The kind of PDF you don’t mind reading.

I wanted to share it forward with a link to the publication so I went to Google, searched for it, and nothing came up. Eventually I was able to track it down to a single download page in a bigger resource library. You couldn’t see any of the interesting stuff on this page, it just looked any other PDF.

That’s the thing about systemic report failure. You can create beautiful reports with well-written stories, but if the system required to get that report into your audience’s hands does not exist, the report will never reach its full potential.

In this post I’ll be talking about The Content Gap. In short, it’s the unfilled void between the technical report written by the research or evaluation team and the stuff the communications team shares on social media. Because ultimately it’s the medium, not the message, that determines whether or not your work will reach an audience.

What’s the job? Evaluation, Design, and Communications

The Job for the Evaluators, Researchers, and Subject Matter Experts.

Most evaluations and research projects end with a technical report. This technical report is a reflection of the thought process that carries through the full project and it documents the work.

Even resources like toolkits and training guides end up in a technical format because they are often initially created by subject matter experts. As such, these resources are often technical even if there purpose is to reach a broader audience.

The Job for the Graphic Design Team.

If a project has a large enough budget or internal design capacity, these resources might go to a design team. This team will usually not touch the actual written content, but will likely redesign the structure and sometimes illustrate.

The Job for the Communications Team.

The communications team is the connection point between an organization and the wider world. The organization’s blog, social media channels, and email newsletter are the responsibility of the comms team. They may create featured images but they also rarely touch the content of a resource.

Sharing the Link.

At the most basic level a technical report pdf will often live on a page where it can be downloaded. This page usually has an abstract and also includes pdf downloads for an executive summary, any translations, and other related downloadable resources.

The link for this page gets shared with the communications team. The communications team share the link to the pdf as part of their overall social media strategy. It probably gets shared once on each channel (X, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.) the organization uses. And that’s usually it.

Individual members of the research and evaluation team might also share the link through their own networks. They might also deliver internal presentations, conference presentations, and write papers where the resource link will be shared.

Evaluation: Downloads, Pageviews, and Social Stats

Evaluation for these kinds of resources is usually limited to superficial metrics like downloads, page views, and social media engagement.

The comms team might look at the social media stats. The organization’s web team (which in bigger orgs is often a different group) might look at the pageviews. The research and evaluation team will likely only ask for download stats.

The Content Gap

If you’re not a regular content creator, this probably all seems fine. It is the standard way technical and training resources have been shared since the late 90s. The basic assumption is that the people who want to read it will find it.

But I’ve been blogging, sharing comics, and creating resources for over 15 years. And I see how we attempt to disseminate our work as being totally inadequate. And one of the big reasons for that is the content gap.

The gap is in the amount of easy-to-share material that should exist between the technical report and the comms team. This includes the HTML version of the report or resource. Detachable resources like infographics, charts, or comics. And any other related media like videos, podcasts, and webinars.

Feeding the Comms Team

Unless it’s already worked into the budget, the comms team doesn’t usually have the bandwidth (or subject-matter expertise) to adapt technical reports and resources into web-friendly/audience-friendly content.

But if someone takes the time to create web-friendly resources, this is often appreciated by a team always looking for interesting and relevant things to share. It’s a lot less work to share something cool than it is to share a link to a boring technical pdf download.

Content Orbits

When you create web-friendly materials they can also develop a orbit of their own. Take my comics for example. Almost all of them were created to match with ideas I’ve shared in blog posts. But each comic can potentially have its own orbit or audience.

Videos, infographics, podcasts, webinars, and websites can draw their own direct audiences. Discovered through search engines, AI, social media, and through sharing by other creators. These people are not necessarily connected to the organization and could be completely separate from the audiences reached by the comms team.

Feedback Loops

Sharing social web-friendly content creates feedback loops. This happens through comments, shares, participation in webinars, replies to email newsletters, etc. If you let it, this feedback can influence the design of new content, drawing more of an audience, and improving the usefulness of the resources.

Rich Evaluation Data

With a content strategy evaluation can become a lot more rich. There are tons of data available through feedback loops, page visits, video plays, time on web page, reshares, social media engagement, polls, Q&A, search engine stats, and even traditional downloads. Because now that you have all the other stuff, the PDF can serve it’s true function as being the technical basis for everything that follows.

So Where is the Systemic Report Failure?

The responsibility for content creation, strategy, and evaluation is currently nobody’s job.

The subject matter team often checks out at the technical report because this is usually when the funding ends. Also they don’t really see creating websites, infographics, podcasts, webinars, and videos as being their job.

The comms team is more versed in creating content like this, but they have a different responsibility. Remember, they are the face of the organization not the caretaker of any one particular resource. They also don’t often have the subject matter expertise necessary to adapt the content properly. Same goes with the org’s graphic design team if it has one.

Content strategy is a specialty that requires a unique skillset. And this kind of position rarely exists even in the largest research and evaluation organizations.

I used to to care a lot, and you will find some guidance on this site about chart design (this blog has been going since 2010 which is over half of my professional career). But over time I’ve come to the conclusion that better charts and graphs don’t matter if a resource is never even opened or read. And very few people ever see or read the vast majority of our resources.

What is a broken resource?

I define a broken resource as a report, guide, toolkit, course, ebook, or other resource that just does not reach its target audience or audiences in a meaningful way.

My perspective. The collective wisdom about why these resources don’t reach their audiences is flawed and based mostly on assumptions.

• What we see. A resource is really long.
• What we assume. The resource needs to be shorter if we want it to reach an audience.

• What we see. The charts are ugly.
• What we assume. The charts need to be better if we want to reach an audience.

• What we see. The resource is poorly organized.
• What we assume. The overall design need to be better if we want to reach an audience.

• What we see. The resource is too technical.
• What we assume. The resource needs to be simpler if we want to reach an audience.

What I’ve discovered over the last 20+ years as a researcher, evaluator, and designer, is that all the stuff we see as being wrong are really just symptoms. And our treatments for those symptoms are kind of like filters on a cigarette. They look positive, but they don’t actually fix the underlying problem.

The real problem behind most broken resources.

To understand the problem you have to understand the research and evaluation process.

For most data folk, a report is not just a communication tool. It doesn’t just get written after the project is done. The report is actually the backbone of the research and evaluation process. It starts being written at the proposal stage when we outline methods. Even if it’s not technically called a report at this stage, all this stuff is usually documented in Microsoft Word.

The writing continues as we monitor data collection and then start compiling results. We don’t come up with analyses and recommendations then go add them to the report. We come up with analyses and recommendations at the same time as we write. Then when the project is close to the end, we PDF our Word document and send it along.

In other words. We think as we write and write as we think. And the result is a PDF we call a “report.”

This PDF is NOT really a report.

It wasn’t created for an audience exactly. It was created as we thought through the project and what we should share with our audience. It usually has a very consistent basic structure that is logical for a systematic study, but not for a presentation.

The PDF is a thinking artifact. You can also call it project documentation or the technical report. It’s not a good presentation of your work for most audiences.

But most people don’t think of it that way. They instead share that PDF with their client. The client then might say back, this is too long, too technical, too wordy, and the charts need work.

For the researcher or evaluator this might feel like an attack not on the report, but on their actual thinking. They are picking apart how you process the information behind the report and asking you to cut a lot of it away.

The same goes for most other learning resources and frameworks.

We often create toolkits and guides with the same approach as an annual report. It’s written collectively in Word with comments and track changes. This produces a resource that reflects the thinking of the subject matter experts. Because most of these people are highly educated and academically trained, the resulting resource will feel more like a journal article than a good presentation.

Common symptoms of a thinking artifact masquerading as a report or resource.

1. No pictures. A good modern resource designed for wider audiences will be systematically illustrated. Most technical resources usually only have charts, models, and the occasional photo.
   
2. Big words and long paragraphs. Good resources for smart audiences usually top out at a 10th-11th grade reading level. The ideal for general audiences is around 8th grade. A lot of technical resources are at a post-graduate reading level.
   
3. Fragmented narrative. You should be able to read a good resource, start to finish. Sometimes technical reports are shortened and copyedited but leave behind seemingly disconnected fragments lacking any narrative flow.
   
4. It’s only in PDF. Modern websites are mobile-responsive, auto-translatable, and search friendly. PDFs are none of those. But PDF is the easiest digital format for someone working inside of MS Word. It’s also usually the first choice of a graphic design team that was handed over a technical report.

The alternative resource design approach.

The alternative design approach is what I model here in my Before & After series. It’s also what I offer when working with clients.

But if you are a DiY kind of researcher or evaluator, or don’t have the budget to hire me, here is how you can baby step into better resource design. Focus on the medium first.

1. Keep the original PDF. This is an artifact of your thought process and important for documentation and for anyone who actually wants see all the little technical details. Just don’t try to edit it down to something easy to present, this is a path to frustration.
   
2. Blog your public-facing resource. Use any blogging tool. I prefer WordPress but you can also use something like Medium or Squarespace. A simple blog can reach far more people easier than any PDF. Write as a person directly to other people you hope will read your work. Always include illustrations.
   
3. Report through email. Any email tool, Mailchimp, Kit, whatever. Start building a real tangible list with your resource target audience’s emails. You know how to email, just pretend it’s you trying to directly reach out to small group of professional colleagues. Approach it like a series.

How it Started – 2025 KIDS COUNT Data Book

Every year since 1990, the Annie E. Casey Foundation has ranked all 50 states on how well children are doing. The 2025 KIDS COUNT Data Book looks at 16 measures across four areas of life: economic well-being, education, health, and family and community. States are ranked from 1 (best) to 50 (worst) based on how they score across all four areas combined.

The data is pulled from a few different federal data sources. The data is then standardized, ranked, and shared. The full resource exists as a pdf report, data tables, press releases, an interactive report, and more. These resources are then used to help inform policymakers and advocate for policy change that improves the lives of kids.

The Problem – Too many clicks, not enough data.

I know there are some people reading this who are looking at that before image and thinking that it looks quite nice. And I agree, it does look nice. It’s also incredibly useful when attempting to inform policy, to break down the data into simple to share soundbites. And these rankings do just that and have for over 35 years.

My issue is with the structure of the interactive data book. I think the real power of an interactive report is in being able to share more data while making it feel like less. This doesn’t really do that. Instead it takes the same data you’ll find in the pdf and makes you click more to get to it.

The interactive also uses a lot of BANs (Big Ass Numbers) and isolates the data for individual states. But with a few basic interactive visuals, we can take the same data and bring it all together in a form that puts everything in context.

Let’s walk through the original so you can see what I mean.

On the main page of the interactive data book you’ll find a map that’s color coded (by shade) based on the state’s overall ranking.

Scrolling down the page you get the individual states ranking and you can also see that the colors are based on quartile.

Each individual state in the map is clickable. By clicking one the state comes into focus.

Underneath the state you get to see the rankings for each of the four domains with the data for each individual indicator.

You can get into each category by clicking on the tab across the top where you find a similar map and ranking table to the overall one.

Clicking on a state here will give you a little bit more detailed data in the form of bar charts. There are also a few comparison categories.

Let’s look at the PDF for a minute.

Pretty much all the main data is shown in the pdf report for ALL states in just a few pages of the appendix. Here is a table that shows all rankings for all the states and all the domains, together at the same time. It does not feel overwhelming.

There is also a table for each of the individual domains. This gives all the states and all the data. Compared to the online version, with this table you can actually look at your state’s data and compare it against the data of other individual states.

What’s the point of an interactive?

Right now the interactive version is just an alternate way to show the data found in pdf. It’s not in a narrative format that encourages you to read. It doesn’t give you much in the way of additional context or show the data in formats that encourage comparison.

There are a lot of people who have this idea in their heads that interactivity makes something more engaging. But the vast majority of the time, it just hides stuff away and forces you to click if you want to see anything.

Let’s try something different.

Digging into the data.

On the main landing page for the Data Book there is also a button for Auxiliary Data Tables.

There is an Excel sheet for every one of the 16 indicators. In the excel sheets you’ll see two years of data with confidence intervals. With sampled data like this even a 1 percent drop between two years isn’t always enough to be statistically significant. And with a different sample, the rankings could be wildly different. Especially on certain indicators and for low population states.

My goal here isn’t to dispute the rankings. They are defensible and useful. But for this prototype I do think there is a lot more value that could be had by comparing the actual indicator data between states instead of just comparing the rankings.

Certain stories can hide in rankings that can be quickly uncovered by just showing all the data. But before I do that I want to go in and create a consolidated data table. This will just give me more options when it comes time to visualize.

Playing with charts and graphs.

I spent a lot of time trying out different types of charts. I used flourish for this as I’ll end up embedding the charts as interactives on my report page. But finding just the right chart can take time and a lot of data restructuring.

I love using dot plots for showing distributions. But since a lot of the data would overlap I turned it into a beeswarm so all the individual circles would be shown. I think there is a value in focusing first on just showing the latest year of data so the comparison you make is between the states.

For the year to year comparisons I used another dot plot, this time with both years and connected to make a kind of slope graph. I also split the chart to separate the states that showed improvement and ones that showed the indicator worsening.

In addition to the indicator level data I think it would also be nice to have a big interactive chart on the front page to show all the rankings for all the states and all the domains.

I liked these column charts. Even though it’s not a traditional way to show rankings, I like how you can put the set together and get a picture across all the indicators. Certain stories start to come out pretty quickly.

Take Massachusetts for example. It’s overall ranked number 3, but has an economic rank of 25. North Dakota has an economic rank of 1 but an education rank of 42. While New Hampshire is at or near the top for every domain.

These kinds of differences always make me a curious and push me to dig deeper into the data. I didn’t really see any of that when looking at the original tables.

Building out the interactive.

I wanted the structure of my prototype to be simple. I was thinking that it made sense to split it into five pages. The first would be an overall page where I would set everything up. I would also have one page for each of the four domains. But given that this is just a prototype I decided to only actually create one of those domain pages.

But I’m still going to pretend that all four pages exist, so I need featured images for each domain page and one for the main. I tried to parallel the KIDS COUNT images, which I believe were created with the same stock library. I also used their colors.

below the intro block on the front page I embedded my big rankings visual.

Then I followed that up with a simple menu for each of the domains.

The top of the Economic Well-Being page will have that same visual, an in-page menu, and then an intro to the section.

I also decided to mirror the front page chart after the beginning section. But I only included the Economic Rank and the Overall Rank. The indicators that will follow are a dive behind the rankings.

At the beginning indicator I give the indicator definition. Then I decided to take a little more creative license and add some additional info. What types of things do we know from research that could move the number? And what are some of the sources you can visit that would give you even more context on the indicator.

The page got a little cumbersome so I added a little repeating menu section using anchor links. This lets you jump up and down the page with a click. You don’t have to use the menu, you can just scroll, but it’s there if you need it.

Next up are both of the individual indicator charts. You’ll notice that if you mouse over a circle it tells you state, the value, and the rank of the state within that indicator. It also gives you “Rank Range” which I created from the Confidence Interval. Basically Nevada is currently ranked #34, but due to sampling error it is likely to be somewhere between rank 29 and rank 34.

You don’t have search to find your specific state if you don’t want to. There is also a little filter box at the top of each chart that lets you choose the state you want to see. If you select a state from this it will isolate that state in its current position in the chart.

One of the things that gets lost in rankings but you can see pretty quickly in visualizes like these is when a state is improving, but might have have changed much in terms of rankings. You’ll find quite a few examples of stats that improved considerably on an indicator but saw little to no change in the rankings.

And that’s it really. Same two charts repeated over and over again for each indicator. And now instead of just a few data points with big numbers you get to compare against hundreds, without adding a lot of complication.

What stories can you find in the data?

One of the things I found interesting is that when you consider the confidence interval, the range of possible ranks for Vermont on the percent of teens not in school and not working is somewhere between 2 and 42…yikes!

Let me know what you think.

This is one of those changes that might appeal more to people who like data. If someone just wants to pull a ranking, original approach is probably better. But for my tastes, I always want more data when I can get it.

How it Started – Building Capacity to Evaluate Child Welfare Community Collaborations (CWCC) to Strengthen and Preserve Families

For this week’s Before and After I was looking for a large federal program evaluation that featured a collection of diverse grantees or program sites. The one I settled on is an evaluation of a multi-year, multi-grantee, Child Welfare project.

This project supports the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in its work with the Children’s Bureau to advance the evidence around collaborative approaches to preventing child abuse and neglect.

Description from the CWCC project page.

It’s more of a collection of pdf briefs than a singular report. There are ten briefs listed on the main page, each one is about 15-20 pages long. There is a also a single 13 page “report.” Outside of the main page (through claude.ai) I found an additional 8 grantee briefs (again 15-20 pages each). I’m assuming there should be 5 more to cover all 13 grantees but I figured I had enough to get started.

The big problem (it’s more than fragmentation)

Well, first, that’s a lot of briefs. I’m not sure if someone up high told the team they couldn’t share a report over 20 pages and this is just kind of what happened. But it’s really hard to dive into a report when it’s so fragmented. The best place to start seemed to be the executive summary.

They administered 405 interviews across the 13 grantees, so that’s a lot of qualitative data. But the executive summary had ZERO quotes. Instead there were just collective findings, visuals, and summarizations. The same thing with most of the research briefs (although there were a couple exceptions).

If you wanted to find the actual voice of the program directors, managers, partners, and staff the best place to find it was in the Grantee Profiles. Not only did they give voice to the program staff, they also told real stories about the programs.

Of course, they did this at a grade 19+ reading level, but that seems to be a normal thing with most reports I read.

A real world example of why I hate most qualitative visualization.

If you’ve read my book on Qualitative Data Visualization, you might know that I think about qualitative visuals differently than most. I think the power of qualitative visualization happens when you use it to make qualitative more approachable. Not by replacing powerful qualitative data with overly simplistic charts.

If you can replace your visualization with a simple table, and that table is far easier read than your visual, you should probably stick with the table. Pretty much every visual in the executive summary is just a fancy frequency table. And I wouldn’t mind it as much if they had at least included actual quotes as well.

Reverse Alchemy – Turning Gold into Lead

I ran a little comparison between one of the grantee profiles and summary lessons in the executive summary. Here are some examples of what I found.

On Trust:

Executive Summary: “Building trust at multiple levels is the foundation of community efforts to prevent child maltreatment.”

CITC Profile: “Trust is something that takes time to build, particularly the more community partners you have.” —Program Manager

On Flexibility/Meeting Families Where They Are:

Executive Summary: “Be flexible and tailor services to the specific needs of families.”

CITC Profile: “And what I hope [family navigators] could be here is connecting with participants as people, recognizing that change readiness is complicated, and sometimes you just need to connect with somebody on a human level before you’re ready to do [the work in the program].” —Project Director

On Community Voice:

Executive Summary: “Engage individuals with relevant experience in the design, implementation, and evaluation of prevention strategies and value them as equal partners.”

CITC Profile: “‘Nothing about us without us.’…It’s not an original quote of one of our leaders, but it is a familiar, repeated theme among tribal partners in our community.” —Program Manager

Step 1. Rewrite

To make the project a little more manageable I decided to focus on just three grantee profiles. I used claude.ai to adapt each grantee profile into blog style format with a more approachable reading level.

The original profile reads at approximately grade 19+ (college graduate level). The new blog version comes in at grade 9.8. Average sentence length dropped from 30.6 words to 16.1 words. Average syllables per word dropped from 1.9 to 1.6 (with fewer bureaucratic/academic terms).

I asked the AI tool to keep all the quotes. Then after I was done with that, I took the three new blog style grantee profile stories and the executive summary and asked claude to rewrite an executive summary. But this time answering the five evaluation questions while focusing just on the three grantees.

I realize this is a bigger jump than most of my other before and afters, because I’m essentially re-doing the main executive summary. But it didn’t feel right to just reconfigure something I really didn’t like in the first place.

Step 2. The Structure

Now I have three individual stories and one summary post. If I had the time, energy, and source material I would have rewritten all 13 individual stories. So I wanted to structure this storytelling dashboard in a way that it could accommodate lots more stories if I had them.

With my new approach the landing page will be the executive summary. But it will also include a menu where you could click and read each of the three individual grantee stories.

Step 3. Style

I’m doing a lot to this in terms of rewriting, so I don’t plan to mirror the original design too much. I did go ahead and use the same header font (Merriweather – 700) and body font (Source Sans Pro – 400). But I just decided to use my own dark blue as the spotlight color.

Easy Illustration

I decided to just go really simple with the illustration (this was already a much bigger project than I had planned going in).

I needed featured images for each of the three grantee stories. These would be used in the menus and the top of each individual page to support navigation. Since just about every little project has a web page these days, I just took a few screen captures.

I also integrated some of the map visuals from the reports. The large country map with all grantees for the landing page (executive summary). And the individual state maps for each of the three grantees.

The quotes themselves are going to play a pretty significant role in breaking up the text, structuring the work, and engaging readers. All I really have to do is to use big color blocks, slightly larger font size, and white text so the quotes stand out from the body.

If you’re only going to use quotes, and not other images, make sure they don’t blend in with everything else. If the quotes are good, that’s all you really need most of the time.

Now to bring a selection of quotes back to the landing page.

Once you have the individual quotes on each of the grantee pages, we can just bring a selection of these quotes to the main executive summary/landing page.

It’s okay to have some duplication, especially when that duplication tells the reader there are more quotes where they come from.

Want to see the final after version?

Just click here to see the live prototype.

One final thought – the trouble with turning primary sources into secondary sources.

This thought came to me while I was doing this before and after, and I just can’t get it out of my head.

When we do qualitative work, we collect primary source data. Then, through analysis and summary, we turn that primary source data into a secondary source. After that, we often cut off access to the underlying primary source materials (which we often call raw qualitative data).

This is the opposite of what historians do. They put a lot of value on primary source materials. Secondary materials, like biographies, are not seen as having nearly as much value as primary source materials for future study.

I understand the idea behind qualitative inquiry. We are taking lots of information and making sense out of it. But that raw material, filled with stories and real world experience, is incredibly valuable. Perhaps we need to put a little more work into preserving that resource.

How it Started – The American Evaluation Association – Guiding Principles for Evaluators

The guiding principles are one of the most important resources shared on the American Evaluation Association website. To pull directly from the source, “the Guiding Principles reflect the core values of the AEA and are intended as a guide to the professional ethical conduct of evaluators.”

Unlike some of the other before and afters, this one is short. It’s just a little over 1,000 words. It features some pretty big words, registering a grade level of around 16. So even though it’s short, it’s also dense and completely lacking in illustration.

The problem, it’s just a big block of text.

Usually when people complain evaluation and research resources it’s because they’re both dense and long. So when you have something that’s short, it doesn’t feel like such a problem.

But here’s the thing. The American Evaluation Association continues to play a fundamental role in shaping the field of evaluation, and not just for its members. These principles are one of the key resources the organization uses towards fulfilling that role. But right now, they are really easy to look at and then quickly forget. There just isn’t anything sticky.

Step 1. No Rewrite This Time.

Could the Guiding Principles be written with simpler language? Yes, no doubt.

But they were also written by an official committee. So I tend to balk a little when considering changing the language with these kinds of resources. Luckily though, there is a lot we can do through simple illustration.

Step 2. The Structure

My goal for the structure is to slow down the reader. I want to spotlight the important information but also create enough space so that the reader will linger.

The base structure/order is fine. The pacing is off. Instead of taking your time going through the sections, somebody just gives you everything in one breath. Right now it feels like a terms of service agreement. You know, like the ones social media companies make you accept that you just skip over so you can get back to doomscrolling.

I think we can also add in some extra info to make the reading more worthwhile.

Step 3. Style

Currently the AEA website uses Libre Baskerville for the headers and Lato for the body. Both of these are common Google fonts. Although I’ll usually up the font size a bit.

As for color, for the most part AEA really only uses one (maroon) outside of the typical gray scale. You’ll find some gold here and there but it’s used sparingly.

Following my O.S.E.E. Framework for Illustration.

I think the biggest need is just some basic systematic illustration. I talk about my O.S.E.E. framework in my latest free-to-read book. So that’s what I’ll use to illustrate.

I don’t want to go overboard and illustrate every point and sub-point. But the main five principles should each have their own icon. But even five icons will definitely help with organizing and spotlighting. So that’s where I’ll start.

When you’re creating a series of icons sometimes putting them in white on a solid color background helps tie everything together. It also helps to search for sets/collections of icons designed by the same creator.

I didn’t want to be too literal with all the icons. For the most part I really wanted to just feature people, because these are really about evaluators not the concepts themselves. I found 5 I liked on The Noun Project that were all created by the same designer, Sven Ihrke.

Engagement and Enhancement

I thought about using some of my comics to help create some engagement on the page, but then I decided to go a different direction.

The biggest asset an association has is its members. But even though these principles were created through a committee and updated multiple times over the years, there isn’t really a face or voice on the page. Let’s change that.

AEA has an amazing resource we can use in AEA365. The community blog that pulls in voices from all sorts of evaluators has consistently put out daily blog posts since January 1, 2010. The archive has over 5,000 blog posts and most are written in the voice of the authors, not academic speak.

I used Claude’s AI to scour the AEA365 library looking for direct quotes from blog posts that would be relevant to each one of AEA’s principles. It took a little back and forth but I ended up with a really solid collection of interesting quotes.

One of the cool things about this is that every single blog post is public and linkable. Meaning, if there is a quote you like and want to dive in deeper, you can do that.

In total I now have 26 direct quotes, with at least 4 quotes for each principle, and a few quotes I can use as part of the overview.

Creating a Collection of Little Infographics

There are definitely ways to directly include quotes in the body text of the web page that could be interesting. But one of the things I like about enhancement illustrations is that you can also create them in a way that they can have a life of their own.

By mixing the quote, the icon of the principle it connects with, and a footer that gives the AEA365 post, I ended up with a pretty big collection of PowerPoint slide sized infographics.

While I was doing this I decided to create a few basic single slide infographics showing each individual principle. Now that I have all of this, it’s time pull everything together.

Starting at the top.

I didn’t dwell on this part too long. There were three basic intro paragraphs followed by three paragraphs that each had a bolded word in front. I decided to split them and just used an image from a past conference as the backdrop for the header. I really want to connect this to evaluation people almost immediately.

To create a split and slow things down, I used some icons in front of the bold word paragraphs. I also added a paragraph to intro my addition of quotes.

In the original we just jump straight into a text block with all five principles and sub-principles. I want to slow things down a little so I start by separating the top line of each principle and the single sentence that goes along. Here is where I’ll drop the little guiding principle mini infographics.

If someone were to click on them, they would still be able to scroll and they could also right click and download the infographic. Since the link is written on each one, attribution is already attached so this could easily fit into a slide deck (this part’s for you, evaluation professors). It’s also already sized for a presentation deck.

I included the set of 5 icons below that. If this were a longer page these could easily be in-page menu links. But for now I just want to show all five at the top without someone being forced to scroll through each one.

Right after that I dropped in my first set of quote infographics. All of these are set to autoscroll, but the reader could also take control and go back and forth. Like the previous one, every single quote is it’s own little infographic that can be downloaded and added to a slide deck or shared on social media.

Now for each section I’ll lead off with the icon, and make the principle and associated one line sentence header sized.

Then following each sub-principle I can drop in the set of associated quotes.

Here is what it looks like when you click on one. It opens up in a light box that still lets you scroll but also gives you the chance to right click/download.

And then I just repeat that approach for each principle. And at the end I went through and added a link to each and every AEA365 blog post referenced via the quotes.

Want to see the final after version?

Just follow this link.

So how did I do?

My ultimate goal here was to use illustration to slow down the reader and provide some extra benefit. By adding voices I think we get to put the principles in their true context. The Guiding Principles should not look like they are just the word from on high, but a living a document built through the dialogue and experience of a diverse member organization.

But what do you think?