48 - Telling Your Data Story: Creative Methods for Visualizing and Disseminating Evaluation Results

Abstract Information: What are the most engaging and effective ways to visualize and disseminate data? How do we avoid the dreaded ‘data dump’ and instead showcase our data in a meaningful way for our clients? The workshop facilitators will guide attendees through a variety of creative, interactive, and innovative ways to visualize and disseminate data to their clients. The pre-conference workshop will consist of small-group discussion, hands-on activities, demonstrations, and large group reflection. The session leaders will demonstrate a variety of ways to visualize and disseminate data based on both promising practices and their own experiences training emerging evaluators. Attendees will work together to practice some creative visualization/dissemination methods with a variety of evaluation and assessment case studies and data sets. Finally, we will have a large group discussion on promising practices, things to avoid, and strategies for successfully engaging your collaborators. Materials and handouts will be provided.

Relevance Statement: Evaluators continue to face the forever-growing mountain of data generated from their clients. A plethora of survey submissions, hours of interviews and focus groups, countless observations, and program materials may be collected as part of your evaluation. However, how do we translate this data into something useful for our clients? How can we avoid the dreaded process of dumping all of the data onto clients and hoping they figure out the key takeaways? Effective data visualization and dissemination techniques are the answers to these questions. By learning how to craft key visualizations by selecting decisive points and designing creative activities, evaluators can effectively communicate their work and illustrate it in an engaging way for clients. This workshop will provide attendees the opportunity to learn the methods that have worked for the workshop facilitators and promising practices from field, gain experience creating a data visualizations using arts-based and computerized methods with real data, work together to develop engaging materials for an evaluation data party, and reflect upon their experiences with the workshop facilitators and colleagues. Additional resource documents will also be provided (on a shared Google folder) on the fundamental items discussed in the discussion, activities, and group reflection.