![\"Birthday](\"\/neo\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2016\/09\/Birthday-Party-Evaluation-Plan-9-16-16.jpg\")
<\/p>\nWhat would you rather look at?\u00a0 Some paragraphs of text and bullet points that explain in a step-by-step fashion your process and outcomes evaluation plans, or a diagram of those plans?\u00a0 For me the answer is easy: a diagram.\u00a0 Diagrams have the advantage of being quickly understandable, interesting to look at, invite participation of the viewer, and possibly most important for me, they\u2019re colorful.\u00a0 A textual explanation can walk me through the same process, but I would play a much more passive role, and I might not understand the big picture without having, well, a big picture.<\/p>\n
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Obviously you would also need the text.\u00a0 Somewhere you need to explain the details of what you\u2019re going to do in your evaluation. But a diagram can make the plan immediately comprehensible, and the reader can then read the textual explanation while understanding the overall context.<\/p>\n
Bethany Laursen, an evaluation consultant, posted some examples of what she calls visual evaluation plans in her blog, Laursen Evaluation and Design<\/a>.\u00a0 These are created by students in a class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.\u00a0 I like them because by looking at them I have a basic understanding of their projects and how they will be evaluated.<\/p>\n Her blog post presents visual evaluation plans as a way of getting non-evaluators to understand your evaluation plans.\u00a0 But I think they can also be a way that people (whether evaluators or non-evaluators who find themselves writing evaluation plans) could begin to think about how to plan their evaluation strategy to fit their project.<\/p>\n Microsoft products like Word and Power Point have drawing tools that can work to make diagrams.\u00a0 But I think best with pen and paper, so if I were designing an evaluation plan for my daughter’s birthday party (see February 4, 2016 post<\/a>), I would do something like the drawing here. Then I could create a plan for evaluating each of the process evaluation questions (in blue arrows) and each of the outcome evaluation questions (in red arrows).<\/p>\n This video, Faster Program Evaluation Planning: a New Visual Approach<\/a>, shows how you could use a product like DoView to create a snazzy looking evaluation plan that also can link images to the textual description of the evaluation, and even further, link to your actual evaluation.<\/p>\n That famous phrase in the title, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” works really well to show how you can use your diagram to communicate your evaluation plan to others.\u00a0 But if you’re using a diagram to design your plan in the first place, the quote that might work better is Gloria Steinem’s: \u201cWithout leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.\u201d<\/p>\n And as Winnie-the-Pooh says “Nobody can be uncheered with a balloon.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What would you rather look at?\u00a0 Some paragraphs of text and bullet points that explain in a step-by-step fashion your process and outcomes evaluation plans, or a diagram of those plans?\u00a0 For me the answer is easy: a diagram.\u00a0 Diagrams have the advantage of being quickly understandable, interesting to look at, invite participation of the… Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2959,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8ICUo-1f9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2959"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4783"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6518,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4783\/revisions\/6518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.nnlm.gov\/nec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}