When I hear “we need a dashboard,” what I hear is “we need relatively current information that we can quickly understand and trust, and we want it on one page.” But a dashboard may or may not be the best way to fulfill that need. Here, I’ll clarify what a dashboard is, and what it isn’t, then provide a checklist you can use to decide if your program or organization needs one.

Curious to know what other tools can support your evaluation consultancy? This article, written by Three Hive Consulting Co-Founder Kristy Madsen, will save you the hours of research and provide you with a list of tools to help run your evaluation consultancy.

You’ve just designed, implemented, and analyzed a client satisfaction survey. Trouble is: clients are not satisfied. Uh oh. No one likes to deliver bad news. However, there are some strategies that will help not only to soften the blow but to make this a rewarding experience.

Congratulations, evaluator, you’ve landed a client! Or maybe your organization has selected an evaluator to complete an exciting project. Either way, your next step is a contract for evaluation services. In this post, we list some components you should include, or at least consider, in your evaluation contract.

Sometimes managing evaluations can feel like herding cats. Despite your best efforts at nailing down methods, timelines, and other evaluation requirements, plans tend to change, especially if you aren’t paying attention.

While we aren’t able to stop your family and pets from ambling by and needing something from you in the middle of an engaging session, we do have some tips to help you maximize your virtual conference experience. Here are 9 things you can do to maximize your virtual conference experience.

Don’t get us wrong, surveys are useful tools and we’re a fan of any survey platform that makes it easier to use the results. But what about when you want to scratch beneath the surface or present a legible graph that will convince the program director or funder that action needs to be taken? This is where the canned survey tools start to falter.

A blank page can intimidate any writer. The same goes for evaluators – that “evaluation questions” column in your evaluation plan may be daunting. Looking at examples of real-world evaluation questions just might inspire your own.

In this post, we describe how Three Hive Consulting supported the evaluation of a home health monitoring project for patients with chronic conditions.

In the past, I have been guilty of putting any and all data I could into a report. I’m talking pages of charts to show ALL the results. If I’m being honest, in some instances, I didn’t know what the point was. I put in as much detail as I could to shift the burden of deciphering the meaning behind the data to my reader.

This post explores how we at Three Hive Consulting worked with a community development initiative to evaluate their activities using social network analysis (SNA). This methodology was used to better understand the relationships and foster collaboration between different individuals, groups, and organizations connected to the initiative.

Here at Eval Academy we are big fans of keeping evaluation simple and that includes how we present our evaluation timelines. These four simple ideas use basic software (Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint) to create clean and easy to understand timelines.

This article explores how to make elements in your report pop using focal points - something that draws our readers to a specific element on a page. Create focal points to draw your audience’s attention to key takeaways in your reports.

This post explores how we at Three Hive Consulting worked with REACH Edmonton Council and other agencies to evaluate a unique initiative called Bridging Together. You’ll see how they developed and carried out an evaluation plan that yielded actionable information.

Part 3 in this six-part series focuses on formatting your report by grouping and spacing elements in your report to enhance readability. Let’s dig a bit deeper into human perception and explore how simply arranging elements on a page can make all the difference when it comes to engaging your audience in your report.

We’ve all been there – you get some data from a client or a survey you’ve run, and you can’t wait to start answering your evaluation questions. But you find one of your data columns is a complete mess because it was an open-ended text field.

Cleaning this messy data can be a day-ruining task - but this doesn’t have to be! I’m going to show you how to use OpenRefine to make this task a million times easier.

This series of posts walks you through how to reno your evaluation reports using six of Canva’s design lessons. Part 1 focused on how to take your audience on a journey using storytelling techniques. Part 2 in this six-part series focuses on how to format your report with a consistent, cohesive look using two formatting elements: colour and font.

Evaluators are notorious for bad reporting. According to Jane Davidson it has to do with our training. Often evaluators are trained in social sciences – a world that prepares people for academic style research and how to write scientifically. The problem is this doesn’t work in the “real world.” Leaders and decision makers don’t want to comb through pages and pages of text to try and find findings and what they should do about them. #TLDR

Evaluators are equipped to ask and answer some pretty complex questions. We are not afraid to tackle abstract ideas and make sense of messy data. However, there is one question that can be tough to succinctly answer - what is evaluation?