FIND YOUR NICHE: USING EVALUATION TO IMPROVE BUSINESS COMMUNICATIONS [AEA 2018 SESSION MATERIALS]

Find your Niche: Using evaluation to improve business communications

Designed for evaluation consultants, this session explored how to turn your evaluation skills inward to improve your communications strategy and position yourself as an evaluation leader. We followed the steps taken by a small consulting firm, Innovation Network, to research and compare its own external communications channels with five related organizations’ channels. Innovation Network candidly described their process to conduct the research, analyze data using a participatory Data Placemats approach, and use the data to challenge assumptions about what is important to communicate and adjust its external communications strategy. Session participants left the session with an improved capacity to identify opportunities to evaluate their communications, collect and analyze communications data, and use evaluation findings to drive decision-making.

What’s so innovative? We used our evaluation consulting skills to look at our own business communications and build a targeted communications strategy.

Session Resources

• Session Slides: A review of our demonstration provided at AEA on November 1, 2018.
• Communications Research template: for collecting data on like organizations’ communications content, engagement, and audience.
• Data Placemat template: for participatory data analysis.
• Communications Plan template: for building an intentional strategy aligned with your organizational goals.
• Guiding Questions: for guiding decision points in the process of developing your communications strategy.