Cartoons and Data: the perfect match

Before I launch into talking cartoons, I’m going to tell you a little story about how this blog got started.

A few months ago, Susan Kistler (former Executive Director of the American Evaluation Association and now evaluation guru and leader of The Smarter One) reached out to me asking if I’d write a blog about how crafting helps me to be a better evaluator for aea365. After nearly fainting from being star struck via email (and feeling extremely honored!), I quickly replied YES.

I have to admit I’m quite proud of the post I wrote. In fact, that very post is what got me started with blogging – I had so much fun writing it and it really allowed me to finally realize how my two worlds were so interconnected.

After reading somewhere that Susan was a whiz with WordPress, I asked for some advice on starting a blog. You see, I had been tossing the idea around for months (maybe years..), but I was torn because I wasn’t sure if I wanted it to be a crafty/DIY blog or a blog for evaluators (#DataDivas if you will). The only thing I had landed on was that I wanted to use WordPress as my platform. Susan & I quickly became virtual friends and I’m still blown away by her kindness. Susan is extremely busy (at the time she was in the midst of launching her new initiative, The Smarter One) and not only did she email me some tips, she even hosted a Google Hangout so she could screen share and walk me through a few essentials!

Human kindness, you guys. It’s just the greatest thing.

Aside from telling you how much I adore Susan (and how this blog got started!), I’m actually writing to tell you about a super useful webinar I watched last week. In addition to running a great tip-a-day blog for evaluators, AEA also offers Coffee Break webinars a few times a month. They’re brilliant 20 minute webinars – just long enough to include the most pertinent details but short enough so you don’t miss too much work time.

I discovered Chris Lysy’s evaluation cartoons (found at Fresh Spectrum) via Stephanie Evergreen’s blog (aka: the data visualization queen!) a while back. Chris’ illustrations literally make me laugh aloud every time I see them. Why? Well, they’re evaluation cartoons (I mean, c’mon – nerdy cartoons! – that’s hilarious!) plus he brings humor to the frustrations evaluators know all too well. When I saw that he’d be hosting one of the upcoming Coffee Breaks, I jumped on registering!

Chris also wrote a great post on his website as a teaser for the presentation. He outlined reasons we should stop wasting data and how we can do that through the use of interactive dashboards (you know my love for Tableau, thus I thoroughly enjoyed this part of the presentation!).

Here are a few of my favorite cartoons from Chris’ post:

Perhaps because I’ve watched too many of my colleagues be driven crazy with the pursuit of a PhD or maybe because journal articles seem so archaic to me, but long reports are really not my thing.

Avoiding becoming long winded (be it in an email, report or…blog post!) is something that could be applicable to anyone in any field.

{Please forgive the fact that this post is so long. As my mother would say: “Do as I say, not as I do”}

So I leave you with my favorite of the cartoons…

Head over to Fresh Spectrum so you too can appreciate Chris’ use of cartoons to encourage simple, usable evaluations.