Last week, more than 3000 evaluators descended on my hometown of Washington, DC for the American Evaluation Association’s annual conference. I learned this much + slept this much = rockstar conference. #omgMQP I had the pleasure of spending Monday and Tuesday in Michael Quinn Patton’s…
Lately I’ve been feeling let down by summary statistics: the min and max, mean and median, quartiles and standard deviation… They do their job well enough. Summary statistics tell a summary. An aggregate story, bringing all the messy scores together into some sort of cohesion. We…
![Building an Evaluation Culture with Top Ten Lists [Guest post by Corey Newhouse]](/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/public_profit.png)
Hi, I’m Corey Newhouse, the Founder and Principal of Public Profit. We help public service organizations measure and manage what matters. As the leader of an 8-person evaluation firm, I think often about staff training and common organizational practices. Anyone who has been in the field…
I’ve been in love with diverging stacked bar charts since I saw Joe Mako’s submission to Cole Nussbaumer’s dataviz challenge last December. Joe made this contest-winning chart. But in Tableau! The amazing but expensive software! Could I ever create one in Excel?! Yes! Luckily I’d…
Last week I shared strategies for improving any chart’s colors. One of the examples was a diverging stacked bar chart: I love stacked bar charts because they’re pretty versatile, and because they’re a great chart for lots of evaluation and survey data. In my example,…