Podcast – Glass Frog

'Tis the season for reflection, so Jen and Rebecca use Episode 6 as an opportunity to talk about what they learned this season and reflect on ways in which they can get better at their work, particularly with respect to approaching their work through a lens of inclusiveness. We hope you benefit from hearing all the ways in which we can improve in our work and hope our episodes this season can prompt some reflection for you as well. Friends, this is our season 4 finale. Thank you for coming with us on this ride. To reiterate, we love the episode suggestions we receive from our listeners, so please keep them coming in. Until next season, stay well!

We had a great chat with Heather Krause, Founder of We All Count Project for Data Equity. Heather is a statistician by training and is presently using her skills and passion to improve equity in data science. She practiced data science in an international setting for many years before realizing many of her own practices were problematic, both reflecting and reinforcing western ways of thinking and often de-legitimizing the values of the people and groups she was studying. Rather than blow up her career, Heather thankfully imagined a new way of doing data science that would marry rigor with equity in the planning, execution, and communication of quantitative research. She now works with a range of clients from the public and nonprofit sectors, as well as academia and other research institutions, to help them identify areas for improvement and tangible practices to improve their own research. We talk with Heather about what data equity means (and, for that matter, what data science means), the many hats she wears not only as a data scientist herself but as a therapist for researchers who are learning that their long-held practices and traditions may be inequitable in both obvious and not-so-obvious ways, and her philosophy that there is no trade off between rigor and equity in data science (and in fact they should be mutually reinforcing!). It was a great conversation, and we know our listeners will appreciate Heather's candor and thoughtfulness. Friends, Heather brings The Goods. First of all, bless her soul, she's a disciplined blogger. Her website is also chock full of tools and resources which you can use to inform your approach to data equity. If you're just now starting to think about approaching your work through the lens of equity, we suggest you start with these resources. The website also offers a Data Equity Framework which researchers can use to think through some of the thorny issues that arise when planning a study, collecting data, analyzing data, and reporting on results. Check out the tools and framework, and if you're interested in digging deeper, please reach out to Heather for more information!

We talk this week with Martha Brown and Debbie Gowensmith about trauma-informed evaluation. It was a great chat, but, before we jump in, here's a little background on our guests. Our first guest is Martha Brown, president and founder of RJAE Consulting. A well-known evaluator and trainer, Martha's expertise is in the area of trauma-informed practices and restorative justice. She joins us alongside Debbie Gowensmith, vice-president of Groundswell Services, Inc., a consulting firm that specializes in strengthening equity-building movements. Debbie's expertise is in community-based research and program evaluation, and she also has a background in program management, which she brings to bear on her evaluation work. We found our guests after reading Debbie's January 2021 AEA365 post on using Photovoice to support trauma-informed evaluation. Debbie introduced us to Martha, and the rest is history. As we mention in the introduction of the episode, we really only scratch the surface in this conversation and would probably benefit from another couple hours with Martha and Debbie! We consider ourselves newcomers to this work, so Debbie and Martha patiently covered some "Trauma 101" material with us before we moved on to discussing trauma-informed evaluation. We talk about different evaluation approaches and methodologies that are better suited for trauma-informed work, but really Martha and Debbie encourage evaluators to assume a trauma-informed lens irrespective of their methodology. Whether we're doing Photovoice or field work or surveys, we should be mindful of the prior experiences of both research participants and our staff and be careful not to engage in practices that re-traumatize individuals or communities. Debbie and Martha referenced and shared a few resources, which we found helpful and will therefore pass along to our loyal listeners: SAMHSA's Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-informed Approach (SAMHSA is Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, an operating division of the Department of Health and Human Services) SAMHSA's National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices (NREPP) CDC's site on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) We really hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did! FYI, if you'd like to reach out to and/or learn from Martha, you can find her at: For training/workshops in Trauma Informed (TI) Evaluation for your organization or conference, email martha@rjaeconsulting.com For information regarding how Hamai Consulting can support TI systems change and help organization become TI, email martha@hamaiconsulting.com

Episode 3 brings us Jennifer Taylor and Sarah Goletz from the Indiana Area Health Education Center (AHEC) to talk about ripple effect mapping (REM). We knew very little about REM, so we sat like schoolchildren at the proverbial feet of Jennifer and Sarah as they patiently walked us through the basics. If you too are unfamiliar with REM, it's a method that combines elements of appreciative inquiry, mind mapping, and participatory evaluation to ascertain how participants and others involved in or affected by a program describe the program's outcomes and impact. It can also be used to identify a program's unintended consequences (both positive and negative) and inform recommendations. This page on the University of Minnesota Extension School's website has some great resources that help explain how it all works. At a high level, it involves gathering 12 to 20 stakeholders in a room, guiding them through a process where they talk in pairs about elements of the program they appreciate or find impactful, and then facilitating a discussion wherein participants share out their ideas while facilitators organize and map these ideas on a large sheet of paper, whiteboard, or projector at the front of the room. The result is a cool map that visually depicts a program's impacts (see example here). Jennifer and Sarah stumbled upon REM in their own work at AHEC, and now they not only use REM in their own research, they also happily teach others how to do so. Though COVID has put a temporary damper on some of this work, they were able to host a workshop in Fall 2020 and are happy to serve as evangelists for the method in any way they can. If you have questions, hit them up!

Friends, we have a doozy of an episode. Andy Johnson from Inspire to Change joined us to talk about arts-based evaluation, creative evaluation, and applied neuroaesthetics. We could have talked to Andy all day, but professional norms dictated that we had to allow him to leave the meeting after our scheduled time expired. Bummer, but if we can have him back, we will! Andy is an artist-turned-evaluator, so he brings an interesting perspective to his work with nonprofits. We wanted to chat with him because of this season's theme around inclusivity. Andy and his team have really unique ways of ensuring that their approach to building hypotheses and theories about program include all perspectives, and also that their way of presenting data reflects the many ways in which people prefer to access and interpret data in the real world. We discuss about some of the unique ways in which evaluators integrate the arts into their work, with respect to both methodology and presentation. Andy introduced us to the visual matrix method, which is a way of using visual art to elicit research participants' thoughts, sometimes subconscious thoughts, on a particular topic by having them freely respond to art work. We also talked about verbatim theater as a way of presenting qualitative data in a way that is accessible both to people who participated in the research and to consumers of the research. We added links here in case you want to check it out. As a quick plug, Andy's team is going to offer two classes this fall -- 1) creative evaluation for internal evaluators and 2) writing for social justice. You can visit the events page of their website to learn more about them.

We are excited to be kicking off Season 4 of the Glass Frog Podcast with evaluator and author Chari Smith! Chari is the founder of Evaluation into Action, which partners with nonprofit professionals to create realistic and meaningful program evaluation processes. She teaches workshops aimed at helping nonprofit professionals understand the value of program evaluation, and recently published her first book that helps early career evaluators, nonprofit professionals, and students learn how to create and implement an evaluation plan. The book, Nonprofit Program Evaluation Made Simple: Get Your Data. Show Your Impact. Improve Your Practice, is on shelves, so order your copy today! Chari is a proud member of the Oregon Program Evaluators Network (OPEN) and the International Society of Evaluation Education (ISEE). She is also an active member of the American Evaluation Association (AEA) and serves on their Nonprofit and Foundations Topic Interest Group (TIG) Leadership Council. As of summer 2021, she is also an adjunct faculty member for the University of Portland's Pamplin School of Business Nonprofit MBA program. Chari is passionate about her work and brings her enthusiasm, insight, and expertise to each project. Chari is also available to speak on a range of topics that will both inspire and inform. If you have an upcoming conference or event, please reach out to her through her website. Feel free to view her opening plenary session at the American Evaluation Association conference 2020. Participate in a workshop with Chari! On Thursday, July 29 at 9:00 AM PST, Chari will be giving a workshop titled Measurable Outcomes Made Simple. If you work with nonprofits or want to learn a more collaborative approach to creating outcomes, please join Chari. You can learn more and register for the workshop here. You can connect with Chari on Twitter (@evalenthusiast), LinkedIn, or by e-mail at chari@evaluationintoaction.com. We talk with Chari about her artistic interests as well. She wrote a song about evaluation (!), which you can hear on her website. You can also learn more about her creative endeavors using the links below: Chari writes music, plays and musicals. Learn more about her creative adventures at: charismith.com Evaluation as Jazz – Comfort Pandemic Music with Michael Quinn Patton, original music by Chari Smith. Portland Mini Musical Festival 2020: Book Club. Book, Music, and Lyrics by Chari Smith. A group of women in varying stages of their adult lives, come together under the pretense of discussing a book. The book never gets discussed, but wine is imbibed, secrets are shared and support is given. It is a heartfelt tribute to the power of friendship among women, no matter what their age. (Please note, this video opens with a song that is for the entire performance of all 6 mini musicals. Book Club starts right after the song and is about 20 minutes.)

We are back for season 4! We have a great lineup this season, and can't wait to learn from our guests alongside our listeners! The first episode of the season will post on Monday, July 5. We're joined by evaluator and recent author Chari Smith. We talk with Chari about her new book, her approach to building a culture of evaluation with her clients, and (on a tangent we couldn't resist) her background in and passion for music and theater. Chari was the perfect guest for the first episode of the season, which we're using to loosely explore the theme of inclusion. How can we be more inclusive of others' perspectives when doing evaluation? How can we be more inclusive of program participants' lived experiences when developing evaluation plans and collecting data? How can we as evaluators be more open to others' experiences and, more importantly, include those voices to make our work better? Chari takes an intentionally inclusive approach to building capacity, and we learned a lot from our conversation with her. Throughout the season, we will continue to drop episodes on the first Monday of every month. As in the past, if you have questions or topics you want to see explored on the podcast, please reach out at https://glassfrog.us/contact-us/. We love hearing from our listeners!

We are excited to be kicking off Season 4 of the Glass Frog Podcast with evaluator and author Chari Smith! Chari is the founder of Evaluation into Action, which partners with nonprofit professionals to create realistic and meaningful program evaluation processes. She teaches workshops aimed at helping nonprofit professionals understand the value of program evaluation, […] The post Making Evaluation Simple with Chari Smith appeared first on Glass Frog Solutions.

Welcome to the final episode of Season 3 of The Glass Frog Podcast! This episode we got to talk with evaluator, consultant, cartoonist, and all around nice guy Chris Lysy. We've been following Chris on and off for a few years now through his blog. He recently published a book of evaluation-themed cartoons, Evaluation Illustrated, and we took that as sign that we should have him on our show. We talked with Chris about digital evaluation, the non-predictable and non-linear dimensions of his career as an evaluator, and of course about his cartoons. If you haven't checked out the book, you should. (It would be a great holiday gift for your evaluator friends and family members!) A few of our favorites are below. Chris has an active newsletter and also a new Patreon where he shares more cartoons and keeps you up-to-speed on his work. Subscribe to both for a regular dose of humor and thoughtfulness amidst these crazy times. This is our final episode of the season. We're already planning for Season 4, so, listeners, please don't hesitate to reach out if you have ideas! It's been fun being on this journey with you!

Welcome to the final episode of Season 3 of The Glass Frog Podcast! This episode we got to talk with evaluator, consultant, cartoonist, and all around nice guy Chris Lysy. We’ve been following Chris on and off for a few years now through his blog. He recently published a book of evaluation-themed cartoons, Evaluation Illustrated, […] The post Season 3 Finale with Chris Lysy appeared first on Glass Frog Solutions.

In this episode, Jen and Rebecca continue their discussion about their project on the study of the ancillary benefits of education programs. (If you haven’t seen the first part of this episode, you can check it out here. It will get you up to speed on the project and the teacher residency part of the […] The post Jen and Rebecca talk about auxiliary staffing programs appeared first on Glass Frog Solutions.

In this episode, Jen and Rebecca talk for the first time about one of their own projects: a study of the ancillary benefits of education programs. That may sound wonky, so let us explain. All nonprofit education programs have primary goals — some aim to help teachers in the classroom, some train teachers, some provide […] The post Jen and Rebecca talk about teacher residency programs appeared first on Glass Frog Solutions.

We had a chance to talk with Teresa McCaffrey of the Educational Partnership Center (EPC) at University of California, Santa Cruz this month. EPC oversees a collection of 10 programs aimed at preparing underrepresented students for college. Altogether, they serve 11,000 students in the Santa Cruz region. Though each program has a different goal, EPC […] The post Collective Impact Models with Teresa McCaffrey appeared first on Glass Frog Solutions.

This month, we talk with Kathy Haynie, Director of Haynie Research and Evaluation, about evaluating STEM education programs. Kathy has worked in the STEM evaluation field for almost 20 years and was gracious enough to let us pick her brain on her background and approach to evaluation, as well as what she (and the field […] The post Evaluating STEM Education Programs with Kathy Haynie appeared first on Glass Frog Solutions.

This episode, we are excited to bring you the wisdom of Madhawa “Mads” Palihapitiya. Originally from Sri Lanka, Mads currently teaches at University of Massachusetts – Boston and is an expert in conflict resolution and violence prevention, which he came to study as a result of growing up during Sri Lanka’s Civil War. Mads eventually began working as an evaluator in communities around Boston, which is when he started integrating photography into his evaluation work. Jen came across Mads’ photography work while reading the AEA 365 blog, as she is wont to do in her leisure time. His article, “Images as Data for Needs Assessments and Evaluation,” and his discussion of art and images in evaluation piqued her interest in his work. Unsurprisingly, Mads was a great guest. If you listen to the podcast, you’ll immediately see why. Like our episode with Stefanie Singer of EASE last month, he reminds us of the role that the arts can play in revealing our shared humanity and helping research participants express their truth. We really enjoyed talking to Mads and we think you’re really going to enjoy the episode as well! The post Photography and Evaluation with Madhawa Palihapitiya appeared first on Glass Frog Solutions.

Welcome to Season 3! We're kicking off our season by talking with Stefanie Singer, who is the Program Director for Everyday Arts for Special Education (EASE), a New York City-based program operated by Urban Arts Partnership. EASE is an arts integration program that trains teachers on how to use simple arts integration activities and methods to improve outcomes for elementary-aged students. The program was designed to serve special education students, but as we discuss in the interview, the activities can benefit all students. We really wanted to talk to Stef because we haven't talked much about teacher professional development programs on this podcast, nor have we highlighted any programs that explicitly address developing social-emotional skills among students with significant disabilities. Stef has a great perspective on the challenges and stresses that teachers face (even before the pandemic introduced a whole new slew of challenges and stresses!), and talks about EASE's role in helping teachers relax in the classroom and let their students have fun. EASE has a bunch of fun activities, some of which you can now try at home with your own kids (or friends - we're not judging). Check them out on the EASE at Home website. You can follow Urban Arts Partnership on Twitter at @UrbanArtsOrg or on Facebook at @urbanartspartnership. The post Arts Integration with Stefanie Singer appeared first on Glass Frog Solutions.

The Glass Frog Podcast is back for its third season! Amidst the chaos and heartbreak of 2020, we're hoping that the podcast can offer our listeners not just a chance to learn something new, but a brief, monthly respite from all of the disorder. We're really glad you're joining us. Our first episode of the season drops on Monday, July 6. We're kicking off the season by talking to Stefanie Singer, who manages a program called Everyday Arts for Special Education (EASE) at Urban Arts Partnership in New York City. Stefanie shares her experience training special education teachers on how to use simple, arts-integrated activities to encourage social-emotional and academic growth among their students. We'll continue to post episodes the first Monday of every month. They’ll be released through our website and on iTunes and Google Play, so please subscribe if you want to stay up to date each month. Thanks to everyone who continues to reach out with ideas and comments! Please keep the feedback coming! If you have ideas for future episodes, please free to reach out to us via the Contact Us page of our website. See you next week! The post Season 3 Trailer! appeared first on Glass Frog Solutions.

Surprise! You (and we) thought we had finished up season 2, but then we had an opportunity to talk with some folks about an issue we think and care a lot about and we couldn't pass it up. Welcome to our bonus episode on cultivating interpersonal effectiveness (in the classroom and beyond). This season we talked (and learned) a lot about how to be better, more empathetic listeners, how to apply those skills as we help organizations build learning cultures, and how our academic colleagues are training the next crop of future evaluators in these skills. Interpersonal skills have been top of mind. Thus, we jumped at the chance to talk with a panel of actual experts on how to cultivate these skills in ourselves and among our colleagues. Our panel guests include: Libby Smith (she/they) is an organizational healing facilitator. As an experienced and holistic evaluator and educator, she excels at the human component of research and evaluation. Never one to shy away from crucial conversations, Libby deftly balances accountability and compassion. Her work focuses on building equity and accessibility through personal growth and embodiment practices. Libby uses these skills to provide intersectional and liberation-forward guidance to organizations and clients seeking transformative change. She is an AEA Board member, works at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, and is auntie to 10-year-old twin girls. Follow Libby on Twitter: @work_with_libby Tiffany Smith (she/her) is an evaluator, educator, and facilitator. She brings experience as a tenure-track faculty member teaching evaluation and research courses, as well as experience with conducting research and evaluation projects. Tiffany has conducted evaluation work in K-12 education settings, non-profit organizations, higher education environments, and community programs. She stresses the importance of communication, reflective practice, and collaboration in her evaluation work and in training others in evaluation and research methods. Follow Tiffany on Twitter: @Tiffany7001 Deven Wisner (he/him) is a capacity builder for data-driven decision making across a variety of disciplines, including community and social welfare, human capital, finance, marketing, and compliance. He leverages his training in evaluation and industrial-organizational psychology and years of senior level management experience to enable clients to leverage data in their organizations decision-making process. Complementary to his technical skills in program design, statistics, and data visualization and reporting, Deven relies heavily on participatory methods and interpersonal effectiveness training to inspire client ownership and buy-in. He is the Principal Consultant for Viable Insights, an instructor at the University of Arizona and president of the Arizona Evaluation Network. At the root of all his work is a passion for empowering individuals to utilize evidence-based decision making as an effective method for achieving their goals and objectives. Follow Deven on Twitter: @devenwisner

Welcome back! This month, we conclude Season 2 by talking with our old friend and colleague, Pau Aragay Marín. Pau is Director of Impact and Organizational Improvement at Educo. Educo is a global NGO that acts in defense of children, ensuring they are living humanely, particularly in the wake of natural and man-made disasters, and that their rights are protected. He oversees a team that is helping to set the strategy for their global impact and putting the systems in place to collect the data to articulate that impact. We spoke with Pau about the challenges of doing evaluation across geographic boundaries, using local resources for data collection, and how to use that evaluation data to make meaningful improvements to programming. Pau was candid about the challenges he’s up against in doing this work. We think these are challenges that will resonate with folks in the nonprofit sector, even if your work isn’t global. Thanks again for joining us. This is our final episode of the season, but maybe we'll add a bonus episode if y'all play your cards right. We've really appreciated all of you who have listened to the episodes and provided us feedback. We hope you've been able to learn something along the way!

Welcome back! This may surprise you, but, despite our girlish good looks and youthful dispositions, we aren't spring chickens. It's been a while since we were in school and we're a little out of touch with what young people are learning these days. Since today's students are tomorrow's professionals, we wanted to learn more about how our colleges and universities are training students to be evaluators. To do so, we invited a panel of evaluation professors to tell us all about their approaches to training students to be both smart consumers and producers of evaluation. Our three guests include: - Len Lopoo, Professor of Public Administration and International Affairs at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Professor Lopoo is also the Director of the Center for Policy Research at the Maxwell School and the Maxwell X Lab, which uses behavioral science and RCTs to evaluate public and nonprofit initiatives. Professor Lopoo teaches statistics and program evaluation, in addition to other topical classes, to graduate students at the Maxwell School. - Joan Stamler, Adjunct Assistant Professor at Teachers College at Columbia University. Professor Stamler teaches program evaluation to graduate students at Teachers College, though the course is open to students in other disciplines like social work. Professor Stamler worked for many years in the private sector, before going back to graduate school to earn her Ph.D. and then working in research and evaluation positions at education non-profits. - Dana Wanzer, Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin - Stout. Professor Wanzer teaches program evaluation to students in the Applied Psychology master's program at the university. (Some of these students are actually concentrating in Evaluation Research, which is exciting.) In addition to teaching and research, Professor Wanzer also has a thriving consulting practice. It was fun to peer back into academia, even for a short while. Our guests reinforced that there is not a single route to becoming an evaluator and that evaluators come from all disciplines and may approach evaluation in a unique way. What's more, students in evaluation classes may all go on to work in very different fields, so one of the challenges is to give students a flexible but comprehensive skill set that can be applied across different settings. Our guests felt that building interpersonal skills, as well as giving students a sense of what evaluation, how it can be used, and why it's valuable, are crucial. Thanks again for joining us. Our next episode is the Season 2 finale and we'll be talking to our friend Pau Aragay Marin, the Director of Impact & Organizational Improvement at Educo, a global NGO that acts in favor of children and the defense of their rights, whether it is in the form of education, health, or humanitarian efforts. We’ll talk to Pau about the challenge of doing evaluation across geographic boundaries, using local resources to do data collection as a collateral duty to delivering programming, and the practical challenges of using evaluation data to make improvements to programming when the organization has an international footprint. Please join us in January for this final episode!

We talk this month with Andrew Taylor and Ben Liadsky of Taylor Newberry Consulting, a program evaluation firm just outside of Toronto, Canada. Andrew and Ben chat with us about building a learning culture -- what it means and how foundations can help support their grantees in this effort. This discussion reminded us a lot of our conversation with Sammy and Scott from Arbor Brothers in the sense that it reminded us of all the ways in which funders can lead the way for promoting healthy evaluation and learning practices with their grantees. We'll share this episode with some of our funder friends and so should you!

This month we had the opportunity to chat with Dr. Kerry Anne McGeary at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Kerry Anne is an economist who transitioned from a more traditional academic research role into the role of program officer at the Foundation. She is great to chat with -- she is smart but sensible; she is a skilled and experienced researcher but knows how to get things done in the real world; and she cares about her work and its impact! We pick Kerry Anne's brain about how to measure and track impact when changes to health culture and behaviors take so long to unfold; how she uses her training as a researcher to inform her work for the Foundation; and the role that culture can play in shaping health behaviors. We enjoyed learning from Kerry Anne and, as usual, think you will, too!

This week, Jen and Rebecca chat about the role that empathy can play in program evaluation. This chat was inspired by a workshop the Glass Frog team held internally a few months ago to discuss what empathy is, its importance for our work, and how we can become more empathetic as evaluators, consultants, and colleagues. We enjoyed that workshop and felt like it helped our team talk through some of the ways in which we are not always as empathetic as we could be. Having this conversation improved our work, so we thought y'all might find it useful as well! As always, we appreciate you listening and would love to hear your thoughts! Feel free to ping us on the Contact Us page with your questions and thoughts!

Welcome back! This month we had the pleasure of talking with Kyrah Brown and Susan Wolfe about evaluating community collaboratives. We define what collaboratives are, Susan and Kyrah's approach to evaluating them, and some of the fun and challenging aspects of working with collaboratives. Kyrah and Susan are both trained as community psychologists, so they approach all of their work from that perspective. We learned a lot and we think you will, too, so give it a listen! If you are interested in learning more about Susan and Kyrah's work or about community psychology in general, here are some useful links: Susan's consulting business: Susan Wolfe and Associates Kyrah's research group: Maternal and Child Health Equity Research and Evaluation Team Society for Community Research and Action The Community Tool Box American Evaluation Association Topical Interest Group in Community Psychology

We are thrilled to be back for our second season of the Glass Frog podcast! If you're new to the podcast, we started it as a way of both connecting with people who were doing interesting work and learning about new topics related to measurement and evaluation. Season 1 was a lot of fun and we're looking forward to doing it all over again in season 2! In the coming weeks, we'll talk about evaluating community collaboratives, health evaluation, the role of empathy in evaluation, and many more topics. The first episode of season 2 will drop Monday, August 5th. We chat with Kyrah Brown and Susan Wolfe about evaluating community collaboratives. We learned a lot from them and think you will, too! So please tune in! We'll continue to post episodes the first Monday of every month. They’ll be released through our website and on iTunes and Google Play, so please subscribe if you want to stay up to date each month.

Last month, we talked with Justin Rivers of The Character Connection Initiative and he shared with us a story about a survey his organization undertook in order to measure growth on student outcomes. You can listen to that episode to hear some of the things that went well and not-so-well, but one of our takeaways from that episode is how hard it is to do surveys well! In our work, we're constantly butting up against problems with how to design good questions, how to tailor surveys to the needs and backgrounds of the participants, and how to implement surveys in dynamic and non-controlled environments. (And, also, how to get people to take our darn surveys!) Who better to chat with than Sheila Robinson about all of our questions? Sheila and her colleague, Kim Firth Leonard, recently wrote a book called Designing Quality Survey Questions that, you guessed it, provides sound advice on how to design quality survey questions. We got to chat with Sheila about a few of our most pressing questions, including how balance the tension between creating really well-designed surveys and working within the time and budgetary constraints that many nonprofits have. We also chatted about response shift bias, using pre-validated versus original surveys, surveying hard-to-reach groups, and Rebecca's inability to say the word vignette (that pesky G!). Honestly, we really just scratched the surface. Sheila is a real wealth of knowledge and we're grateful to have had a chance to talk with her. This is our final episode of Season 1! The season finale everyone's been talking about! Rest assured, there are no cliff hangers, only gratitude for everyone who listened to the podcast this season. If you have ideas for future episodes, please feel free to reach out to us via the Contact Us page of our website. We would love to hear your suggestions. In the meantime, have a wonderful holiday season, if this is when you celebrate your holidays. Check back with us in the spring when we kick off season 2! Until then!

Did you know that almost two-thirds of reporting public charities in the U.S. have an annual budget that is less than $500,000? (We learned that from Social Startup Success.) There are a lot of small organizations out there and it's tough to do evaluation when you're a one or two (wo)man show. In this episode, we chat with Justin Rivers, founder of The Character Connection Initiative (TCCI), a character education program serving the NYC region. Justin is a former middle school teacher and spent time as the lead educator for a character education nonprofit before starting his own organization. We chat about that transition in this episode, as well as how his experiences using and teaching character education in the classroom helped him see its value. We also chat with Justin about TCCI's approach to program evaluation, and the challenges he's faced along the way. Justin was an absolute pleasure to talk to. We would be remiss if we didn't also mention that he's kind of a Renaissance Man. In addition to being an entrepreneur and educator, he's also a playwright, tour guide, and graphic novelist. (What have you done today?) You can check out some of his cool side gigs here, here, and here. In the intro, we offer two quick footnotes for this episode. First, since we recorded the episode, TCCI hired an executive director. Her name is Sarah Beth Lardie. You’ll hear us talk about how Justin is both the founder and interim E.D. That's no longer the case, which is a big milestone for TCCI! The second footnote is that this conversation with Justin was actually the first podcast episode we’d ever recorded! So if the recording sounds cruddy and we sound awkward, that is why. It may not be the high quality production you've come to expect out of the Glass Frog Podcast ;) This is our penultimate episode for season 1. We'll be back next month with our final episode when we pepper Sheila Robinson with all of our questions about survey design. We hope you'll tune in. If you have a minute, subscribe to the podcast via iTunes, Google Podcasts, or TuneIn. If you need to find us in any of the directories, you can search for "Glass Frog" (two words). Until next time!