How to shift your organization away from Report Factory and towards a strong Insight Ecosystem. I. Moving Beyond Performative Dissemination I believe that most evaluation teams write reports with the best of intentions. They work late nights cleaning data, discovering insights, drafting narrative, and obsessing over clarity. Most people don’t get into research or evaluation […]
Two-Step Templates for Everyday Reports
Most people design their everyday reports, briefs, and knowledge products the wrong way. Not because they’re bad at design. Because they’re trying to write and design at the same time. It’s a multitasking problem. Writing is hard. Design is hard. Doing both simultaneously — in the same document, on the same deadline — means you’re […]
How to Disseminate (in 2026)
Welcome person who wants to share something with others. I created this guide because I disliked pretty much every resource I could find about dissemination. I think they teach you the wrong way to do things simply because it sounds right. But sounding right and being right are not the same thing. Everybody is welcome […]
Systemic Report Failure: The Content Gap
Systemic report failure is when structures, formats, and habits consistently prevent reports and other resources from reaching the right people in ways they can actually use. In evaluation and research we treat this systemic failure as if it’s a skills issue. It’s not. Better charts, interesting stories, and well-designed PDFs are not enough to make […]
KIDS COUNT 2025 – Before and After
This is one in a series of before and after designs. With each post I take a real publicly available resource or report and adapt the writing, format, structure, and illustrations in order to increase the accessibility. You can see other before and after posts in the series by following this link. How it Started – […]
Qualitative Storytelling Dashboard – Before and After
This is one in a series of before and after designs. With each post I take a real publicly available resource or report and adapt the writing, format, structure, and illustrations in order to increase the accessibility. You can see other before and after posts in the series by following this link. How it Started – […]
Guiding Principles for Evaluators – Before and After
This is one in a series of before and after designs. With each post I take a real publicly available resource or report and adapt the writing, format, structure, and illustrations in order to increase the accessibility. You can see other before and after posts in the series by following this link. How it Started […]
My qualitative dataviz book is now live! (and free)
Compelling Qualitative Data Visualization, my latest free-to-read book, is now live. Here is a little synopsis. What’s the book about? In the book I talk about my approach to illustrating mixed-method and qualitative reports. It’s a very practical book. Wasn’t this a workshop? Yes, I’ve actually delivered the workshop live a couple of times. Since […]
CDC Evaluation Framework – Before and After
This is the second in a series of before and after designs. With each post I’ll take a real publicly available resource or report and adapt the writing, format, structure, and illustrations in order to increase the accessibility. You can see the first post on adapting a UNICEF Strategic Plan by following this link. In […]
UNICEF Strategic Plan 2026–2029 – Before and After
I’ve decided to create a few concepts to show you exactly how I approach adapting pdf reports for the web. These will be unofficial concepts adapted from real reports and resources. My goal is to show you what’s possible. How it Started – UNICEF Strategic Plan 2026-2029 I originally set out to find a regular […]