Evaluation Guides

Evaluation Storyfinding

September 16, 2025 Chris Lysy

Summary: Evaluation maps really well to storytelling. Would it be easier if we just called ourselves story finders?

I remember years ago sharing one of my evaluation cartoons with my mom. Her reaction was annoyance. Not with me, but with evaluation.

She was a family literacy teacher for most of her career and the funded programs she worked under were constantly changing. Her favorite program, the one she felt did the most good, didn’t have a good evaluation plan. Eventually the program was scrapped for a different program with a more robust evaluation that showed some positive results. A program my mom felt was inferior.

Point of view is important in evaluation, just like it is in storytelling.

I teach a live workshop every now and again on data storytelling. But storytelling might even be a better metaphor for evaluation than it is for data communications. Or to be more precise, storyfinding.

*Comics like this one get interpreted in very different ways depending on the reader’s perspective*.

The parts of a story.

A story is made up of the following pieces:

Character – Who is involved?
Setting – When and where does this take place?
Plot – What happens? The sequence of events and actions.
Conflict – What’s the problem or challenge that needs to be resolved?
Resolution – How does the conflict get resolved (or not)?
Theme – What’s the deeper meaning or message? What does this story say about life, human nature, etc.?
Point of View – Who’s telling the story? What’s their perspective?

Story elements paired with evaluation concepts.

Now let’s take the same story elements and pair them with evaluation concepts.

Characters – Who is involved with the program? Directly and indirectly.
Setting – What is the context, the community, or timeframe?
Plot – What are the program activities and what actually happened (outputs)?
Conflict – What is the problem or challenge this program is trying to solve?
Resolution – What are the outcomes? Did this program help deliver results?
Theme – What are the bigger lessons we can learn from this program?
Point of View – Who’s perspective are we seeing? What if we changed point of view?

What if we scrapped the evaluation lingo?

We spend too much of our time defining terms and not enough time connecting on concepts.

Does it really matter if your clients know the difference between outputs and outcomes if they already understand plot and resolution?

Do they need a logic model or would a story board work just as well?

And is it just me, or does this sound like more fun to you too?

Virtual Community of Practice: Quick Launch Guide

September 2, 2025 Chris Lysy

Summary: This guide will walk you through five steps for launching a simple but effective virtual community of practice.

Running a successful Community of Practice can take a significant amount of time and effort. That is if you want actual connections to form between community members. But contrary to popular belief, the biggest challenge is not technical. It’s also not about creating the learning content. The significant time and effort required is in the longer term community building.

Bottom line, you can launch a CoP quickly. In this guide I’ll walk you through a set of five basic steps to get you started.

Step 1. Frame your community.

It won’t be an actual community until your people get to know each other. If they already do, great. If not, that will be your job.

Who are your people? What practice do they have in common? Be really specific about who is meant to be in your community, and who is not.

I run an evaluation community of practice for the CDC’s Overdose Data to Action (OD2A) program. The people in the community are the people charged with evaluating the OD2A program. You don’t have to call yourself an evaluator to be in the CoP. This is a known group. While people do come and go a bit, we already have most of their names and emails already. This makes our community framing easier.

If you have to build your community first, start with a Google form. Ultimately you’ll need a list of names and emails (everything else is just icing on the cake).

Step 2. Start with the most basic CoP platform.

I’ve tried just about all the well known community platform things over the last 20 years (Slack, Buddypress, Circle, Discourse, Discord, Ning, Sharepoint, etc.). You know what the best platform is?

An email newsletter and a Zoom account.

That’s it. It’s cheap and effective. If you want to replace the Zoom account with a Teams account or something else, that’s fine. If you have a small group and just want to send regular emails, that’s fine too.

There are exceptions, but most professionals don’t need another website they have to visit. It’s far easier to get them to block an hour off their calendar each month than try to get them in the habit of visiting some kind of web platform they may or may not feel comfortable using.

Step 3. Meet regularly.

I suggest monthly. You can try staggering times if you need to but it’s easier to just have a specific day and time each month (ex. third Wednesday at 2PM eastern).

Things can get complicated quickly, so at the very least, try not to start complicated.

Step 4. Recruit speakers from within your community.

The power of a community is in its members. One of the mistakes people make is in spending a lot of time building a series of interesting lectures with outside experts that they think will be of interest to the community. But that’s not community building, it’s audience serving.

Having your community members deliver the session content is a win win. Not only do you get highly practical instruction (which is what a CoP is designed to offer), you also get an opportunity to showcase individual members.

I like to approach my sessions in blocks. If I have 60 minutes, that’s three 20 minute blocks. This means we can have an intro (first 20) and two talks (15 minutes of talk, 5 minutes of Q&A). Or we can have an intro (first 20), talk (second 20), and some time for breakout groups (third 20).

Step 5. Encourage connection.

When we meet in person there are all sorts of opportunities for people to connect. People might connect by just sitting next to each other at a table or waiting together in the hall. It can help to have someone connect people, but it’s not always essential. Especially if you have a chatty group or a few extroverts.

Now, if you meet virtually, that’s a different story. It’s really easy as a virtual attendee to take on a passive role. Perhaps you just watch the webinar while eating your lunch with your camera off.

It takes a lot more effort to forge connections between community members in a virtual setting. So you have to be intentional. Occasional breakout groups can help a little, but ultimately, the facilitator should play a kind of matchmaker role.

Last Thoughts.

I said at the beginning of this guide that building an effective virtual community of practice takes a lot of time and effort. It also takes a bit of emotional effort.

One of the hardest things about facilitating an online community is that most people instinctively lurk before they participate. It can be unnerving to lead a presentation without being able to see the faces of your audience.

But if you source your expertise from the community, you’ll start to get to know the people involved. I almost always have a 1-on-1 Zoom with potential speakers sometime before the event. Once you get to know the people in the community it becomes easier and easier to find future speakers and connect members with one another.

Want help launching or facilitating your Community of Practice? I help organizations build and run CoPs. You can learn more about my services by visiting my consulting page.

How to Create a Logic Model in Canva

August 21, 2025 Chris Lysy

Summary: You don’t need fancy tools to create basic logic models.

In this post I’m going to walk you through the visual creation of a logic model. If you want to learn more about developing the content for a logic model, I suggest starting with this post: What is a Logic Model?

Why Canva for Logic Models?

You can use all sorts of different tools to create logic models, from PowerPoint and Word to Adobe Illustrator and InDesign. But now-a-days I tend to use Canva for just about anything, logic models included. It’s especially nice if you want to add a little visual flair.

In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to create a basic logic model using Canva.

A Simple Results Chain Logic Model – Example from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation

Okay, so as a starting point I’m going to use this example logic model found in the Kellogg Foundation logic model guide.

Recreating the Logic Model using Canva

When it comes down to it, most basic logic models are really simple to design. It’s just a bunch of shapes, arrows, and lines.

There are a few ways to do this in Canva.

Most rectangles and other shapes in Canva let you click inside them to add text directly to the shape.
You can put in all your text using individual text boxes and then add the “background effect” to turn it into a box.
You can put in a bunch of hollow rectangles, then add in all of your text using individual text boxes.

I tend to use the hollow rectangles and individual text boxes because it gives me the most visual control.

It didn’t take too long to create something that looked really similar to the original. And because it’s now in Canva, I have a lot of download options. If I just want an image I’ll usually download as PNG. If I want something printable, then I’ll download as a PDF Standard.

Adapting your Canva Logic Model

The nice thing about Canva is that it’s pretty easy to duplicate and adapt your logic model, trying out different styles. I find the outline boxes to be a little visually jarring. So instead I replaced the outline boxes with some solid color light gray boxes.

The shapes exist separately from the text, so you just insert the rectangle and send it to the back to set behind the text blocks. If you spend a lot of time moving the boxes around it’s a good idea to group the individual text/shape pairs.

Color coding the logic model.

Once you have the base shape and text there are all sorts of alterations you can do to the design. I know there are a lot of evaluators who like to color code different elements. That’s certainly simple enough to do.

Occasionally you’ll want a softer color, especially for background elements. One way to do that is just make the boxes slightly transparent.

Photo annotating the logic model.

If you find yourself creating a lot of different logic models annotating with some photographs and background elements can really help you to differentiate. Especially if the photographs pair well with the actual project. I created this corny version with just some Canva stock photos.

Canva logic model with photo annotations

I use a Canva a lot, so I’ve made the investment in a pro account (~$10/month at the time of this post). Given the amount of stock content I use and the bonus features, this is well the worth the subscription cost. One of the features I like to use is the background remover. It’s a nice way to make certain stock images fit almost anywhere.

Coding Logic Model Elements

If your logic model is still being developed and fine tuned it can be a good idea to code the individual blocks. This makes it a lot easier to talk about individual elements.

For this I just shrunk the text and offset it to the right of the gray boxes. Then I darkened the side to create a space for codes.

Icon Illustrating your Logic Model

My favorite way to adapt a logic model is to simply icon illustrate the individual elements.

Just move from element to element looking for icons that somewhat illustrate each block of text. There are all sorts of icon styles available within Canva.

Do you want to start with these templates?

I made the Canva file a template file. Just make sure to log in to your Canva account before opening the following template (and if you don’t have a Canva account, create one, it’s free).

What tools do you use to create your logic models?

There is no one perfect tool for anything. Canva has some downsides just like every other tool. So what tool is your favorite?

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