When data professionals need creative support, they call me.
Trying to do something creative?
For example:
- Build or facilitate a virtual community of practice or learning community.
- Create a web-based report, data dashboard, or interactive infographic.
- Grow an audience or run an organic social media campaign.
- Illustrate your work with clever cartoons.
- Evaluate a virtual project.
Time to Call Chris.
Working with me always starts with a FREE consultation.
Why hire Chris Lysy?
I bring a unique mix of expertise you will not find with any other individual consultant.
- Masters Degree in Sociology.
- 20+ Years in Research & Evaluation.
- Professional experience in the following:
- Data Analysis & Data Management.
- Data Visualization & Data Storytelling.
- Graphic Design & UX Design.
- Content Strategy & Web Development.
- Cartoon Illustration & Content Design.
- Marketing & Business Development.
- Learning & Organizational Development.
I am an independent consultant, it’s just me. So I only work with a handful of clients at any given time. When my client roster is full, I keep a waitlist. Currently I only have space for one additional client.
3 Sample Projects
Here are just a few of my current, and past, projects.
1. Since 2020 I have facilitated an evaluation Community of Practice for the CDC’s Overdose Data to Action Program.
Creative Challenge: Develop a virtual community of practice for a national program in order to build evaluation capacity for hundreds of program evaluators across 49 states, 40 localities, and the District of Columbia.
Creative Strategy: The evaluators are all practitioners who share a domain of interest, but very few know each other or have ever met in person. My CoP strategy puts an emphasis on virtual community building and peer to peer education in order to facilitate ongoing social learning.
Key Lessons Learned:
- Creating a volunteer advisory group made up of CoP members helps us to stay in tune with community needs and plan upcoming sessions. It also creates a core group of CoP advocates.
- Recruiting session speakers organically, from inside the community, increases familiarity and connection between community members.
- Focusing on regularly scheduled live video calls with a panel format, allows for multiple presentations and increased participation.
2. I partner with data agencies to develop web-based reports.
Creative Challenge: Create interactive online evaluation reports, data dashboards, and interactive infographics.
Creative Strategy: By designing reports using WordPress, instead of traditional PDFs, they become easier-to-update, mobile-responsive, auto-translatable, Google-search friendly, interactive, and multi-media friendly.
Key Lessons Learned:
- In a lot of organizations the web development, graphic design, social media communications, and data teams operate independently from one another. Getting everyone involved in the process early can reduce headaches.
- Hosting reports on a separate server offers fewer complications, but building directly on an existing organization platform is often preferred by clients.
- Most report writers, or dashboard creators, are not familiar with mobile-responsive and multi-media design, along with the challenges and opportunities this approach presents.
3. I help technical and academic experts illustrate their work using comics.
Creative Challenge: Translate complicated technical and academic work into accessible, digital-media and presentation friendly, comics.
Creative Strategy: I work directly with subject matter experts to illustrate the key components of their work. The cartoons can then take on a life of their own, increasing reach and supporting ongoing sharing efforts.
Key Lessons Learned:
- Cartoons work best when they highlight questions, problems, and challenges. It makes the work more conversational and sets the expert up to deliver their solution through words.
- Academic publishers provide only a very small budget for illustration. But the illustration process has a huge positive impact on the actual book writing process and subsequent marketing efforts.
- In an era of mass produced AI and stock images, simple comics stand out. As a key component of a comprehensive content strategy they can greatly increase exposure and reach as well as boost audience building efforts.
Testimonials
“Having worked with Chris on multiple projects, I’m especially impressed with how he can create a visual “feel” that really matches the client’s and project’s needs and style. Whether the work highlights a lot of quantitative data through clear, attractive charts and such, or focuses more on qualitative data and visuals to tell a story, Chris creates inviting, engaging, interactive reports that our clients are uniformly thrilled with.”
Summer Wood
Co-Director, Ampersand LLC“We worked with Chris to turn a static report into an interactive website that was branded for the client, visually compelling, and centered user-experience. Rather than scroll through a lengthy report, users can easily navigate to what’s most important to them. I highly recommend working with Chris to transform data products into something useful and engaging.”
Nina Sabarre
Founder + CEO of Intention 2 Impact“The quality, relevance, and accessibility of his final products speak for themselves. But the process of working with Chris is what I find most exemplar. Chris asks the right questions, brings rich expertise, is one helluva problem-solver, doesn’t shy away from the messiness of creative innovation, and is fun to work alongside! The rewarding process of co-creating with Chris is why our firm already engaged him on another body of work for a new client.”
Kathleen Doll
Partner + COO of Intention 2 Impact“We reached out to Chris because we are a small team trying to develop actionable and interesting infographics and videos that help our affiliated network understand our organization’s impact narrative, both nationally and locally. Chris created engaging materials that helped lay out the impact that our programs have on our communities, and created templates that we can continue to update moving forward.
Further, he helped us understand how to create video documentation, and helped us kick our Canva skills up a few notches with his ongoing educational series. We feel much better equipped to create engaging data products after having worked with Chris and have received overwhelmingly positive feedback on what we have released so far.”
Kathleen Chaballa
Senior Analyst at Habitat for Humanity International“Chris provided senior visual design leadership on a project I lead. We had a data visualization challenge and wanted to take the design of a series of regular executive briefs to a new level. Chris was able to communicate with and learn from our project teams and client and develop a series of unique visualizations through Tableau. He just has a natural talent for taking technical data and making it compelling for an audience that is not always data savvy. I really enjoy working with Chris as he develops a visual design, he is a great collaborator and team player.“
Amy Mulcahy-Dunn
Chief of Party, USAID Data Evidence for Education Programming (DEEP)“We really enjoyed working with Chris. Not only was it fun, but it challenged us to think about what we really wanted to communicate about realist methods. The idea of illustrating ideas or issues people found confusing or difficult really resonated with us, as that had been one of the main reasons for embarking on the whole project in the first place. It felt like a genuine collaboration and I’m really pleased with what we have produced.“
Joanne Greenhalgh
Professor of Applied Social Research Methodology, University of Leeds“I shared a few articles and summaries about collaborative, participatory, and empowerment evaluation with Chris and he produced a simple cartoon that captured the essence of each approach quickly and effectively.”
David Fetterman
President & CEO, Fetterman & Associates“Chris has a knack for capturing and communicating the essence of an idea with insight and humor. That makes his cartoons evocative, provocative, high impact and memorable, which is why I use them. A lot.”
Michael Quinn Patton
Founder and Director, Utilization-Focused EvaluationThere is absolutely nothing to lose.
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