I believe the evaluation world is underserved, let’s change that.
I started this blog a little over 15 years ago as a hobby and creative outlet sharing my work with just a handful of people. A year and a half later, I started including cartoons in my posts and growing a following on Twitter.
Flash forward to today, I’ve now published 718 blog posts and shared thousands of single-panel comics. My cartoons can be found in presentations, resource websites, course materials, and textbooks world wide.
I reach just about 3,000 evaluators through my regular email newsletter. Through LinkedIn, in the past year, my posts have reached 40K with 228K impressions. Also in the past year, I have also served 155K+ users across 219 countries through FreshSpectrum.com alone. This includes 1,000+ users in each of 22 different countries.
But I think we’re barely scratching the surface of what’s possible.
There is a monitoring & evaluation professionals group on LinkedIn that has 88K+ members. Just based on that, I think we can fairly say that the global evaluation audience is over 100K.
But then you should also consider the evaluation “home cooks.” These are the nonprofit staff, program managers, researchers, government employees, and all the other folks who do some evaluation work but don’t tend to identify as evaluators. Just from experience, I would estimate that these home cooks outnumber self-identified evaluators by at least 20 to 1.
Putting it all together. 20 * 100K = 2 million.
The evolution of FreshSpectrum.com
This website has become a hub for the global evaluation community…accidentally. My new goal is to intentionally build and strengthen that community. This means leveraging the existing platform and amplifying what works.
Here is exactly what I would like to do.
Reach
- Develop evaluation “recipe” collections, step by step tutorials designed to make evaluation methods and theory more approachable for evaluation home cooks.
- Offer regular free live webinars (monthly) on a variety of evaluation topics, featuring guest evaluators from all around the world.
- Continuing to create comics and other easy to share resources.
Teach
- Deliver free premium live evaluation workshops through platforms that do not require registration and are auto translatable.
- Adapt the free live workshop recordings into self-paced courses available through the website without requiring registration.
- Offer monthly free live office hours sessions, including expert guests when possible, with staggered times to reach different global audiences.
Connect & Amplify
- Lead intentional asynchronous community discussions through multi-voice blog posts.
- Review and share resources and feature resource creators to help amplify good work.
- Community Q&A posts with individual evaluators from across the global community.
What is a conference really?
Networking, education, belonging. There is no reason that these things have to happen in a hotel over the course of a few days. My theory, supported by substantial evidence, is that we can reach, teach, and connect more people to evaluation through content creation via WordPress and YouTube. And not just for a few days, but year round.
Why now?
In terms of interest, evaluation is at a 20 year high point. In terms of developing effective resources, we are creating less original content than we did 10 years ago. At the same time, recent U.S. federal funding cuts have eliminated several major evaluation training resources just when they’re needed most.
Partnership and Sponsor Opportunities:
Creating content (live workshops, courses, recipes) and building community takes a lot of time and energy. So in order to make this happen, while keeping everything free and low barrier, I need funding. My personal goal is to move away from consulting and spend full time developing this forever conference.
I’m seeking sponsors who believe in democratizing evaluation information. Partnership levels ($10K-$50K annually) are similar in structure and cost to conference sponsorships but with year-round engagement and better reach than you could get by paying online marketing firms.
As a strategic partner I can also offer additional benefits you will not get through traditional conference sponsorships. This includes strategic support, co-branded content creation, website and resource evaluation, private training, comic illustration, and the ability to help inform the direction of FreshSpectrum.com.
How You Can Help:
Know someone who might sponsor this? – I need partners who believe evaluation knowledge should be accessible to everyone, not just the few who consider themselves professional evaluators and can afford conferences. If you are someone who could sponsor, or know someone, reach out via email and/or schedule a time to chat > https://freshspectrum.com/contact.
Pledge your support – Want to pledge support as a community member? Fill out our form and help me prove the value to potential sponsors. Click here to join the community waitlist.