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.

Making Evaluation Simple with Chari Smith

The Glass Frog PodcastBy Glass Frog SolutionsJul 21, 2021