Online courses in evaluation

Claremont Graduate University (USA) is offering three online courses in evaluation in the next months at very reasonable prices:

* March 28-29: Hard-Core Qualitative Research Methods, Part A (Michael Scriven)
* April 4-5: Hard-Core Qualitative Research Methods, Part B (Michael Scriven)
* May 19-20: Introduction to Practical Program Evaluation: A Theory-Driven Approach (Stewart I. Donaldson)

Each course includes two 3-hour training sessions in an online virtual classroom  environment, available to anyone with aninternet connection anywhere in the world.

These courses are offered at USD $90 each.

Full descriptions are available on their website>>

(the authors of this blog have no commercial relationship with the courses – they just seem interesting and at a good price!)

First European Summit on Communication Measurement 10 – 12 June 2009

The first European Summit on Communication Measurement is planned for 10 – 12 June 2009 in Berlin, Germany and the program looks very interesting so far. The summit starts with a full day of workshops and the speakers over the next two days include:

* Bjorn Edlund, VP Communications, Shell International
* Pablo Fernández Calvo, Director of Communication, BBVA
* David Michaelson, President USA, Echo Research
* Neil Martinson, Director of News & PR, UK’s Central Office of Information
* Frank Oviatt, President & CEO of the Institute for Public Relations
* Katie Paine,CEO, KD Paine & Associates
* David Rockland,Partner,Managing Director,Ketchum
* Dr Christopher Storck, Principal, HeringSchuppener
* Dr Tom Watson, Bournemouth University
* Dr Donald K Wright, Boston University
* Professor Dr Ansgar Zerfass, EUPRERA/University of Leipzig

Some of the topics to be covered include:

* Social Media – The Big New Opportunity for Communications
* Traditional Media is Adapting with Confidence to Embrace the Challenge of Social Media
* How Clients see Media Change and Experiments with Communications Models
* International Measurement – an Insight into the Latin American Regional Analysis for BBVA
* In Defence of AVE’s
* What Media Evaluation will look like in the future: the next generation
* Public Relations in Europe – Status Quo and Future Challenges
* The Comparative Communications Effectiveness of Advertising and PR
* Social Media Measurement Case Studies
* The Role of Research in Communications
* Predicting the Future for Communications-What International Research Tells Us
The conference is organised by the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communications , the Institute for Public Relations (US) and the German Public Relations Public Relations Association (DPRG).

More information and registration>>

Six outcome categories for advocacy campaigns

As I mentioned in an earlier post, an interesting guide on measuring advocacy and policy (pdf) has been published by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. What I found interesting in this guide was that the authors have determined six outcome categories for advocacy campaigns. Studying campaigns, they identified what advocacy campaigns aim to achieve (“outcomes”) and broke it down into six categories:

1) Shift in social norms: e.g. knowledge, values, behaviour of society
2) Strengthened organisational capacity: e.g. skill set and structure of coalitions that carry out advocacy work.
3) Strengthened alliances: e.g. structural changes in community and insitutional relationships and alliances.
4) Strengthened base of support:  e.g. grassroots, leadership and institutional support for policy changes.
5) Improved policies: e.g. policy development, demonstration of support, adoption, funding and implementation.
6) Changes in impact: e.g. ultimate change in social and physical lives and conditions.

Read more about these outcomes (go to page 17) in the guide (pdf).

Measuring social media – Twitter

For those interested in measuring social media, here is an interesting tool to monitor Twitter and its users – the Twitter influence calculator. You can discover the most influential users and compare yourself to others. Plus, they present the information in graphs and tag clouds as seen above.

Glenn