Without a clear understanding of evaluation results, organizations are unable to use findings to learn and strengthen their work. That means that the reports and presentations we develop are a tremendously important aspect of our work at the Improve Group. Reporting is often the culmination of months, and sometimes years, of inquiry and hard work. The Improve Group has been further strengthening our practices over the last several months. Because writing reports and delivering presentations is so common in our work, it is easy to fall into old (dare we say, boring) habits. Through some excellent professional development sessions, we’ve gained new ideas for presenting evaluation results in a more effective and powerful way.
The end result produces reports and presentations that are customized to the target audience, easy to read, and visually appealing. Today, we’re sharing some tips that we’ve learned along the way.
Tips for written reports and their PowerPoint counterparts
It’s never too early to start planning for your report! We meet with clients to plan for reporting before we type a single word, sometimes even before we’ve collected any data. This helps us make sure that we have the style and content matched to the main questions we are trying to answer and to the audiences that will use the information. We’ve found that time spent planning upfront saves us much more time in the revision process.
An early outline, using the evaluation questions as a guide, helps you plan how the report or presentation will unfold. This ensures you tell a clear story that links all of the findings together into cohesive themes.
Consider your audience in the design of a piece. There is no “one-size-fits-all” report template. A report designed for a legislative or executive audience will need to convey the key messages quickly and concisely. A report for program staff learning how to improve their programs should be much more in depth. Oftentimes, the findings result in multiple pieces for different audiences: an Executive Summary or brief stand-alone piece for busy audiences, with in-depth reports for leaders, staff and volunteers who are deeply invested in the work.
Help your audience to navigate your report. We make it easy for our readers to understand the main point at a quick glance by using conclusion statements as headers. Conclusion statements are a simple statement of the findings that are followed by more in-depth information in the subsequent paragraphs. Our audience doesn’t have to read through the whole text to understand meaning as we provide it from the start.
During a presentation, the same principle holds true, but with the absence of in-depth text the presentation headers should be more descriptive, or better yet, eliminate the header and stick to one descriptive statement per slide. The key is to tell a compelling story through the evaluation results, ensuring the audience understands the impact on their programming strategy and what they might do with this information.
Use visual breaks to give readers a chance to reflect and take information in. Tables, graphics or text box can draw your audience’s attention to important findings. Keep tables on one page when possible, as it is harder for your audience to read data that breaks across pages. Strategic use of photos can help convey meaning, make your point more memorable, and tie your report or presentation together. They can often help emphasize a specific idea. If you don’t want to buy stock photos, take your own or try the free images available at the Flickr Creative Commons site. For presentations, be even more strategic with words; current research suggests one idea per slide is the best practice, conveyed with as few words as possible.
For more on reporting and presentations, you can check out a few of our favorite experts in the field: Stephanie Evergreen and Kelci Price. Please feel free to comment on this article and share other ideas and lessons learned in creating your own powerful reporting documents.
