What’s Better Than an Evaluation Report? An Evaluation Portal!

Ahh, the lengthy and traditional evaluation report. Funders require them, then struggle to read them. Organizations invest precious time and human resources to prepare them. The results are often dry tomes illustrated with graphs that capture specific results to specific questions posed a year ago when you applied for a grant. But as a one-shot-static-data-snapshot they can’t fully capture the successes and innovations of your programs over time, nor can you be sure that the data holds true even a month after you drop your pen. 

For the team preparing the report, it’s a headache to collect and wrangle a year’s worth of data and feel confident that it truly represents the hard work and passion they’ve put into their programs. For funders, the evaluation report is a tool for ensuring accountability that hopefully someone will find time to read and present to the board. A month later, no matter who you are, it’s just a virtual doorstop. 

Everyone, it seems, has a love-hate relationship with traditional evaluation reports. But what if preparing a report – or a slideshow, a thank you note to a donor, or a newsletter -  didn’t have to be so hard? What if data-wrangling could be timely, easy, accurate, and flexible? What if reports could be shorter AND better? And what if you had a portal that gave you quick and easy access to accurate data that you could slice and dice to answer all kinds of questions without keeping a data consultant on speed-dial? With access to your data at any time, you could use that data to make your case in favor of a grant, you could make data-driven decisions all year round, and you could share accurate data with your board, stakeholders, potential donors, and visitors. And if someone throws a data question at you? You could knock their socks off with a quick query. 

Inciter can take all your evaluation data, put it in our warehouse, and connect it to an interactive reporting tool with powerful analytics features and options. We can pull your data from wherever your team is storing it, be that excel, access, or SurveyMonkey – no migrations necessary. And we’ll help you develop data hygiene protocols to keep your data accurate and clean so it will be optimally useful. 

We know data: we’re experts in data warehousing architecture, and we understand the ins and outs of evaluations, reporting, and data visualization. We’ve been doing this for a long time and we’re excited – really excited – about the possibilities for nonprofits to have unprecedented access to their own data, to use, to share, and to track outcomes over time. We think you should be, too. We invite you to talk to us about how Inciter can help you take the pain and time out of data wrangling and make preparing data-based reports almost effortless. 

*Warning: after getting such easy access to your findings, you’ll have a new challenge. To misquote Mary Oliver, what will your organization do with your newly-created, wild and precious free time? You’ll still have to write up case reports and compose a letter from the director, and perhaps stage a photo op, but data wrangling? Nope, it’s no longer an all-consuming headache. Inciter’s got your back, so you can get back to doing what you love.