Our blog

by Angela Lao Back in the spring and summer, Inciter conducted focus groups in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. to gather feedback on marketing tools that were being developed by a client for ours for their public health campaign, which was focused on eating behaviors. As an intern at Inciter, I was tasked with helping to recruit participants for this project, and I was eager to find any method that would attract as many participants as possible.

Please be sure to go to the website on the bottom of the receipt to fill out our survey! If youve ever gone grocery shopping, eaten fast food, or shopped at a major retailer, youve heard these words spoken by a cashier at some point. In the age of big data, seemingly no venue is immune from solicitations to take a survey of some sort, be it online or in-person.

Over the past several years I’ve had the privilege of splitting my time between Inciter (until recently, CRC) – approximately half time each as an evaluator and as program staff at an arts and human services nonprofit, Make Studio. Throughout this time, I’ve found that wearing two hats and having two sets of experiences to draw from has helped me to work smarter and better (only sometimes harder), for the benefit of my evaluation clients and program recipients.

Those are two words you may not hear together a lot. And they are two words that are the underpinning of everything we do at Inciter. What do we do? We help clients thrive by measuring your impact, which helps you better communicate your value that in turn, bolsters your fundraising. Measure Impact. Maybe you have to conduct an evaluation as part of a grant that you received. Or, perhaps your Board has been asking about results, or your staff is starting to wonder how effective a program is.

Have you ever known just what to do to make a project work, but you couldnt find the right tools to make it happen? We’ve been there frustrated by data management software options because we didn’t love what we saw, so we built our own custom software - named Incite - to gather, manage, and report on data. Enter our company, Inciter. Inciters mission is to make it easy for nonprofit organizations, foundations, and government agencies to harness data and use it to communicate findings to funders, stakeholders and staff.

We have exciting news to share with you - weve changed our name! We are now doing business as Inciter. We are undertaking the same quality work, with the same great staff, and a fun new product Incite - which means expanded opportunities for all.< Established in 2003 as Carson Research Consulting, Inciter is still a small, woman-owned firm located in Baltimore, MD. When you work with Inciter, you continue to get a team of experienced researchers, evaluators, and custom software designers.

by Jill & Mandi Information graphics and visualization expert Alberto Cairo caused a bit of a stir last fall when he bluntly tweeted his opinion that data journalism and visualization should stop using the term storytelling. “Storytelling” is a term that ought to be abandoned in journalism, #dataviz, data, etc. It has no meaning and leads to the wrong mindset https://t.co/5cEv184UsD Alberto Cairo (@albertocairo) September 11, 2017 In the replies, he subsequently clarified that the word need not be abandoned if used properly, but should be considered problematic and approached with caution.

Here at CRC, we’re always fans of measuring the right thing, at the right time, for the right reasons. And that includes measuring advocacy efforts. You may think that measuring advocacy efforts and social change movements is impossible. It’s definitely true that it can be challenging to do because evaluating advocacy is very different from evaluating direct service work. The theory of change is going to be more complex, and it’s harder to identify the direct links from your advocacy activities to people’s responses.

A Message From Team CRC All of us at CRC wish to send out a hearty **THANK YOU **and HAPPY NEW YEAR to our many clients, partners, collaborators, and friends. We thank you for helping our firm to have another successful year in 2017, in which we were honored to help organizations and agencies – large and small, local and national – to demonstrate and tell their stories of the important work they do.