The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Getting Great Data Week. All posts on AEA365 this week are contributed by evaluators who came together to write about the theme of getting data that is accurate, timely and, most of all, useful. Our own Taj Carson contributed this timely post: https://aea365.org/blog/getting-great-data-week-how-to-have-great-data-when-people-and-technology-both-do-their-part-by-taj-carson/ We hope you’ll check it out and let us know what you think!

**Looking to measure your impact, communicate about it, and bolster your fundraising? We at Inciter can help you through research, visualization, and our new custom software, Incite. ** Inciters mission is to make it easy for nonprofit organizations and government agencies to harness data and use it to communicate findings to funders, stakeholders and staff. Inciter helps clients change the world by using data to tell the story of their impact, raise funds, and advocate for social change.

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.

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.

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.

by Mandi Here at CRC, weve been focused on working smarter, not harder, by utilizing different skills and adding new tools to our tool belt. One of those tools is Python, and it has been a lifesaver for streamlining our data processes, saving us time and increasing productivity. What is Python? Python is a simple, yet powerful programming language that is relatively easy to learn. It can be used for a variety of things, including to create practical programs that automate tasks on your computer, as a support language for software developers, and in web and internet development.