Data Collection

May is cherry-picking season, and my family loves visiting the cherry farms in Brentwood, California, where we get our fill of “tasting” plump, fresh cherries as we gather bags and bags to take home to eat fresh or make into other goodies like smoothies and cobbler. Interestingly, there’s a really narrow window of time when cherries can be harvested!

Harvest Your Data (HYD) is a platform for data collection and management, similar to SurveyAnalytics. You can find the HYD website here: https://www.harvestyourdata.com/ 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not a new concept; if you’ve ever used a program that checks your spelling and grammar, you’ve used a form of AI! However, the release of products like ChatGPT has kicked off a boom in AI technology, and it is growing more sophisticated every day. 

So how does this AI boom affect our work in tobacco control evaluation? I took a deep dive into the topic to find out!

It is an exciting time in the public health world!  State and local policymakers are taking action to reduce the availability of the tobacco industry’s deadly products in the retail environment.

When you need to collect data, how do you know what’s important to ask? Do you brainstorm a list of questions? Or do you dust off an instrument your project has used in the past? If you wonder about that, the Tobacco Control Evaluation Center (TCEC) has an array of tools that can help!

Collaboration unites people, ideas, and surveys. Yes. You read that right. Surveys. Mono County’s Tobacco Education Program (TEP) has been working with their Local Oral Health Program to deliver a tobacco cessation survey to dental providers. Their collaboration is just one example of the many that already exist and are forming. I’ve had the privilege of interviewing Lauren Kemmeter, Project Director of Mono County’s TEP.

To get to know more about their collaboration, I wanted to understand who they are first.

If you haven’t taken the time to explore the Tobacco Control Evaluation Center’s website, you might be missing out on evaluation lifesaving information! In this series, we highlight some of the online resources TCEC provides to our partners in tobacco control.

As the observations for the End Commercial Tobacco Campaign wrap up, TCEC staff had the chance to assist Local Lead Agencies with their data collections. As always, TCEC is happy to help, and when we do we like to write up our experience. This time around, Jorge Andrews and Danielle Lippert went out in the summer heat and put their evaluator skills to the test. Here are their stories:

How to use evaluation to win campaigns. 

That’s how Paul Knepprath of the American Heart Association’s Tobacco Endgame Center for Organizing and Engagement characterized the presentation that TCEC gave on the Tobacco Endgame Center’s March Affinity call.

UPDATE: As of January 2026, TCEC no longer provides free access to SurveyAnalytics, though agencies may still choose to use this platform without TCEC support. Local Lead Agencies now have free access to Harvest Your Data and its accompanying apps for mobile data collection. See https://tobaccoeval.ucdavis.edu/mobile-data-collection for more details.