We'll Be There for You!

Earlier this year, TCEC rolled into a new contract, which runs through 2030! It is our privilege to continue serving CTPP-funded projects and providing consistent support for all your evaluation needs. If this is “BRAND NEW INFORMATION,” then allow us to detail the ways your Friends at TCEC will continue to be there for you! 

Our team of evaluation specialists is sprinkled throughout the state to provide support to all CTPP-funded projects. While our “Central Perk” office is at the University of California, Davis, we provide support remotely and can also travel to your local communities to provide technical assistance and trainings to support your evaluation work. We may go “on a break” from time to time, but our website of resources is always available. Here, you can check out our upcoming events, newsletter articles, recorded webinars, and so much more. In fact, we already delivered all of our minimum required webinars in the first few months of the year!  We also offer a few online sessions where we don’t record, so that participants can feel more comfortable sharing freely without being nervous or self-conscious. For example, we launched a new offering called Data Viz Dialogues where people can bring their data visualization drafts to get feedback from peers and Idea Lab associates. These are special sessions offered specifically for CTPP-funded projects, because “Rules help control the fun.” 

“Could we BE delivering any more live webinars?!” Actually, yes we do! We also offer live Q/A sessions every first Thursday of the month. Between March - June, we focus on the End Commercial Tobacco Campaign (ECTC) observations. Once that wraps up, we’ll open up our live Q/A sessions to other important topics such as data analysis, reporting, or anything else your teams want to discuss. For the ECTC observations, each LLA is assigned a TCEC support person that will help run data checks, make corrections, and provide overall support. We can also help with your local data collection trainings in-person or virtually, loan you mobile devices to collect data, and even be extra data collectors if you’d like.   

Whether you’re creating a data collection instrument from scratch or adapting one that another project has already used, we can help review your data collection instruments and get them to a state of “unagi.”  We can also help translate your surveys and interview guides then provide recommendations for pilot testing with your intended audience. Be sure to check out our recently released website of data visualization templates and samples to turn your “Smelly cat” visualizations into actionable results in a fraction of the time! 

There may be times you may find yourself in a situation where “They don't know that we know they know we know.” TCEC can serve on advisory councils or workgroups to help your team think through anything concerning collecting data, sharing results, and using evaluation for decision-making. 

TEA, the Tobacco Evaluator Alliance, continues to grow and function more efficiently. Its steering committee, GrEEN TEA, just recruited new members with fresh ideas and a renewed commitment to strengthening TEA’s mission to provide support to our community of evaluators. I don’t think any member of TEA would be upset if you “Ate MY sandwich!!!”   

There have been many changes in recent years, and even more are likely to come. For example, we’ve had to “Pivot!” to providing feedback and support for writing Final or Brief Evaluation Reports (FER/BER) before submission rather than simply assigning a score after the fact. We can now review your whole report or just sections of your report, so you can gauge “How you doin'?” and receive tips on how to improve your reports before you submit them. This is a service we just launched last year. If you’d like to have your FER/BER reviewed, you can email a draft to your favorite evaluation Friend or through our TA email: [email protected]  

We regularly release written and video recordings of templates, and we are also working on providing recommendations to make evaluation reporting more streamlined and useful in real time.

If there are other ways that we can support your evaluation work, please let us know! Your Friends at TCEC will be there for you, “cause we know you’re there for us too.”