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:

Facts are everywhere around us.  From the news to what we learn in school, facts are ubiquitous.  We are often inundated with facts, data, and information. But how do we know what fact is supported by good or bad evidence?

Even before I was born, my family has been huge followers of Bay Area sports.  Our Golden State Warriors are currently up 1-0 in the Western Conference Finals.  (Go Warriors!)  As a fan, it’s a lot of fun (and nerve-wracking) to watch our favorite teams do what they do.  As an evaluator, my brain can’t help but also see the fun in the numbers of the game, the different stats and data visualizations flashed on the screen or written in articles.   

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.

If you’re reading this in between your marathon of writing FERs and BERs: Keep it up!  You got this! 

If you’re reading this after you’ve come up for air from sending off all the reports: Congrats!  You deserve a breather from this whirlwind of a contract!

I still cannot believe we’re at the end of another year, yet here we are!  Thank you for all the amazing effort and progress you’ve all made despite this unusual year (and more!)  2022 is just weeks away, and with that comes another year and new opportunities to put your evaluation efforts to good use.  Here are a few ways to jump into 2022 with an evaluation focus.

It’s the end of an era at the Tobacco Control Evaluation Center. Long-time evaluation associate and former TCEC project director Jeanette Treiber has retired from her post to head for greener pastures! She won’t have to go far either—just right outside her door to the seven-acre Rio Linda farm she and her partner Deno have created.

In February 2020, as I was returning to work from a vacation in Mexico, news about COVID-19 patients at UC Davis hit my inbox. Less than a month later, the TCEC offices at the university, along with workplaces across the country, would be empty.

Many of us were asked to move away from our work on tobacco control in order to help address the COVID-19 pandemic, and for good reason, as we are first and foremost public health advocates, and this was the single largest public health crisis in over 100 years .

The limitations section in an evaluation report can feel a bit like a confessional.  When writing these, one can feel like they are admitting all the ways they got it wrong; revealing the skeletons in their evaluation closet.  It can be uncomfortable and maybe even a little disheartening.  So why do we do it?

As we head toward the end of the calendar year, we’re approaching the end of the reporting period for local lead agencies. If you haven’t already, it’s time to start writing your Final Evaluation Reports (FERs) and Brief Evaluation Reports (BERs)!

It’s also the time of year when TCEC starts receiving more questions about FERs and BERs, including a big one: What’s the difference?

When science fiction imagines how the future might look, these visions often include either helpful robots (like Rosie from The Jetsons), or menacing machines (like the titular character in The Terminator). Either way, the robots of the fictional future are machines that people interact with in the physical world. Coming back to the present, the bots have arrived-- and they are not how we imagined.

Over the next 12 months, LLAs will be conducting two separate sets of KIIs: one that I like to call, “Contract Extension KII” and one that I call, “ECTC KII.”  The Contract Extension KII were added to LLAs’ current 2017-2021 workplans, and the ECTC KII, short for End Commercial Tobacco Campaign, is a required evaluation activity for LLA’s upcoming 2022-2025 workplans.  This article aims to clarify the difference between the two and share resources for helping you ensure these activities are useful to your communities.

Report writing can be a frustrating endeavor, especially if you have to do it alone. 

To help projects master the Final Evaluation Report (FER), TCEC hosted the first-ever FER Clinic in late April and May 2021. A small and brave cohort of evaluators and project staff convened over Zoom to discuss, collaborate, and improve on their FERs. Eight Local Lead Agencies participated, with attendees ranging from novice to very experienced, representing small and large counties alike.

2021 marks the start of a new contract for TCEC, and we’re excited to continue bringing our love of all things evaluation to our local lead agency partners around the state. And you may have noticed, it’s been a busy year so far! Here are some important things for LLAs to take note of:

TCEC Hosts Inaugural FER Clinic

With the end of 2020 also came the close of another TCEC contract.  In just 3 short years, our talented TCEC team delivered 23 webinars, 15 newsletters, 22 papers, 34 presentations, 681 instances of technical assistance (TA), and another 1,989 additional instances of TA specifically for what ended up being the last round of data collection for Healthy Stores for a Healthy Community.