Here’s the AEA 365 post that Fred Newman mentioned in our breakout session at the 2011 EN4MRB conference: http://aea365.org/blog/?p=4664. It’s entitled ”Rakesh Mohan and Maureen Brewer on Successfully Navigating Through the Political Maze.”

Need to truly understand the needs of the stakeholders. Usually that means many meetings and many chances to communicate and come to an agreement.

We talked about creating effective slide decks in the data utilization session at the EN4MRB conference. I thought I’d share an AEA 365 post I wrote a while back on that very topic. There’s a webinar link at the bottom of the post. http://aea365.org/blog/?p=416

Need to truly understand the needs of the stakeholders. Usually that means many meetings and many chances to communicate and come to an agreement.

What is data utilization, anyway? That’s one of the questions we discussed at the EN4MRB conference. @eric said that knowing your audience is important. Also, having a variety of tools: fact sheets for meetings, a good powerpoint, and modeling good presentation styles.

The key to making products that can be used is to be extremely organized. We truly must make sure that every word counts and that every graph makes the point. Making drilldown links and other methods to get to the details only as needed.

PowerPoints can be a great resource. The key is to try to make it reusable so that the client can push and pull from the presentation as they need it.