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Kaylan Fitch:
At the Maricopa County Department of Public Health, we focused our first targeted evaluation plan on the department’s onboarding processes. This assessment involved many avenues of data sourcing, including retention data, hiring, timeliness, formal recognition submissions, survey data from the Human Resources Department, and primary data collection through key informant interviews with managers and supervisors, and a survey for employees new to their position. It was difficult to organize this mass of data in a way that would not only catch the attention of evaluation partners and interest holders but also spark conversations about next steps and motivate data-informed actions.

However, it is part of an evaluator’s responsibility to transform raw data into meaningful and actionable recommendations according to the CDC. After hosting a virtual data party that ended with more questions than answers, a new tool was introduced to our team called the “Data Analysis, Integration, and Synthesis,” or DAIS process. Although it has traditionally been used by teams of evaluators to develop findings from multiple data sources, this process also proved to be extremely useful for a single evaluator.

The DAIS process guides the evaluator, or evaluators, through four main steps, each informed by the last. Emerging themes that focus on one data source and one evaluation question at a time, finding statements that focus on an important part of the evaluation story, conclusions that explain the relevance of findings, and recommendations that are feasible and direct. By using the DAIS process for this project, I was able to give a 10-minute presentation to leadership about the same information that was shared previously in the one-hour data party, and we were able to prioritize recommendations with the remaining time.

This tool has helped our evaluation team grow our individual and team capacity to analyze large amounts of data and drive true data-informed decision-making. Please refer to the QR codes at the bottom right of the poster to see more information about the DAIS process and upcoming courses offered by Encompass to learn about this process in more detail.