I love connecting people with one another. We all have different skills and loves, and the more we can connect quality people with one another, the better the world will be.

The following is a list of people I’ve featured as part of “Follow Friday” over on LinkedIn.

Click their graphic to read more about them.


Sarah Williams Leng

Sarah helps organizations build stable and sustainable foundations for effective program monitoring and evaluation. She does this by helping organizations collect, store, and analyze data with great systems that make evaluations easier.

Recently, Sarah helped a community-focused nonprofit develop logic models that aligned their organizational mission with program strategy. She is now helping them with their data collection strategy to gather insights AND with their reporting system that will inform program improvement and communicate impact.

Get to know her by following Sarah Williams Leng Consulting, LLC on LinkedIn and checking her website at SarahWilliamsLengConsulting.com.

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Becky Garrow

Rebecca is an evaluation consultant focusing on public health research. If you’ve met her in person or online you’ll know she’s very entertaining and forthright.

Rebecca finds joy in focus groups, surveys and all types of data collection and despairs when confronted with red tape, excessively long meetings, and complexity for the sake of complexity. I think we can all relate with this.

Get to know Rebecca by following her on LinkedIn, or on instagram at @garrowconsulting and checking her website at GarrowConsulting.com.

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Sheila B. Robinson

Sheila is involved in SO much, but the one thing you need to know about her is that she’s an amazing teacher who is genuinely invested in and cares about her workshop participants’ learning and success. An expert in learning strategies and engaging audiences, Sheila now helps coaches, consultants, and business owners create their own rave-worthy workshops and courses. 

Sheila is about to launch a new course on designing workshops and courses in early 2025, and she’s always writing about learning strategies, audience engagement, facilitation, survey design, and more on her blog.

Get on her newsletter list to learn more!

https://www.sheilabrobinson.com/subscribe

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Ama Nyame-Mensah

I met Ama through us both being coaches in Stephanie Evergreen‘s Data Visualization Certification Program.

She rocks out with R (and Excel! and Tableau!) and she’s known for her ability to simplify complex data concepts and really cares about how effectively organizations communicate with data.

She designs data experiences that are accessible and actionable (and therefore awesome).

Follow Ama on LinkedIn and check out her website at https://www.anyamemensah.com/.

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Nick Visscher

Nick owns Spotlight Impact Data Design, and helps organizations communicate their data stories through designing data visualizations, reports, and presentations. He’s worked for a variety of cultural organizations like museums, zoos, and aquariums as well as higher education.

His YouTube channel, Spotlight Impact Data Design, is one of my FAVE YouTube channels. It’s full of cool tips about how to make amazing powerpoint slides and other cool visual data products.

Nick is excellent at teaching people how to Powerpoint. His videos are easy to follow, explained well, and makes everything a breeze. One of his videos taught me a cool powerpoint trick that helps me build the graphics for these Follow Friday posts!

Follow Nick and check out him out on YouTube:
Spotlight Impact Data Design

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Elizabeth Sweitzer

I met Elizabeth through a fun #evaluation social group that meets every 2 months here in Toronto. In fact, Elizabeth plans and organizes us all to make this group happen.

Elizabeth loves figuring out how to measure and manage performance in international and sustainable development programs. She has expertise in evaluation programs related to climate change, sustainable energy, agriculture and natural resources.

Oh yeah, she also leads courses about monitoring & evaluation, data analysis, and ethical considerations in evaluations.

Elizabeth is awesome. Go follow her.

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Stephanie Evergreen

Stephanie and helping you “business”

Stephanie has an amazing entrepreneur coaching course called “Boost & Bloom”.

Whether you are just thinking about starting your own business or already have one but want to grow it (in ways that mean more money, less work, and feeling good about everything you do), Boost & Bloom is your jam.

How to start, how to brand, how to PRICE yourself, how to social media, how to get clients, how to market… EVERYTHING. Stephanie’s built 3 businesses, passed 7-figures in revenue years ago, and will tell you what to do, frankly and honestly (but also nicely).

This isn’t just talk. I’m in my 2nd year of business myself and it’s more fun and lucrative than I ever expected, because I do what Stephanie says.

You can join her Bearing Fruit Newsletter to get free business tips and tricks in your email.

Follow Stephanie on LinkedIn and also Instagram and check out the Boost & Bloom site too.

Stephanie teaches you Data Visualization.

I randomly attended a data visualization talk by Stephanie at a conference 11 years ago and discovered not only a great teacher with an awesome brain, but someone who could distill into simple language why some graphs are amazing and some suck.

Stephanie runs the Evergreen Data Viz Academy and it only opens up twice a year for new members. If you care about communicating data effectively, this is the best money you or your company will ever spend.

The Academy has hundreds of tutorials about how to use Excel, Tableau, Power BI, R and even Google Sheets to make amazing visuals that people love. Stephanie holds Office Hours monthly too, where you can give her your data viz challenges and she solves them on a big fun caring zoom call for all Academy members to watch (and provide input on).

Follow Stephanie Evergreen and check out her Academy.

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Alicia Lynch

Alicia Lynch is the founder of Lynch Research Associates, which focuses on Youth Development Research and Evaluation services, and I love seeing the phrase “data geeks with heart” on their website.

Alicia believes every child deserves access to opportunities to allow them to lead a happy and fulfilling life, so she loves helping organizations understand how to promote well-being and create programming help young people thrive.

One of the many reasons I love following Alicia is that all her posts have a little fun story to them that helps communicate what she’s posting about. A great example is how her son leaving wet towels on the floor *outside* the bathroom was merely one data point of a much larger story and context.

Follow Alicia on LinkedIn and check out Lynch Research Associates.

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Elizabeth Grim

Back in the early 2010’s I worked in an Evaluation department, and followed a few Evaluation people on twitter, including Elizabeth. While I didn’t meet her in person until last year, she’s been in my feeds for like a decade!

Elizabeth loves helping organizations figure out their data puzzles to make evaluating their programs and processes fun and actionable. Through her consulting company ( https://elizabethgrim.com ) Elizabeth ensures organizations ask good evaluation questions that result in meaningful measurement and sustainable strategies. She loves challenges, as they often result in creative and novel solutions.

You may also want to follow Elizabeth because her feed is fun. She celebrates “EVALentines Day” every February, and recently had a surprisingly fun “Guess how many sticky notes my workshop participants will use” game. (I did not win).

Follow Elizabeth Grim and check out Elizabeth Grim Consulting:

https://elizabethgrim.com/

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Chris Smith

Chris was a elementary school teacher for 17 years before he started helping teachers and schools make sense of the tons of data collected in education via Smith Visualizations.

Chris is also a co-founder of the Data in Schools Conference that happens every spring and fall in different locations around the world. Data in Schools brings together all kinds educators (school leadership, administrators, data analysts, teachers, etc.) to help break down the silos that exist within and across schools to collaboratively solve challenges using data-informed decisions.

Data in Schools just had their Spring 2024 conference in India, and will be in Singapore and Germany next.

Follow Chris Smith and check out the Data in Schools Conference.

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Allison Prieur

Allison Prieur founded and runs DARE Impact Consulting to help organizations of all sizes use data they already have to improve programs and change systems. All organizations have a ton of data, but it’s rare that it’s used as well as it could be (or at all). Allison and DARE come in and create realistic plans to help collect and use data strategically using resources they already have.

With years working in non-profits and the organizations that fund them, Allison has a ton of experience helping organizations use their data to attract more funding and collaborations. She wants you to spend less time chasing funding so you can focus on making a difference.

Allison also has an awesome tagline:

Use your data. Change the world.

Follow Allison Prieur and check out DARE Impact Consulting and especially her Instagram at @consultantswhodare, which is very entertaining, filled with pop songs and colors and is just a lot of fun.

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Lee Durbin

Lee Durbin is a Welshman living in New Zealand (What a combo! Both bucketlist locations for me!) who loves helping people use data more efficiently. Lee helps data practitioners break free from spreadsheets to advance their careers.

Lee is a data guy I feel a kinship with because he’s as passionate about coding as he is about communicating, and he thinks the best data analysts succeed at both.

You can follow Lee on LinkedIn, but also check out his newsletter “Datacaster”.

A recent post is about how he landed himself a job that needed Power BI skills. But, Lee had never used Power BI before, so he told a story about how he built a user-friendly Tableau dashboard. They hired him for his data storytelling, even without Power BI skills, because the tool doesn’t matter.

The story is what matters.

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Kim Firth Leonard

Kim is a program evaluation pro and also focuses on surveys. Survey design, survey coaching, and survey training. Basically, if you need to get high quality and meaningful data from a survey, you need to talk to Kim.

Kim even co-wrote a book about survey design. A whole book! It’s called Designing Quality Survey Questions and if you collect survey data, you should buy it.

Buy it on Sage.
Buy it on Amazon.

If you want a glimpse of Kim’s survey brilliance while you’re waiting for your book shipment, check out the blog post on “Asking survey questions about sex and gender”.

Follow Kim Firth Leonard and check out her website at leonardrande.com

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Liz Mosley

Liz Mosley is a great graphic designer but I’m posting today about her “Building Your Brand” podcast.

It’s for small business owners about branding and marketing… and y’all, I *hate* business podcasts. I really TRY but they all annoy me by being either too “bro”, formal, “manifest-y”, or too much about AI and SEO, and I unsubscribe from most pretty fast. Meanwhile, I think I’ve listened to most of Liz’s episodes twice. Even when I think her guest won’t be interesting or give me ideas, I’m proven wrong.

It’s a business podcast that doesn’t feel like a business podcast. It feels like you’re listening in on 2 friends talking about how they are navigating the ups and downs of running your own business in real, human (and funny) terms.Liz interviews other small business owners with expertise in video content, social media, embracing creativity, using kindness and honesty and integrity in business and so much more.

I’ve gotten SO many creative ideas from this podcast. Some funny little stories from guests have given me ideas that have turned into entire slides that I’ve incorporated into conference presentations! It’s nominally about branding, but there’s also so much about running and promoting a business you can be proud of.

You’ll also want to check out her blog post about her Rejection Challenge… how pursuing rejection helped her business a ton. It’s so great!

Follow Liz here on LinkedIn, and also on Instagram at @lizmmosley, where she’s *very* active. but also check out Building Your Brand on your podcast app of choice!

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Natalia Buia

I’ve followed Natalia for years and years on Instagram, from back when I basically followed everyone when I first joined the app. I have culled who I’ve followed many times since, but Natalia is still on there because she’s damn entertaining (and made fun movie and TV trivia on instagram during COVID).

Also.. her last name is pronounced “Booyeah” !! I love that so much.

Natalia runs Gold Candor PR, a public relations agency that specializes in helping get meaningful stories and exposure in the media for small business owners and entrepreneurs.

After working as a journalist for over a decade, Natalia now writes pitches to reporters and media partners and even provides training for on-camera interviews.

Follow Natalia here on LinkedIn, but also at these links:

Website: goldcandorpr.com
Instagram: @itsbooyeah

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