Looking for a career boost?

In partnership with Brown School Professional Development, the Advanced Learning Certificate Programs are designed to advance your skills and knowledge in program evaluation and data visualization. We offer two programs:

Program Evaluation

Designed to provide theory and relevant practice to build your expertise, effectiveness, and confidence evaluating programs.

As funders and donors increasingly view their support as an investment, competency in Program Evaluation has become an essential skill within health and human service organizations. Regular, systematic evaluation helps assure organizations are delivering on their missions and acting as good stewards of donor dollars.

To respond to the increasingly competitive funding landscape, human services organizations must not only measure impact — they need to maximize it.

This certificate program will help you align your resources and efforts to the change your organization strives to create. The program design includes lectures, case studies, practice exercises, and readings — all carefully chosen to increase your skills.

The course provided me with a new language, practical tools, and vital skills − to engage partners, evaluate programs, manage projects, and communicate data to diverse stakeholders.

Carly Heminway,
2019 Cohort of PMC Program Evaluation
Students participated an evaluation workshop

During the program, you will :

  • Conduct a stakeholder-driven evaluation planning process and develop a comprehensive evaluation plan
  • Identify and prioritize key evaluation questions and select appropriate methods
  • Better understand how to systematically manage quantitative data
  • Translate evaluation findings into compelling data visualizations to enhance strategic learning and utilization
  • Develop several evaluation products, including a logic model, evaluation plan and submission of brief written reflections about class content

Data Visualization & Communication

Build your skills at visualizing data and communicating it to various audiences by leveraging tools like Excel and PowerPoint.

In a fast-paced world with a constant flow of information, the ability to succinctly share and use data to tell compelling stories has become a vital skill. This certificate program will be helpful to professionals in a range of settings who create reports, presentations, and other communications using data.

This certificate program offers a variety of hands-on activities to allow participants to practice their new skills. The instructors encourage participants to bring their own dataset or projects to the class and use them for class assignments and activities to create products that will be useful for their own agency, setting, or interests.

I create lots of reports and data visualizations at work, but I have never been trained in how to create effective and appealing materials that actually work with how our brains process information.

After just a few weeks of this class, I was already able to create significantly improved charts and slide decks, and I know I will continue to draw on my learning!

Nava Kantor,
2021 Cohort of PMC Data Visualization & Communication

During the program, you will :

  • Learn data visualization and communication theories, best practices, and principles and how these support comprehension of data
  • Identify best practices for communicating and presenting both quantitative and qualitative data
  • Apply these best practices to generate your own data visualizations in Excel
  • Understand a process for facilitating stakeholder engagement in data interpretation and communicating and using data
  • Understand strategies and a process for storytelling with data
  • Develop a dissemination plan that includes identification of tailored products for different stakeholder groups/audiences