Evaluation Reporting with Adobe Spark

This blog was originally published on AEA365 on December 28, 2018: https://aea365.org/blog/evaluation-reporting-with-adobe-spark-by-ouen-hunter-and-emma-perk/

Hi! We are Ouen Hunter (student at the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Evaluation Program, IDPE), Emma Perk (project manager at The Evaluation Center), and Michael Harnar (assistant professor at the IDPE) from Western Michigan University. Recently, we used PhotoVoice in our evaluation of an Upward Bound program and wanted to share how we reported our PhotoVoice findings using the cost-free version of Adobe Spark.

Adobe Spark offers templates to make webpages, videos, flyers, reports, and more. It also hosts your product online for free. While there is a paid version of Adobe Spark, everything we discuss in this blog can be done using the free version. The software is very straightforward, and we were able to get our report online within an hour. We chose to create a webpage to increase accessibility for a large audience.

The free version of Adobe Spark has a lot of features, but it can be difficult to customize the layout. Therefore, we created our layouts in PowerPoint then uploaded them to Spark. This enabled us to customize the font, alignment, and illustrations. Follow these instructions to create a similar webpage:

• Create a slide deck in PowerPoint. Use one slide per photo and text from the participant. The first slide serves as a template for the rest.
• After creating the slides, you have a few options for saving the photos for upload.
  1. Use a snipping tool (Windows’ snipping or Mac’s screenshot function) to take a picture of each slide and save it as a PNG file.
  2. Save each as a picture in PowerPoint by selecting the image and the speech bubble, right clicking, and saving as a picture.
  3. Export as a PNG in PowerPoint. Go to File > Export then select PNG under the File Format drop-down menu. This will save all the slides as individual image files.
• Create a webpage in Adobe Spark.
  1. 1. 1. 1. Once on the site, you will be prompted to start a new account (unless you’re a returning user). This will allow your projects to be stored and give you access to create in the software.
           2. You have the option to change the theme to match your program or branding by selecting the Theme button.
           3. Once you have selected your theme, you are ready to add a title and upload the photos you created from PowerPoint. To upload the photos, press the plus icon. 
           4. Then select Photo. 
           5. Select Upload Photo. Add all photos and confirm the arrangement.
           6. After finalizing, remember to post the page online and click Share to give out the link. 

Though we used Adobe Spark to share our PhotoVoice results, there are many applications for using Spark. We encourage you to check out Adobe Spark to see how you can use it to share your evaluation results.

Hot Tips and Features:

• Adobe Spark adjusts automatically for handheld devices.
• Adobe Spark also automatically adjusts lines for you. No need to use a virtual ruler.
• There are themes available with the free subscription, making it easy to design the webpage.
• Select multiple photos during your upload. Adobe Spark will automatically separate each file for you.

*Disclaimer: Adobe Spark didn’t pay us anything for this blog. We wanted to share this amazing find with the evaluation community!