IPA and like-minded organizations are all about generating evidence on what works in the fight against poverty, so that those who direct funding and design policies and programs can make better-informed decisions. When we think about our audience, we usually have the giants of the field in mind: government agencies, multi-million dollar foundations and NGOs, international organizations, and so on. And appropriately so. These are the folks who have the power to design or revise whole programs, or to champion a new way of thinking on the national or international stage.

That's the slogan of Hans Rosling, who runs the website Gapminder.org. I hope you've seen and made use of Gapminder before -- if not, please go rectify the situation immediately. In essence, it's a free online tool for helping people visualize data, especially for helping people see the larger patterns in changes over time and across countries. For those of us who geek out about new ways to tell stories with data, Gapminder provides unlimited hours of entertainment.

In round two of Lisbeth Schorr versus evidence-based policy (see round 1 here), she writes in the Chronicle of Philanthropy that,

If government agencies and private grant makers, afraid of being considered not rigorous, unscientific, or wasteful, choose to support only those efforts that meet the randomized-trial test, we will be robbed of:

* Good programs that do not lend themselves to random-assignment evaluations.