WHEN: March 4, 2015, 8.15 am - 9.45 am
WHERE: 1 Dupont Circle, Suite 700, Gildenhorn Conference Room
WHO: Tom Black, Susanna Dilliplane, and Tom Glaisyer

It’s a brave new media world. We can get news and information anywhere, anytime, and in any shape or form we please. Partisan media, social media, mobile viewing, news aggregation websites – these are just some of the developments in the media landscape that have changed how we get information… and what information we get. These changes raise normative questions about the media’s role in nurturing an informed citizenry. They also make it ever more difficult to measure media impact.

On March 4, 2015, the Democracy Fund’s Tom Glaisyer, APEP’s Susanna Dilliplane, and the Gates Foundation’s Tom Black will tackle salient issues on media impact, measurement, and democracy. Susanna will discuss her doctoral research on partisan media effects on American voters. Tom Glaisyer will discuss how the Democracy Fund, a relatively young foundation, is seeking to embed measurement and identify impact in its work on media and informed participation. And Tom Black will describe how the Gates Foundation has used findings from its most ambitious opinion research project – a 5-year, multi-country longitudinal survey of citizen views of global poverty, development, and aid spending  – to inform grant-making and communication with the public about these issues.

Media and politics buffs, methodological junkies, and democracy aficionados are welcome. Or you can just come for the free Danishes.

Tom Black is Senior Communications Officer for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He manages opinion research on the Gates Foundation’s global issues. Prior to joining the foundation, he was a pollster in London working on local, national, and European elections for parties of all political stripes.
 
Susanna Dilliplane, PhD, is Deputy Director of the Aspen Planning and Evaluation Program at the Aspen Institute. Drawing on her background in quantitative and qualitative methods, Susanna works closely with APEP’s clients to optimize evaluation designs, data collection, and data analysis, with an emphasis on providing rigorous and actionable results.

Tom Glaisyer is Program Director for the Informed Participation Program at the Democracy Fund. He invests in organizations working to inform the American public and to reduce deceptive practices with a focus on public engagement as well as journalism at the local level. Tom brings to the Democracy Fund a background in media research and policy, as well as social media advocacy consulting.