Effectively communicating PRDP’s emerging benefits and impact through comprehensive visuals and compelling narratives is important for establishing support, showing successes and progress, inspiring engagement, and ensuring transparent and accountable practices.

With this in mind, the DA-PRDP North Luzon Cluster component and unit staff from the Project Support Office (PSOs) and Regional Project Coordination Offices (RPCOs) underwent a training workshop on Data Visualization and Technical Writing for producing and finalizing Rapid Appraisal of Emerging Benefits (RAEB) reports from October 24-27, 2023 in Baguio City.

On the topic of data visualization, PSO M&E Specialist, Karen Cortado, introduced and demonstrated how to navigate and utilize the free version of the data visualization tool called Tableau.

To familiarize the participants with its interface, basic features, and other aspects, she prepared a dataset for them to work on.

She showed how to connect a wide range of data sources, create interactive and visually appealing data visualizations, through charts, graphs, maps, and dashboards to represent data in a meaningful way and combine multiple visualizations into interactive dashboards, which can be shared with others.

Tableau is a widely used data visualization tool that helps users understand and make sense of their data.

Meanwhile, the participants also learned the basics and important topics to improve and widen their knowledge of technical writing.

Jaime Manalo IV, Senior Science Research Specialist and Head of the Development Communication Division of the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) served as the resource speaker where he shared tips and methods for clear and effective writing.

He combined his discussion with exercises to gauge the participants’ learning on the presented topics. These include concept mapping and outlining, journal article critiquing, and pitch document writing and lay-outing.

The “pitch document” writing is a concept introduced to the participants that they could implement in their respective offices to show the summarized version of their RAEB reports that only highlight the significant parts of the reports for readers to easily comprehend and grasp the content.

With this kind of capacity development training, DA-PRDP personnel are equipped with tools and techniques to maximize the true potential of data, utilizing it in a transformative effort for development impact. By honing their data communication skills, PRDP staff can become catalysts for progress, propelling agricultural and rural development forward in North Luzon and beyond. (Ericson M. Guiao, PSO North Luzon InfoACE)