Lisa Colvig-Niclai, MA
Vice President of Evaluation
Email Lisa: lisa@appliedsurveyresearch.org
Lisa is a seasoned community planner, researcher, and facilitator with more than 25 years of experience connecting people, ideas, and resources to help build better communities. With ASR for 22 years, Lisa leads the company’s Sacramento office, where her primary role is to design needs assessments, facilitate strategic plans, provide guidance on program development, and create evaluations with various levels of rigor and complexity.
Across these methodologies, Lisa infuses key approaches such as participatory planning, monitoring, and evaluation (PM&E), theory-based evaluation (TBE), and empowerment evaluation (EE) to help groups identify the change they must see, the efforts they require to create that change, and the most relevant data to tell their stories. Key partner contracts have included First 5 Alameda, First 5 Contra Costa, First 5 San Francisco, First 5 Solano, FIRST 5 Santa Clara County, First 5 San Mateo, First 5 Santa Cruz, First 5 San Benito, First 5 Sacramento, First 5 Yuba, First 5 Siskiyou, and Solano County Board of Supervisors. She is a frequent presenter at conferences and commissions.
Before joining ASR, Lisa worked abroad for four years as a technical consultant with PLAN International Indonesia, helping to facilitate community strategic planning and evaluation of child-focused community development projects. She is also skilled at creating engaging visuals (diagrams, logic models, dashboards, briefs) to display data and information. Raised in the mountains of Siskiyou County, Lisa has traveled extensively in South East Asia and the Pacific, and she is fluent in spoken and written Indonesian.
Lisa earned a Master's degree in Evaluation and Policy Analysis from Stanford University. She received her Bachelor's degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz with honors in Cultural Anthropology and South East Asian Studies, and an additional focus in Economic Development. In 1995, she attended Institut Keguruan dan Ilmu Pendidikan (IKIP) in Malang, East Java, Indonesia, where she deepened her knowledge about the Indonesian socio-cultural-economic landscape, language, and arts.
Lisa is married with two school-age sons. She enjoys volunteering in the community, hiking, rafting, boating, and garden design with tropical plants. Originally from rural northern California, she participates in the local Indonesian community. She also owns Bali Pillows +, a company that designs and imports traditional Balinese textiles in contemporary forms of home decor.