Switchboard Blog

Switchboard’s blog posts offer a wide range of insights on the newcomer experience, including practical tips for navigating the resettlement process, resource lists tailored to community needs, case studies about relevant programs, engaging stories of successful integration, and more.

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Insights from the Field: The Use of Artificial Intelligence in Resettlement Work

Switchboard December 19, 2024 No Comments

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming humanitarian aid and resettlement services. In this blog post, two experts in the field—Kimberly Mays, a Senior Program Officer

How States and Other Refugee Service Providers are Using Infographics to Engage Communities

Wondering whether your program data has potential for community engagement? Unsure of how statistics can capture an audience’s interest? A recent Switchboard blog post provided suggestions for using data to tell a story, and today we’re diving deeper into one interesting method: infographics.

Switchboard
November 13, 2019

Using Data to Tell Program Stories…Without Putting Your Audience to Sleep

Many of us don’t think about how we might communicate out our project data until the reporting stage, when we are required to look back on data and summarize it for a reader. Or conversely, given the vast extent of data many projects collect, we might be tempted to flood our communications materials with facts and figures.

Meg Gibbon
November 8, 2019

Sharing Refugee Stories to Build Community Support

Are you looking to increase local support for refugees in your community? Supporting refugees to tell their stories is a powerful way to put individual faces and voices to the resettlement experience. There are many innovative ways stories can facilitate strong connections that demonstrate how resettlement benefits everyone in the community.

Switchboard
November 1, 2019

How States Can Benefit from Switchboard’s New Data Toolkit: A Perspective from a State Refugee Coordinator

This blog post accompanies a new toolkit developed by the Urban Institute as part of the Switchboard program: Data-Driven State Refugee Programs: Lessons from the field on managing, analyzing, and using data to improve refugee programs. What challenges do states face in tracking Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) program outcomes? States face a number of […]

Charles Shipman
October 25, 2019

Getting More from Your ORR-6 Data: What’s the Value of ORR-6 Data to You?

This blog post accompanies a new toolkit developed by the Urban Institute as part of the Switchboard program: Data-Driven State Refugee Programs: Lessons from the field on managing, analyzing, and using data to improve refugee programs. The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) recently delivered a series of webinar trainings on its updated ORR-6 report, which […]