North Carolina’s Office of Strategic Partnerships was launched at the end of 2018 under Governor Roy Cooper with a mission to enhance partnerships between state government and North Carolina’s research and philanthropic sectors. As its website notes, “This includes elevating the State’s internal capacity to use and generate evidence in its policy and programmatic functions.” […]

In King County, Washington, under Executive Dow Constantine and the County Council, equity and social justice has been an important focus of the county’s work. That includes the launch in 2015 of an Office of Equity and Social Justice and the creation of its strategic plan, designed to help the county become a place where […]

The nonprofit Results for America has been an important advocate of — and catalyst for — evidence-based policy and decision making over the last decade. It recently released two new resources: The 2020 Invest in What Works Federal Standard of Excellence (click to see the federal standard and the press release), as well as a […]

The Small Business Administration's Jason Bossie describes how the SBA strengthened a culture of evidence and data, including creating an evaluation office and a chief data officer role within the CFO's office, as well as creating a learning agenda to identify priority research questions from its bureaus.

Lisa Massena explains how OregonSaves is designed to make payroll retirement savings plans available to all workers in Oregon, with design features that make it easier for participants to make good choices.

Lindsay Page of the University of Pittsburg and Michael Weiss of MDRC discuss the Dell Scholars Program and CUNY ASAP, both of which have been found to have sizable effects on promoting college success for low-income and first-generation students.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently launched a pilot version of a new initiative called the Data Science CoLab, an eight-week-long data science training program. The first class, which kicked off in October 2017, included 25 employees from different agencies within HHS and with different levels of knowledge about using data. Participants applied […]

The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, passed by Congress and signed by the President on February 9th, 2018, contains several noteworthy bright spots in the use of data and evidence-based policy. Those wins suggest there is continuing bipartisan support in Washington for using evidence, data and innovation to improve the results and cost-effectiveness of Federal […]

A small but growing number of federal departments and agencies have created  evaluation policies that describe the principles that those agencies seek to promote when they conduct program evaluations. Those principles can include rigor, relevance, transparency, independence, and ethics. To learn more about evaluation policies and why they are useful to federal agencies, we are […]

Matthew Notowidigdo of Northwestern University discusses how South Carolina is using random assignment within its Medicaid program into order to build evidence about the program and better serve clients.

Amy Laitinen and Clare McCann of New American discuss the new report, "Putting the Experiment Back in the Experimental Sites Initiative." They discuss how this U.S. Department of Education's "Ex Sites" initiative can become a more effective learning tool to improve higher education policy.

Laura Wentworth, the director of the partnership between Stanford University and the San Francisco Unified School District, shares insights from the partnership.

While Democrats and Republicans can’t seem to agree on much these days, there was a bright spot for bipartisanship recently: Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Democratic Senator Patty Murray joined together to praise the recommendations of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking (CEP), which Ryan and Murray launched last year. The Commission was […]

Greg Duncan of UC Irvine discusses features of interventions that can be expected to sustain beneficial program impacts for children and adolescents.

Emily Gustafsson-Wright of the Brookings Institution discusses global trends in impact bonds, used to harness private capital to fund social interventions.

Tom Kane of the Harvard Graduate School of Education discusses how states can use the Every Student Succeeds Act to focus education spending on what works.

Kelly Fitzsimmons provides an overview of Project Evident, a new initiative to help nonprofits and their funders develop and implement multi-year evidence-building plans.

Bryan Garcia of the Connecticut Green Bank explains how the Bank is leveraging private-sector dollars to help finance green energy infrastructure.

The Colorado Department of Human Services (CDHS) recently celebrated five years of C-Stat, its performance management and leadership strategy and one of the leading examples in the U.S. of data-informed decision making in human services. Through C-Stat, CDHS reviews about 100 measures each month. Two-thirds of those measures have maintained or beat their goals set in […]