Evidence to Support CED programs: The Growing Talk About RCTs

<p>Whether you work in community or economic development, there has always been pressure to measure your success. CED professionals are very familiar with having to explain what type of impact they hope to have with their initiatives.  It is even harder to document success. Evidence-based decision-making is front and center in conversations on good governance. But what does this mean in practice? What serves as evidence? In the eyes of a growing group of CED policymakers, the best evidence comes from randomized controlled trials (RCTs).</p> <p>RCTs are the gold standard in research. But as with any gold standard, it’s very hard to achieve in practice. RCTs are still new to local, state or even federal government. The concept behind RCTs is simple. If you randomly assign potential program participants to one of two groups, where one group actually participates in the program but the other group doesn’t, you should be able to see if the program is effective. For example, if a group of job-seekers is randomly assigned to two groups – one taking part in a job training program and the other group not, you can look at how successful the two groups are in obtaining jobs. If those with the training find betters jobs, or find jobs more easily, then the training could be the reason.</p> <p>The North Carolina Office of Strategic Partnerships (OSP), part of the North Carolina Office of State Management and Budget, has been moving toward using RTC’s to understand program impact. The NC OSP work was highlighted recently by Pew [...]</p>