Good morning! I wanted to make people aware that there will be a free workshop on 12/13 from 11-12 as a pre-conference event for the North Carolina Local Government Budget Association’s Winter Conference (NCLGBA). This year’s NCLGBA conference is in Durham at the Washington Duke Inn.
Implementing Field Experiments for Innovation and Success
Is your service delivery not as effective as it should be? Could your department streamline current processes? Do you see problems in your organization but lack ideas on how to address it? If so, this is the pre-conference workshop for you.
Do you see ways to make your department more efficient? Deliver services in an improved manner? Get payments in a more timely fashion? Do you have ideas of how to improve your jurisdiction but don’t know how to put these ideas into action? If so, then this is the pre-conference workshop for you.
In this workshop we will brainstorm and share ideas about how to solve identified problems. We will then discuss how to take our ideas from conversation to actionable next steps. We will pay particular attention to how to launch field experiments that test how your ideas work in practice. By first testing your ideas, you and your organization can make sure that you are making informed, data driven decisions that will improve performance, before implementing large-scale change.
Bottom-line: We know that it can be challenging to innovate in government. With change, comes risk, but without risk we cannot improve. Field experiments allow an organization to learn about the impact of a proposed reform while limiting risk. We all want to make government better but know the uncertainty that comes with disruptive change can impede progress. Implementing a field experiment may be the solution for you and in this pre-conference workshop, Justin Ross (Director of Field Experiment Research, IU Public Policy Institute; Associate Professor at Indiana University) and Whitney Afonso (Assistant Professor at University of North Carolina) will teach you how.
