Strategic Evidence Planning: A Practitioner's Perspective

The Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of individuals with criminal convictions through gainful employment.

CEO’s supervised program is designed to assist recently incarcerated participants re-entering society by offering job readiness training, placement assistance and counseling. The program was able to successfully reintegrate formerly incarcerated people into their communities, and began looking to expand in a meaningful way.

In 2017, CEO partnered with Project Evident to pilot the development of a Strategic Evidence Plan (SEP) - a multi-year roadmap to determine the investments and activities necessary for continuous evidence generation and program improvement. The roadmap takes into consideration the operations capacity and the learning agenda of the organization, and makes actionable suggestions for moving forward efficiently.

Brad Dudding, CEO’s former Chief Impact Officer, reflects on the organization’s experience with the SEP process in this brief.