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Amelia Showalter served as Director of Digital Analytics on Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, leading a team that designed and implemented hundreds of experiments to improve the performance of all types of digital outreach. Today, she is a consultant who helps organizations achieve better results through testing.
In the interview, we draw on her innovative experience in politics to consider how government — in nonpartisan ways — can learn from the same techniques of testing and experimentation in order to improve program and agency performance. In other words, how can public managers build a culture of rapid organizational testing and improvement?
Web extra: Amelia Showalter talks about the “email derby” in which she and her staff tried to pick the most and least effective versions of fundraising emails and how the derby results underscored the usefulness of randomized testing. [click here]
Matt Leighninger is the Executive Director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and the author of the recent report for public managers, “
Telework — working outside of the office — has the potential to save billions of taxpayer dollars along with other benefits. To promote its use, the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010 expands telework opportunities to over one million federal workers. Today federal agencies are working to implement that law, while state and local officials are also findings ways to promote telework.
Almost half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended and the women and children involved in these pregnancies are disproportionately likely to experience a range of negative outcomes. For insights into cost-effective policy strategies to reduce unintended pregnancy, my guest is Adam Thomas, a professor at Georgetown University and the former Research Director for the Brookings Institution’s Center on Children and Families. His recent article in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management — as well as a 
Jeff Tryens is the Deputy Director for Performance Management in the Mayor’s Office in New York, under Michael Bloomberg. He is responsible for reporting overall city government performance and initiating cross-agency performance improvement initiatives. Prior to that role, Jeff was a management consultant focused on strategic planning and metrics, including for the government of South Australia. It is Jeff’s ten years at the helm of the 
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has 9,000 employees and a $46 billion budget. How does the agency focus its numerous staff and diverse programs on critical goals? It uses HUDStat, launched in 2010.
A growing trend among cities and states in the U.S. is outcome budgeting. Baltimore began using 
