Incentives for finding, creating, using and sharing evidence about social services and other government and not-for-profit programs are fundamentally flawed.

For decades, governments and non-profits have tried to learn how to better manage services and products they deliver to realize better outcomes and do so at lower cost.

Many efforts have tried to find, create, use, and share evidence about  programs and practices to inform decision-making.  However, too often the way evidence is funded and used complicates efforts to improve the well-being of people and communities.

Efforts to improve evidence use have not addressed two critical questions: 

(1) How to motivate evidence finding, building, sharing, and use.

(2) How to design incentive structures that encourage continuous learning and improvement