North Carolina

The North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management (OSBM) recommends that state agencies complete a two-year strategic plan each fiscal biennium. The agencies’ strategic plans include agency or department-wide goals, objectives, and strategies; performance and outcome measures and milestones; existing best practices and areas for collaboration; and more. OSBM provides strategic planning guidance and facilitation services to support this process. Further, FY21-23 budget instructions included the governor’s four budget priorities: positioning North Carolina to create new jobs and recover from pandemic economic losses; making North Carolina a top-10 educated state; promoting healthier and safer communities; and ensuring an effective and efficient state government.

Issue Areas: Child Welfare, Economic Mobility, Education, Health, Workforce

The North Carolina Governor promotes a culture of data and evidence in a variety of ways. The 2018 Executive Order 43 created the Governor’s Advisory Committee on Performance Management, which advises the Governor on rules and policies related to performance management and strategies for advancing evidence-based policy statewide. The Governor also appointed a Director of Strategic Partnerships who leads the North Carolina Office of Strategic Partnerships (OSP), which enhances partnerships between state government and North Carolina’s research and philanthropic sectors. This includes elevating the state government’s internal capacity to use and generate evidence. OSP hosts the Monthly Connect, a series of panel discussions on cross-sector partnerships, led a Government Research Partnerships Learning Forum, and created an Evidence Advisor position.

Through the 2020 Executive Order 143, the Governor directed the state Department of Health and Human Services to update reporting processes to increase the inclusion of racial and ethnic demographic data; to review data to determine impacts on communities of color; and to use collected data to allocate resources to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. The processes focus on reducing the adverse health impacts on racial and ethnic minorities.

Additionally, the Governor’s FY21-23 budget recommendations included funding for increasing government effectiveness, efficiency, and responsiveness; rigorous evaluations to determine program effectiveness and outcomes; and setting up agency research units to oversee internal research efforts and build cross-sector partnerships. The Governor’s American Rescue Plan budget recommendations narratives included data and evidence to justify the needed funding and its expected impact.

Issue Areas: Economic Mobility, Education, Equity, Health, Workforce

The Office of State Human Resources, Office of Strategic Partnerships, Volcker Alliance, and Behavioral Insights Team, funded by the Sloan Foundation, are collaborating on a project to understand how behavioral science can be used to improve state government recruiting practices and increase workforce diversity. State agencies have created positions dedicated to diversity and equity. The Department of Natural and Cultural Resources named a Deputy Secretary of Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion. The Department of Revenue named an Assistant Secretary for Tax Research and Equity, and the Department of Health and Human Services created a new leadership position, the Chief Health Equity Officer, to lead cross-department equity work and oversee an expanded Office of Health Equity/Office of Rural Health.

Issue Areas: Equity, Health

The state’s interim Chief Data Officer also serves as the Deputy State Chief Information Officer and oversees the North Carolina Government Data Analytics Center, which serves as the centralized data office for the state. In this role, the Chief Data Officer leads efforts to support data sharing between state agencies, develop enterprise solutions, identify cost savings through fraud and compliance initiatives, and leverage the state’s data assets to provide information for state leaders to make evidence-based decisions. For example, the Government Data Analytics Center is assisting with the development of North Carolina’s Longitudinal Data System, which will link data from across agencies – including early childhood, K-12, postsecondary education, and workforce – to help inform decision-making. Additionally, some North Carolina departments and agencies have their own chief data officers, as well.

Issue Areas: Economic Mobility, Education, Workforce

The North Carolina Government Data Analytics Center (GDAC) operates as a division of the state’s department of information technology, which works to transform data into information that facilitates decision support, increases operational efficiencies, and improves outcomes for the citizens of North Carolina by integrating and sharing data assets. GDAC has deployed a statewide Enterprise Entity Resolution (pp. 24-27) infrastructure and processes that were developed to match entities or cluster individual record data across disparate data sources to a common entity (i.e., single person, single business). As such, the platform enabled extensive records matching that improved the state’s public health response to COVID-19 and analysis of identity theft associated with unemployment benefit recipients.

The North Carolina Early Childhood Integrated Data System (NC ECIDS) is a single source for integrated early childhood data for selected education, health, and social services programs to help answer key policy and program questions. NC ECIDS integrates data from subsidized child care, NC Pre-K, Food and Nutrition Services, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, IDEA Part C, and IDEA Part B-619 to produce reports and fulfill research requests that support state priorities for young children and families. Using recently awarded Preschool Development Grant funding, NC ECIDS plans to expand its reporting and research request infrastructure and to add data from new programs to its system. NC ECIDS is also participating in state efforts to build a statewide longitudinal data system to link early childhood, education, and workforce data together.

The North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management operates Log Into North Carolina (LINC), an interactive data retrieval service containing over 900 data items for a variety of geographic areas within North Carolina. Topics include: population and housing, education, transportation, vital statistics and health, and more. LINC also includes a subdomain for the State Demographer platform, which houses the latest data produced by the North Carolina Demographer.

Issue Areas: COVID-19, Economic Mobility, Education, Workforce

North Carolina has taken a data-driven approach to equitable vaccine distribution. This includes removing systemic barriers to vaccine access, such as transportation, increasing vaccine allotments for counties with larger populations from historically marginalized communities, and prioritizing community-based vaccination approaches. Vaccine providers are required to use the state’s vaccine management system, which requires demographic data to register someone for a shot. This has improved data collection and increased the equitable distribution of vaccines. In July 2021, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report highlighting how North Carolina’s focus on equity in administering vaccines increased COVID-19 vaccination rates in Black and Hispanic communities.

Issue Areas: COVID-19, Equity, Health

North Carolina is deepening efforts and investment in evaluation leadership and governance. In 2021, the North Carolina Office of Strategic Partnerships (OSP) established the state’s first Evidence Advisor position to maximize investment in evidence-based policies and programs. OSP is collaborating with state agencies to identify programs that, based on available evidence, could be scaled or adjusted, and to identify and prioritize opportunities to grow the evidence base by initiating randomized controlled trials of promising programs or policies.

The North Carolina FY21-23 budget includes $500,000 in nonrecurring funds in each year of the 2021-2023 fiscal biennium to be used to provide grants to state agencies to do the following: (1) in partnership with research institutions, conduct research projects that will directly inform the agencies’ policy and program decisions; and (2) pursuant to contract with an outside entity or in conjunction with the Office of State Budget and Management, evaluate how well the agencies’ programs are achieving their intended outcomes. In addition, North Carolina’s agencies and departments can use program and administrative funds for evidence-building and evaluation.

The North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management released program inventories in the areas of child and family health and juvenile justice. The state also publishes periodic Results First progress reports and has created evidence definitions to categorize programs based on their levels of evidence.

Issue Areas: Child Welfare, Criminal Justice, Health

North Carolina requires budget requests for new and expanded programs and services to include evidence and research supporting the programs’ goals, as well as the Governor’s strategic priorities. For the FY21-23 budget development process, Office of State Budget and Management (OSBM) increased its focus on evidence-based budgeting, data-driven decisions, and strategic management of the state’s resources. North Carolina continued to use the two-step budget submission process where agency and budget office staff work collaboratively to develop evidence-based approaches before submitting their final budget requests. Agencies who opted-in were given additional time to work with a diverse set of state stakeholders to develop evidence-based approaches before submitting their final budget requests.

The North Carolina Governor’s American Rescue Plan budget recommendations included justification narratives for each of the main budget recommendation categories. Each justification narrative included data and evidence to support why the funding was needed and the expected impact it would have on the state.

Issue Areas: Child Welfare, Criminal Justice, Economic Mobility, Education, Health, Workforce

Juvenile Crime Prevention Councils (JCPC) exist in all 100 North Carolina counties in order to direct funding to programs that address the localized risks and needs identified for youth in that community. Reviews of program outcomes and performance (including successful completion of programming) include program monitoring, standardized program evaluation protocol, quality of service scoring through comprehensive review of data and program practices, and quarterly reporting. Egregious issues are addressed with corrective requests (including Program Enhancement Plans) or funding cessation. Trends and non-performance are addressed by informing the JCPC so that they may better be able to make use of state funding by allocating funds to other programming sources. The section is moving toward performance-based contracts for state-contracted services.

Program evaluations at the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction provide evidence of the programs’ successes and areas for growth. The programs that continue beyond the initial phase are amended based on the results of the evaluation.

Issue Areas: Criminal Justice, Economic Mobility, Education