We are looking to gain a better understanding of a new prospective target market to make sure there is a need and demand for our service. This will allow us to determine if there are near-term, future opportunities that we can target. We want to understand if government agencies who are participating in a particular area of criminal justice reform using grant money are also spending money on evaluation and assessment of these programs. This work itself is very important to our society as these grants are being given out to try to reduce the impact of drugs in our society by implementing special analysis and diversion programs in court systems at the state and county levels. We want to form the right kind of team to provide assessment and evaluation services and need to better understand the market for these services. This research will clearly explain the opportunity.

In 2021, the State of Maryland received a $1.7 Million grant to implement these reforms in its court system and then just recently issued its own RFP to secure program assessment and evaluation services from contractors like us. Our firm did not know about this Maryland RFP in time so we did not form a team to submit a bid. The purpose of this project is to come up with a market analysis and provide enough insight and recommendations on the market to indicate if there are sufficient opportunities that our team could compete on.

By the end of the project, students should complete the following list of activities (this is basically a retelling of the steps above):

1. Access existing sources of information on grant programs being funded by the US Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) that are generally related to this one in Maryland called the Adult Drug Court and Veterans Treatment Court Discretionary Grant Program. Understand the Maryland program that provides a prototype of what
2. Find other resources that may have information about similar programs at other states. The BJA website provides the original solicitation that the State of Maryland received a grant under. https://bja.ojp.gov/funding/opportunities/o-bja-2021-46003. Use Internet research to find other sources of information about awards for the same general Adult Drug Court and/or Veterans Treatment Court programs won by other states.
3. Compile a list of other states that have won similar programs.
4. Research and analyze the programs that have received grants from the BJA that are still in operation today.
5. For each program identified, conduct additional research to identify if that state has issued any RFPs for grant program assessment and evaluation. Research can include any combination of Internet searching, perusal of the websites for the governmental jurisdiction in question, or phone calls or emails to officials for those organizations. For direct outreach, we will coach an appropriate script
6. Through outreach to responsible officials, try to ascertain the program's plan for conducting assessments and evaluation. Include if they will outsource it, how they will outsource it, and when they expect to outsource it.
7. For any that have already conducted evaluation and assessment that they have outsourced, try to identify who it was outsourced to, how big the contracts were, and if there will be additional competitions for future assessments.
8. For any providers who have won such program and evaluation work, compile a synopsis of the competitor (name, website, time in business, location, services provided, business size, unique qualifications, formidableness of them as a competitor)

Bonus steps would include:

• Obtain insight about how firms compete and if there are clear winners and likely winners
• Recommendations on the type of team capabilities that would be needed to win and if we should modify our current vision for team composition (which we will provide during the project)

Final deliverables should include

• A report including research, recommendations on whether this market is worth pursuing, and recommendations for next steps on trying to crack this market

Students will connect directly with us for mentorship throughout the project. We will be able to provide answers to questions such as:

• What are the services that the Department of Justice has funded?
• Who is our target market?
• What is the type of team that we envision establishing to compete in this market?
• Input on choices, problems or anything else the students might encounter.