The Bail Project is a national nonprofit that provides free bail assistance and pretrial support to thousands of low-income people every year while advancing policy change at the local, state, and national levels. It is on a mission to combat mass incarceration by eliminating reliance on cash bail and demonstrating that a more humane, equitable, and effective pretrial system is possible. Through our Community Release with Support model, we provide our clients with return-to-court services including court notifications, free transportation assistance, and referrals to voluntary services. These interventions have helped nearly 30,000 people return to court 91% of the time with none of their own money on the line, preserving the presumption of innocence and demonstrating the efficacy of needs-based pretrial support. Learn more about The Bail Project at bailproject.org.

The Bail Project is looking to create more opportunities to receive feedback from the clients we serve with our model, which is known as Community Release with Support. Under this model, The Bail Project’s clients receive free bail assistance and supportive services that help ensure that clients return to court when they are released pretrial. These supportive services include court notifications, travel assistance, and voluntary referrals to services like housing assistance and clinical services to treat mental illness and addiction. We are looking to strengthen our client feedback processes to better understand how our clients experience our services. To be effective, our client engagement and feedback processes must recognize the power imbalances that can often exist between social service organizations and their clients, especially when organizations play such a significant role in a client’s life, such as enabling someone’s release from jail. We also need to consider our remote context when developing feedback processes, as most of our staff engage with clients remotely instead of in-person. Starting at our Cincinnati, Ohio site, we wish to pilot a process for collecting meaningful feedback from clients which can inform a larger client feedback strategy for the organization.

  • Improving Client Engagement & Participation
  • Structured Feedback for Meaningful Improvements
  • Mitigating Against Impediments

Read the full article about feedback by Natasha Marshall at Feedback Labs.