Federal Government Information Technology

How Government Can Drive Better Grantee Outcomes

By Tom Fazio and Wagish Bhartiya, REI Systems

Given the current political and fiscal climate, Government agencies are under increased pressure to be more effective with the billions of dollars they award each year to grantees. While there are already a variety of reporting standards for compliance with regulations, these standards are not designed to directly help agencies improve their grantees’ outcomes, but focus on more indirect mechanisms, such as financial compliance, policy adherence and procedural consistency. In fact, we believe that far too little grant management energy is directed toward mission outcomes. And, probably too much attention is paid to compliance tasks that create only modest value for taxpayers and grant program beneficiaries.

Our experience has shown that five pragmatic actions are among the best ways to produce significantly better grantee outcomes when it comes to mission impact. More importantly, we believe that agencies can shift their mindsets from monitoring compliance to enabling performance without significantly increasing the risks of fiscal mismanagement. The five actions are:

Strengthen staff skills
Find what really works, using evidence
Recognize and reward high-performing grantees
Encourage collaboration (between grantors and grantees)
To get innovative grant outcomes, use innovative grant processes

1. Strengthen Staff Skills - Use Grantee Staff (on Temporary Assignment) to Strengthen the Skill Pool of Grant Makers

To ensure grant makers understand grantee needs and achieve program goals, some agencies bring in grantee employees to participate in planning and managing grants, typically for a temporary period (one to three years). For example, the National Science Foundation (NSF) brings university researcher grant recipients to work at NSF’s headquarters as grant managers, reimbursing their home institution for their salaries. These “co-op” staff provide NSF an unfettered perspective on grant methods and research priorities from the vantage point of the recipient. After they return to their home organization, they also provide a voice to their peers that can offer insight into NSF’s priorities and explain NSF’s processes and the rationale for them.

2. Find What Really Works, Using Evidence - Combine Analytics and Site Visits to Find Best Practices (and Combat Mismanagement)

Review program outcome data from a portfolio of grantees, using grants analytics (and simple comparison) to find which five to ten grantees have best achieved tangible mission outcomes. Then, schedule field visits with those grantees, instructing the site visit team to seek to understand the most important discretionary factors behind each grantee’s results. In addition, agencies can invite “high-performing” grantees to explain their own judgment of the root sources of their success. Grant managers should look for the discretionary factors that are most frequently cited across the successful group, and call those “evidence-based best practices.” These practices should inform future grantee training, technical assistance, and award selection criteria. Similarly, the same process in reverse (site visits of grantees found to have failed financially or received significant audit findings), will identify key factors associated with mismanagement. Grant managers should apply those factors across grantees to predict risk of mismanagement, and target compliance effort/burden.

3. Recognize and Reward High-Performing Grantees

As an agency assesses grantee performance, it should publicly celebrate grantees that achieve the strongest outcomes. Consider socializing measurable performance outcomes from those successful grantees, along with the root causes of that success, using knowledge sharing communication strategies that leverage online forums on which many grantees participate.[1] Such virtual forums, encourage cross-pollination of best practices, lessons learned, and possible resource sharing. Recognition can lead to better grantee engagement with the grantor agency, and create a community that nurtures innovative ideas aimed at advancing the agency/program’s mission.

The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) evaluates health care quality results for over 1,350 grantee health clinics. The agency assesses clinic performance focusing on patient outcome improvements such as control of diabetes, coronary disease reduction, and completion of preventive health screenings. (Data for these analyses comes from electronic health records.) HRSA uses that data to identify top performers, publicly acclaim the best clinics, reward those clinics with additional grant funding, and HRSA seeks to learn their best practice lessons to be able to share them with other grantees. The result of HRSA’s effective grant management is that clinics it funds achieve better patient outcomes than do many private clinics which serve wealthier and less isolated populations.[2]

4. Encourage Collaboration (Between Grantors and Grantees)

Some aspiring applicants don’t support the grant program’s mission – resulting in the quick rejection of the application, and discouraging the applicants. By thinking of grant applicants as customers, grant managers can collaborate with them – communicating the right information at times and through channels that are most likely to be received and understood. NASA’s Small Business Innovation and Research (SBIR) grant program uses a series of industry days for two-way communication – shaping program priorities, and helping aspiring grantees align effort to NASA’s program purposes.

Collaboration between grantors and grantees is as important post-award as it is pre-award. In fact, one of the biggest complaints from grant recipients in the REI-GWU-NGMA 2017 Annual Grant Management Survey was that information only flows in one direction: from grantees to grantors, with no feedback to grantees who originate the information. If grantors shared information back with individual grantees to show summaries across all grantees, cross-cutting trends would become clear, and each recipient could find how its performance compares to high-performing grantees, motivating better grantee outcomes.

5. To Get Innovative Outcomes, Use Innovative Grant Processes

Many agencies – competitive grantors and formula/block grantors – have discretion to award a portion of their grants toward experiments and innovations. However, few seem to do so. One success in this arena is the “IDEAS Lab on the Origins of Life” that’s been jointly managed by NASA and the NSF. In 2016, the “Ideas Lab” brought together individual researchers from different institutions and backgrounds (e.g., a botanist, a chemist, a geologist, a space scientist, etc.), and asked them to work together in ad-hoc teams to create a grant proposal aimed at solving an important problem. (The problem was: What current experiment could shed light on how organic molecules and thus life first arose on Earth?) At the end of a five-day event, ten teams presented their ideas, with five receiving an immediate award of $1 million to $5 million in grant funding from NASA and NSF to carry out their proposed experiments. Several facets of this are innovative:

Innovative grant outcomes can come from teams of people who don’t know each other before the grant process begins;
It’s possible to create a grant process that announces objectives, solicits competitive proposals, evaluates applications, and makes an award – all within five days; and
A portion of grant funding can be dedicated to innovation – looking for ways to innovate, or trying them out.

One awardee group from this process has already been able to conduct such experiments, and published their findings in a peer-reviewed international journal in 2017.

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The growth of grant-funded government programs should increase a focus by grant managers on driving grantees’ mission impact. The good news is that grant managers can improve grantee outcomes, in significant ways. We recommend that, to do so, grant managers focus on strengthening staff skills, using evidence to find and spread grantee best practices, recognizing and rewarding high-performing grantees, collaborating across grantor/grantee lines, and working to innovate in how they structure grant processes.

About the Authors:

Tom Fazio is a Senior Director at REI Systems responsible for support to clients with science and technology, and financial missions. His clients include NASA, DOE, NOAA, SBA, OPIC, OCC and Treasury.

Wagish Bhartiya is a Senior Director at REI Systems responsible for providing grants management support to our state, local and international customers. His clients include the States of Utah, Ohio, Texas, and Florida, and numerous local governments.

[1]. The National Grants Management Association’s NGMA Network is a good candidate for such a forum.

[2]. Source: REI Systems’ comparison of key health outcomes (low birthweight, hypertension, and diabetes) at HRSA clinics, compared to national data for the same outcomes reported by CDC on www.HealthyPeople.gov.

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