Generating & Reporting Results: The Systematic Identification of Intervention Effectiveness through an Evaluation Technical Assistance Center

Under the Government Performance and Results Modernization Act of 2010 (The GPRA Modernization Act), Federal programs are required to demonstrate and document meaningful returns (i.e., results) for the public's investment in such programs. This presentation will focus on the efforts of one Federal office, whose mission is to address the health needs of racial and ethnic minority populations, to systematically produce evidence of intervention effectiveness of its funded grant programs through the establishment of a systems-oriented Performance Improvement and Management System (PIMS) with an Evaluation Technical Assistance Center (ETAC) that forms the crux of the system. The presentation will describe the standardized protocols, procedures, and instruments used by the office to acquire and assess evaluation plans from all grant applicants/awardees, to identify best practices in evaluation planning likely to generate results and that can serve as exemplars for other applicants and grantees; and to regularly monitor, assess, and strengthen the conduct of grantee data collection and evaluation implementation activities to ensure emerging and actual evidence of intervention effectiveness. At the end of Fiscal Year 2012 (September), the first 3-year cohort of grantees on whom the ETAC protocols and procedures have been fully applied will have come to the end of its grant cycle and another cohort of grantees will have ended the second of three years of continuous grant funding. This presentation will identify the kinds of results (i.e., interventions with emerging and actual evidence of effectiveness) that can now, and in the future, be systematically produced and disseminated as a result of the ETAC; how other grant-funding entities within and outside of the Federal government can use the ETAC as a model in their own organizations or institutions; and how we can individually and collectively ″grow the science″ of ″what works″ in minority communities.