Supporting Program Progress: Performance Measures, Data System, and Technical Assistance for the 2020 Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood Grantees

Since 2006, the Office of Family Assistance (OFA), within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has awarded and overseen federal funding for three cohorts of healthy marriage (HM) and responsible fatherhood (RF) grant programs (2006–2011, 2011–2015, and 2015–2020). HM grantees promote HM and relationships through eight legislatively authorized activities, such as marriage and relationship education. RF grantees’ legislatively authorized activities promote responsible parenting, HM, and economic stability.

OFA works with ACF’s Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) to conduct research on how to best serve families through these grants. As part of ACF’s learning agenda to increase understanding of HMRF programs and to support program monitoring and improvement, ACF requires grantees to submit performance measures data collected from people served by the program (clients) and program staff. For the 2015 grantee cohort, ACF approved a common set of performance measures on characteristics and outcomes of clients, services provided, and program operations. Grantees submit data via a web-based data collection system called Information, Family Outcomes, Reporting, and Management (nFORM).

To better understand what worked well and identify improvements for the HMRF grantees’ performance measures and data collection, ACF conducted a review to identify potential changes to the performance measures, nFORM functionality, and data collection support activities. This report describes the process to review the existing system and identify improvements and describes the planned changes for the next cohort of HMRF grantees, which ACF expects to start in 2020.

This work is part of the Fatherhood and Marriage Local Evaluation (FaMLE) Cross-Site Project, led by OPRE in collaboration with OFA. ACF has partnered with Mathematica to conduct the FaMLE Cross-Site project.