What resources or strategies exist to help municipalities develop robust program outcome measures to incorporate into their grant applications?

Municipalities should ensure program outcomes are specific, measurable, attainable, results-oriented, and time-bound. To facilitate meaningful program outcomes, municipalities should first examine a grant’s Notice of Funding Opportunity (“NOFO”). Municipalities should consider contacting the funding agency for project guidance and direction regarding acceptable and anticipated outcomes and potential strategies to obtain those goals. When applying for funding, municipalities should aim to understand the grantor’s priorities and comply with points emphasized by the relevant NOFOs to put their grant applications in a more advantageous position.

Grant applications often include a scoring rubric or scoring considerations to help applicants develop program outcome measures. For example, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (“RAISE”) Grant Program NOFO scoring category for “Innovation” includes in the description of a “High” ranking project, the following:

“Innovation is an explicit project purpose AND the project has clear, direct, data-driven, and significant benefits beyond common practice for planning, designing, or building infrastructure for [d]eploying technologies and other practices that drive safety, equity, climate and resilience, or economic outcomes for underserved, overburdened, or disadvantaged communities or augment workers.”[1]

A scoring rubric is a useful tool in determining how likely a proposed project or program is to be funded. Self-scoring also allows applicants to reflect and adjust programs, outcomes, or other project-related components. Municipalities may also use the resulting score as guidance for future grant cycles.

Further, municipalities may refer to the funders’ websites to access specific award requirements and archives of past awards, applications, and project abstracts. Municipalities can also connect with past award recipients to improve the municipality’s understanding of program outcome measures and lessons learned. Municipalities may also consider requesting copies of successful application packets and any supporting materials from past award recipients to use as a reference.

Municipalities should also carefully review the funders’ compliance and reporting requirements to ensure the necessary criteria are measured. In addition, municipalities may benefit from conducting research on comparable grant-funded programs and reviewing the applicable outcomes and other data measurement tools related to those programs. 

Partner and stakeholder alliances can also help develop funded projects and foster ongoing coordination and collaboration between stakeholders, including sharing data and letters of support.

Finally, the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted the way many funders and applicants communicate. Many federal, state, and local funders have transitioned to online grant applicant briefings, and recorded information sessions can now be found on agency websites. Municipalities may also attend online, or in-person funding availability listening sessions and ask agency representatives questions. Funders are often willing and helpful collaborators in the grant application development process, as are agency representatives.

Last Updated: February 2, 2023