Why It Matters
Prioritizing evidence can ensure the effectiveness and impact of interventions, improve equity by addressing disparities across populations, and enhance accountability and transparency in the allocation of resources. With a clear evidence definition in hand, government workforce agencies can prioritize evidence within grants and contracts in two ways: (1) require the use of evidence-based approaches; and (2) award preference points for the use of evidence during the application review process
Overview
The most common ways that government agencies prioritize evidence in their grants as contracts are as follows:
Requiring Evidence-Based Approaches in Grants and Contracts: Workforce agencies can include language in notices of funding opportunities (NOFOs) and requests for proposals (RFPs) specifying that responses must use approaches that are evidence-based according to the agency’s evidence framework. Agencies can go a step further and provide respondents with a menu of specific strategies, models, and approaches to choose from, and might allow respondents to propose other evidence-based approaches not on the menu.
Preference Points for Evidence: Allocate preference points to grant and contract applications that meet the agency’s evidence definitions. In scoring applications, workforce agencies can award more points to applications that propose evidence-based approaches and disaggregate data to understand disparate outcomes and the equity of the results across populations. Agencies can also award more points for approaches that fall into higher-level evidence tiers.
Both of the above strategies might also include requiring that a portion of the budget be dedicated to conducting an evaluation or award preference points for the inclusion of evaluation strategies to further contribute to the evidence base.