Request for Approval

Monitoring and Reporting System (MRS) for

Rape Prevention and Education (RPE) Program Awardees

(OMB no. 0920-1130; Exp. date 08/31/2019)

Proposed Changes to MRS: Justification and Overview

Date of Submission: March 21, 2017

Project Description

This is a change request for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Monitoring and Reporting System for Rape Prevention and Education (RPE) Program awardees (OMB# 0920-1130). This Non-Substantive change requests does not include changes to the currently approved burden and/or costs. None of the proposed changes will alter the purpose of the project, the methods for MRS data collection, or the interpretation of data reported by awardees.

RPE awardees systematically report progress on activity information to CDC annually through two reporting tools: the Work Plan Tool and the Program Report Tool. The Work Plan Tool collects awardees’ annual goals, objectives, progress, and performance towards overall cooperative agreement purpose and strategies. The Program Report Tool assesses awardees’ implementation, use of evidence-based prevention strategies, and use of the public health approach.

The purpose of this change request is to modify questions and instructions in the two MRS tools to increase the relevance and clarity of the questions. The requested changes mostly include modifications to question formats and text, as well as added instructions to clarify the information awardees should provide in response to a question. In addition, there are a few added and deleted questions to improve the relevance of questions to awardees’ prevention work. The requested changes are based on feedback from RPE project officers and awardees, the proposed changes will improve the clarity and accuracy of the questions, answer options, and instructions, which in turn will improve the quality of data reported by awardees. In addition, the formatting and text changes will improve user experience and the relevance of MRS questions to RPE awardees’ work and approach.

Proposed Changes

The proposed changes will reduce reporting inconsistencies via more focused program reporting, and will allow to provide progress updates on existing efforts and report on any new efforts, and increase the tools’ alignment and relevance with the RPE awardees’ work and strategies.

Currently, the design of the Work Plan Tool allows for pre-population of previously submitted information, and awardees only have to report on status at the next APR submission. The following proposed changes to the Work Plan Tool will maintain the Work Plan Tool’s main purpose of tracking awardees’ goals, objectives and activities by allowing awardees to report on completed work, specify new work for the next budget year, and indicate any revisions of continuing work.

Proposed changes include:

• Modifying current question formats for goals and objectives to include annual reporting status updates to indicate whether their goals and objectives will be continued, discontinued, or revised for the next budget year.

• Adding “Add New Goal” and “Add New Objective” features, which will provide awardees with the flexibility to replace discontinued or completed goals or objectives, as well as instructions to explain the new feature.

• Modifying questions about anticipated challenges and support needed to achieve goals in the next budget year to integrate successes and challenges faced in achieving their goals in previous year.

• Modifying the format and questions for evaluation related goals, objectives, and activities to more accurately reflect the awardees’ work around capacity building and evaluation. At least twelve RPE awardees are enhancing their capacity to do outcome evaluation. The current Work Plan format and questions for goals and objectives are not specific enough to accurately capture evaluation efforts in the tool. These proposed revisions maintain the Work Plan’s goal and objective format while adding more specific and relevant language to help awardees complete goals and objectives related to evaluation. Including evaluation goals and objectives versus a narrative question will reduce the burden and increase reporting consistency across awardees.

• Replacing questions about alignment between Work Plan goals and prevention strategies in the Program Report Tool’s Background Tab to a single question in the Work Plan Tool to reduce reporting burden.

The proposed changes to the Program Report Tool mostly include updating features and modifying current items with more accurate question formats, as well as deleting one question and a replacing a series of questions with a single more streamlined question. These proposed changes will reduce misalignment across tabs, data entry error, and time spent on data cleaning by both CDC staff and awardees by allowing awardees’ to more easily link their implementing organizations to their prevention strategies. The proposed changes include:

• Deleting the Background Tab in the Program Report Tool and renaming the Prevention Strategy Tab as “Implementing Organization”.

• Deleting and replacing questions currently in the Background Tab with simpler and consolidated questions in the Home Tab, the Implementing Organization Tab, or the Work Plan Tool as noted above.

• Reordering questions and sections to improve flow of information.

• Modifying instructions for awardees to explain the format, features, and how to improve accuracy of reporting.

• Replacing unclear open-ended questions with more specific open-ended or close-ended questions that will reduce burden of writing long responses.

• Modifying questions about prevention strategy reach in each implementation site to a single question about aggregate reach across sites to reduce reporting burden.

Change to Burden and/or Cost

This non-substantive change request does not include changes to the currently approved burden and/or costs. While the proposed changes include additional and more specific instructions, a few additional questions, and revisions to make questions more focused, some changes will reduce awardees’ reporting burden and offset the burden of added questions by making the tools more aligned with awardees’ processes and work. Questions have also been deleted or deleted and replaced with fewer questions. Therefore, CDC estimates that the time gained and lost will be equal, and thus there is no change in the currently approved burden.

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