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LSI

Understanding of National Performance Measures 

1/19/2022

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>>: Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. Before we get started, let’s 

review the zoom features we are using for this event.

The audio for this event is broadcasting by phone and online. This event is 

lecture only; the microphones are muted to reduce background noise. To adjust audio 

through your computer, go to the bottom left of the screen, click the small arrow next to 

audio settings and select a speaker.

Some viewers get better audio when streaming while others get better quality by 

phone. So, if you have any audio difficulties you may want to try a different connection 

method. There are several zoom features we will use today.

At the top of the screen, click the view options button and select exit Fullscreen to 

display the chat panel on the right side of the slides. If you need zoom technical 

assistance for this event, please email us at AmeriCorpswebinarssupport@lsidc.com.

The chat panel is disabled for attendees, it will be used by the percent are to 

provide links and resources. You can ask questions using the Q&A panel. Select for 

English and if you wish to view them in Spanish select the string text link. We are 

recording this event, let's start recording and turn over to our presenters

>>: Hi and thank you for joining us on this Wednesday afternoon my name is: 

white and I'm the senior manager of program impact and training at AmeriCorps seniors.

It is my pleasure to talk about performance measure this afternoon. Today we will 

review national performance measure for the funding opportunity from foster grandparent 

and senior companion programs here is some just basic information about the notice 

recently announced.

Just to reiterate, applications are due at close of business on February 3 of this 

year. This is a part of the series of webinars that AmeriCorps will give, this is the last and 

not series. However, we have recordings of each additional webinars that are located on 

our website. Here is our agenda for today. I'm going to do a couple of things; we are 

going to talk about national performance measure and general, for those who have 

attended our other webinars in this series you know that we really haven’t been able to 

get there without talking about performance measure a little bit of the time.

We will also start by going through the work plans and talk about how you can 

allocate your volunteers within your application. Our agency has uniform set of 

measurements that are used across AmeriCorps seniors and AmeriCorps. It allows 

grantees to measure and assess your effectiveness and communicate to key stakeholders. 

It allows AmeriCorps to tell a unified story about the impact of our programs.

As we think about why performance measures? there is a couple reasons for that. 

All in all, we are a federal program, and we take our role as stewards of taxpayer dollars 

seriously. If you receive an AmeriCorps seniors grant and you become a steward of 

taxpayer dollars as well and that comes with certain responsibilities including the 

responsibility to collect relevant data, measure your impact, and use information to

improve an increase or impact.

So, why do we measure performance one? Reason is accountability. This allows 

participants, board members community member staff and clients to see their program is 

getting results. Another reason to measure performance is to determine if they change 

you thought what happened with their intervention is actually occurring. Performance 

measure is a systematic way to collect reliable information about the inner vision. Do 
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some people require more or less intensive service to show a positive outcome even when 

an intervention is implanted exactly as planned performance measure can help you find 

ways to strengthen the intervention to make it more effective. 

Performance measurement is a way to get feedback, so you know if your 

intervention is making the expected difference and helps you decide how to make the 

most effective use of your limited resources. What are some of the benefits of using 

national performance? AmeriCorps can focus efforts on national priorities. Areas of need 

where National Service has had success and experience. National performance measures 

provide the data for a strong agency wide narrative to tell the National Service story. 

AmeriCorps will collect high quality data in the results of similar interventions to 

demonstrate the powerful impact of National Service. To ensure that AmeriCorps can get 

the data and report results with confidence, guidance from the national performance 

measure includes definitions for the intervention target population outputs and outcomes 

and information collecting data and collecting measure. Before I dive into performance 

measure, I went to briefly discuss how we structure are measures. There is a couple of 

different components. We will walk there all of the components and a bit.

You can see it is a pretty broad triangle. Gets more specific as you go up the 

paramedic. Let's quickly discuss each one of these what they mean, and we will start 

with the focus area. There are several AmeriCorps focus areas for FGP and SCP, are 

stipend programs, the primary focus areas are education, economic opportunity, and 

healthy futures. For reference, AmeriCorps has six focus areas. The objective is a general 

category within each focus area. Looking at the education focus area, you concede is 

translated into two slightly more specific objectives, school readiness and K-12 success.

We are getting more concrete in terms of specific activities that is going on that 

there are still pretty broad. Now we will get into the specific measures. These are 

reflected in outputs and outcomes. Every national performance measure output must be 

paired with an outcome. For performance measure, applicants must select one output and 

one of associated outcomes. Let's dive into outputs and outcomes. It is through outputs 

and outcomes that we are able to measure performance. We know that performance 

measurement is the ongoing systematic process of tracking your programs or projects 

output and outcomes. 

Outputs are the amount of service provided. They measure the completion of 

activities and document, and the fact individuals receive services, products were created, 

or programs were developed. Outcomes reflect the changes or benefits that occur. 

Outcomes can reflect changes in individuals’ organizations communities or 

environments. This may include changes in attitudes, knowledge, behavior, or condition. 

For example, changes within an organization may include an enhanced system to better

serve community members.

Outcomes answer the question, what difference did our service make for 

beneficiaries in general, the most compelling outcomes address changes in behavior or 

conditions of. However, what makes a change compelling is not just the type of change 

but the magnitude or amount of change. Let's talk a little bit about the type of changes 

we might see, including changes is an attitude or belief knowledge or skill behavior or 

condition.
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Outcomes regarding attitude and belief involve a change in thought or feeling for

example a caregiver may have more social support after receiving services. Outcomes 

measure knowledge and skill involving change in understanding or ability. What a 

person learns. Outcomes addressing behavior involves changing and actions such as 

conduct or habits often in a specific context. For example, a student improves class 

participation after participating in a school mentoring program. 

Finally, outcomes regarding condition and while they change and situation or 

circumstance. For example, a family is transitioned into safe affordable housing after 

receiving referrals and counseling or a community receives an afterschool program 

because a youth organization has been able to build capacity to provide resources.

Let's review our specific performance measurement requirements as it relates to 

this application. You must M a workplan that results in an output and an outcome 

specified in the national performance measure. All unduplicated volunteers or lawn care 

service years must be placed in a workplan. The maximum cost per year volunteer 

service year may not exceed the allowable cost for VSY. We have a lot of important key 

documents, the most important is the notice of funding opportunity.

However, I want to draw you to two other ones that should be used for your 

application. One of them is appendix B, national performance measure instructions and 

the second is workplan development worksheets. The national performance measure 

instruction summarizes performance measure requirements. Workplan development 

allows you to plan work plans outside of e-Grants. The tools we would use for 

performance measure are in appendix B for national performance measure instructions. 

These instructions include all of our performance measures.

National performance measures are like a menu, you will select the measures that 

best describe what you do. As you can see, they are organized in terms of focus areas. 

We do have instructions, and the beginning of this appendix and that is the place you 

would go to no more about it in depth. I also want to take a brief moment to highlight the 

workplan template which is designed to help you plan your performance measure.

 The workplan can help you organize how you will fit your performance measure 

together with the volunteer activities. We really recommend that you use the worksheets 

and use the completed worksheets to transfer the information into e-Grants. Now, all of 

this information can be found in our performance measure instructions. I wanted to walk 

through them with them. The following sections must be completed for all of our work 

plans.

Description of Community Need: The description of the community need must be 

completed for each output you select. This needs statement should explain the compelling 

need that will be addressed by the volunteers. Output: Outputs are the immediate results 

of the volunteers’ services. These are usually count- numbers of children served, etc. The 

output is selected using the pull-down menu in the eGrants.

Service Activity: The service activity (or activities) is the task that the volunteers 

will perform. The service activity description should explain what the AmeriCorps 

Seniors volunteers are doing in a way that shows how they will achieve the outputs and 

outcomes. State who the beneficiaries are, and what the volunteers will be doing with the 

beneficiaries. State how often volunteers will provide the service and for how long. State 

where the service will take place. For each output, you may select more than service 
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activity. The service activities are selected using the pull-down menu in the eGrants. For 

each service activity selected, the eGrants will select a different workplan. 

Number of Unduplicated Volunteers: For FGP and SCP, this is the proposed 

number of volunteer service years (VSY) that will be performed for each service activity.

Each VSY can only be counted once when a volunteer is assigned to a service activity. 

VSY is one VSY per 1044 hours served. We will further discuss later in a slide in the 

presentation.

Total Number of Volunteers: Here, you enter the total volunteers engaged in the 

activities, if you were to assign all of them according to each activity. In this way, 

volunteers can be counted more than once- for example, if the same volunteer does two 

different types of activities such as tutoring AND mentoring, you can account for both 

assignments in this field.

Targets: The target is the number that you anticipate achieving in the third year of 

the performance period. For example, if you think your volunteers will serve 50 children 

in Head Start in the third year of the performance period, you will enter 50 as your target.

Outcome: Outcomes are the longer term, permanent change, or improvement 

expected in the community due to the volunteers and their services. The outcome is 

selected using the pull- down menu in the eGrants. Finally, Instrument used for Tracking 

Output: This is the tool that will be used for data collection. The Instrument is selected 

using the pull-down menu in the eGrants.

I want to come back to allocating volunteer service years across our work plans. 

What does that mean? You will fill out a different workplan for each set of performance 

measures that you use. You will need to assign a certain number of unduplicated 

volunteers or VSY to that workplan. you have heard me reference Volunteer Service 

Year or VSY. This is a budget term that equals to 1,044 hours of volunteer service 

activity.

This funding opportunity requires applicants to demonstrate cost-effective 

practices in achieving performance goals through the services described in the proposed 

work plan. Applications must include work plans that meet the following minimum 

requirements: For volunteer assignments that are for stipend volunteers for every $6,500 

in federal funding, at least one Volunteer Service Year must be placed in workplans that 

result in National Performance Measure outcomes for the selected focus area.

It’s fairly simple to calculate the number of unduplicated volunteers or VSY you 

need. Common arithmetic rules should be used to determine how to round unduplicated 

volunteers in outcome-based work plans. Grantees should round to the nearest whole 

number. For example, an applicant requesting $300,000 in federal funding would require 

46.1 VSY in work plans that result in national performance measure outcomes 

($300,000/$6,500 =46.1).

Since 46.1 is less than 46.5, this would be rounded down to 46 VSY in work plans 

that result in national performance measure outcomes. As I said, a Volunteer Service 

Year (VSY) is a budget term which equals to 1,044 hours per year. For example, a 

volunteer service 2,080 hours per year (a volunteer averages 40 hours per week), serves 

as 2 VSYs while a volunteer serving 783 hours per year (averaging 15 hours per week) 

serves 3⁄4 of a VSY.
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A quick recap, AmeriCorps expects applicants to use natural forest measure as a 

part of car principal formants measuring stretch that relies on both performance measure 

and elevated data to learn from their work and make tactical and strategic adjustment to 

achieve their goals. Applicants are required to use the identified Performance Measures 

outlined in this Notice. For more information, please refer to Appendix B. Applicants 

must identify a Primary Focus Area and the work plan must include service activities in 

selected Primary Focus Area.

This funding opportunity requires applicants to demonstrate cost-effective 

practices so for every $6,500 in federal funding, at least one Volunteer Service Year must 

be placed in workplans that result in National Performance Measure outcomes for the 

selected focus area. A quick pull at the end just to see what you would choose. 

Would you choose your output and outcome targets based on? A - what you think 

is big enough number CNCS. B- An assumption that you will reach everyone in the 

community, and that the program will have its intended effects on 100% of its recipients. 

C- A realistic estimate of how many people you can expect to reach, and the realistic 

impact of the program on those people, informed by your own research, your potential 

partners and the input of others who know your community and the field. D- a dartboard.

Thank you so much for getting this right. I appreciate it. That was our 

presentation. I know we have a pretty intimate audience right now so I will see if my 

camera is working to go on camera and I as well as my colleague Emily are happy to 

answer any questions.

>>: Thank you, just a quick reminder, if you have questions this is a great 

opportunity to really pick AmeriCorps seniors collective brain you want to make sure you 

are using the question-and-answer function on zoom.

>>: As I give it a pause here, I'm going to put in the chat a link to AmeriCorps 

Senior companion placement opportunity. It is a link that will have the deadlines, 

recordings, frequently asked questions document, as well as all other materials. Again, 

applications are due by 5 PM Eastern on Thursday, February 3 of this year.

I will give it a brief moment. I do appreciate those chose to spend their afternoon 

with Emily and I today. We think this is a great opportunity for organizations across the 

country and we also want to thank you all for the work you and your organization have 

been doing. We know has been a trying couple of years, we do appreciate it and hope 

this is an opportunity that you can take a vantage of to further the impact in your 

organization and volunteers in your community.

Not seeing any questions, I will lock off and thank you everyone for taking the 

time this afternoon, we do appreciate it.