Administration for Community 

Living 

Evaluation Policy 

Updated 2021

Introduction 

This evaluation policy builds on the 

Administration for Community Living’s 

practice of conducting program evaluation 

according to widely recognized standards 

of the American Evaluation Association1

and as defined by the Office of Management 

and Budget2. This policy reflects the 

requirements of the Foundations for 

Evidence-based Policy- making Act of 2018 

as well as the standards provided in OMB 

Memorandum M-20-123. This policy 

reconfirms ACL’s commitment to 

conducting rigorous, relevant evaluations 

and to using evidence from evaluations to 

inform policy and practice. It indicates 

ACL’s interest in conducting outcome 

focused evaluations for all ACL programs. 

1 Information about the American Evaluation 

Association evaluation standards are available at:

Yarbrough, D. B., Shulha, L. M., Hopson, R. K., and 

Caruthers, F. A. (2011). The program evaluation 

standards: A guide for evaluators and evaluation 

users (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage and The 

program evaluation standards: A guide for 

evaluators and evaluation users (3rd ed.).

2 Selected OMB program evaluation guidance is 

available at: OMB webpage titled “Evidence and 

Evaluation”

3 Downloaded 8/12/2021 M-20-12 Phase 4 

Implementation of the Foundations for EvidenceBased Policymaking Act of 2018: Program 

Evaluation Standards and Practices

ACL seeks to promote rigor, relevance, 

transparency, independence, and ethics in 

the conduct of evaluations. 

The Administration for Community Living 

(ACL) is committed to the principle that

“All people, regardless of age or disability, 

should be able to live independently and 

participate fully in their communities. 

Every person should have the right to make 

choices and to control the decisions in and 

about their lives. This right to selfdetermination includes decisions about 

their homes and work, as well as all the 

other daily choices most adults make 

without a second thought”.4 To achieve 

this, ACL “provides national leadership 

and direction to plan, manage, develop, 

and raise awareness of comprehensive and 

coordinated systems of long-term services 

and supports that enable older Americans 

and individuals with disabilities, including 

intellectual, developmental, physical, and 

other disabilities, to maintain their health 

and independence in their homes and 

communities. ACL programs support 

strong state, tribal, and local community 

networks designed to respond to the needs 

of persons with disabilities, older adults, 

and their families through advocacy, 

research, systems change and capacity 

building to ensure access to needed 

community services, individualized 

supports, and other forms of assistance 

that promote self-determination, 

independence, productivity, and 

integration and inclusion in all facets of 

4 Downloaded About Community Living on 

7/2/2018
community life.”5 The importance of this 

commitment demands continual 

innovation and improvement, and that we 

systematically evaluate our activities and 

those of our partners. Through evaluation, 

ACL and our partners can learn 

systematically so that we can make our 

services as effective as possible. 

Evaluation produces one type of evidence. 

ACL recognizes that a learning organization 

with a culture of continual improvement 

requires many types of evidence, including 

not only evaluation but also descriptive 

research studies, performance measures, 

financial and cost data, survey statistics, 

and program administrative data6. Further, 

continual improvement requires 

systematic approaches to using 

information, such as regular data-driven 

reviews of performance and progress. 

Although this policy focuses on evaluation, 

the principles and many of the specifics 

apply to the development and use of other 

types of evidence as well. 

This policy applies to all ACL-sponsored 

evaluations. While much of ACL’s 

evaluation activity is overseen by the Office 

of Planning and Evaluation (OPE), ACL 

program offices also sponsor evaluations 

through dedicated contracts or as part of 

their grant-making process. In order to 

promote quality, coordination and 

usefulness in 

5 Downloaded from the Federal Register at 

Statement of Organization, Functions, and 

Delegations of Authority; Administration for 

Community Living on 1/15/2017

6 PROGRAM EVALUATION: Strategies to Facilitate 

Agencies’ Use of Evaluation in Program 

Management and Policy Making (GAO-13-

570)Downloaded 6-1-2018 Strong evidence may

include descriptive research, clinical trials,

evaluations of innovative practices, survey

statistics, performance data, case studies, and

program administrative data.

ACL’s evaluation activities, OPE provides 

consultations and support to ACL program 

offices when designing evaluation activities 

and evaluation language for relevant 

documents such as notice of funding 

opportunity announcements (NOFO’s). 

Program offices are encouraged to discuss 

evaluation projects with OPE in early 

stages to clarify evaluation questions and 

assess methodological options. As 

activities progress, OPE staff will be 

available to review evaluation designs, 

plans, and reports. Program offices may 

also ask OPE to design and oversee 

evaluation projects on their behalf or in 

collaboration with program office staff. 

Rigor 

Credible evaluations must be managed by 

qualified evaluators with relevant 

education, skills, and experience for the 

methods undertaken. An evaluation must 

have the most appropriate design and 

methods to answer key questions, while 

balancing its goals, scale, timeline, 

feasibility, and available resources. ACL is 

committed to using the most rigorous 

methods that are appropriate to the 

evaluation questions and feasible within 

budget and other constraints. Rigor is not 

restricted to impact evaluations, but is also 

necessary in implementation or process 

evaluations, outcome evaluations, and 

formative evaluations; and in both 

qualitative and quantitative approaches. 

Rigor requires ensuring that inferences 

about cause and effect are well founded 

(internal validity); requires clarity about 

the populations, settings, or circumstances 

to which results can be generalized 

(external validity); and requires the use of 
measures that accurately capture the 

intended information (measurement 

reliability and validity). 

In assessing the effects of programs or 

services, ACL evaluations will use methods 

that isolate to the greatest extent possible 

the impacts of the programs or services 

from other influences such as trends over 

time, geographic variation, or pre-existing 

differences between participants and nonparticipants. For such causal questions, 

experimental approaches are preferred. 

When experimental approaches are not 

feasible, high-quality quasi-experiments 

offer an alternative. 

Staffing 

ACL will recruit and maintain an evaluation 

workforce with training and experience 

appropriate for planning and overseeing a 

rigorous evaluation portfolio throughout 

ACL. To accomplish this, ACL will recruit 

staff with advanced degrees and 

experience in a range of relevant 

disciplines such as program evaluation, 

policy analysis, economics, demography, 

anthropology, sociology, gerontology, 

disability studies, and public health. ACL 

will provide professional development 

opportunities so that staff can keep their 

skills current. ACL will ensure that 

contractors and grantees conducting 

evaluations have appropriate expertise 

through emphasizing the capacity for rigor 

in requests for proposals and funding 

opportunity announcements. This 

emphasis entails specifying expectations in 

criteria for the selection of grantees and 

contractors, and engaging reviewers with 

evaluation expertise. It also requires 

allocating sufficient resources for 

evaluation 

activities. ACL will generally require 

evaluation contractors to consult with 

external advisors who are leaders in 

relevant fields through, for example, the 

formation of technical work groups. 

Relevance and Utility 

Evaluation priorities should take into 

account legislative requirements and 

Congressional interests and should reflect 

the interests and needs of ACL, HHS, and 

Administration leadership; program office 

staff and leadership; ACL partners 

including Federal partners, states, 

territories, tribes, and local grantees; the 

populations served; researchers; and other 

stakeholders. Evaluations should be 

designed to represent the diverse 

populations that ACL programs serve, and 

ACL should encourage diversity among 

those carrying out the work, through 

building awareness of opportunities and 

building evaluation capacity among underrepresented groups. 

There must be strong partnerships among 

evaluation staff, program staff, policymakers and service providers. Policymakers and practitioners should have the 

opportunity to influence evaluation 

priorities to meet their interests and needs. 

Further, for new initiatives and 

demonstrations in particular, evaluations 

will be more feasible and useful when 

planned in concert with the planning of the 

initiative or demonstration, rather than as 

an afterthought. Given federal 

requirements related to procurement and 

information collection, it can take many 

months to award a grant or contract and 

begin collecting data. Thus, it is critical that 

planning for research, evaluation, and 

dissemination of evaluation products be 
integrated with planning for new 

initiatives.

Evaluations should present findings that 

are actionable and available in time for 

use. Information should be presented in 

ways that are understandable and that can 

inform agency activities and actions such 

as budgeting, program improvement, 

accountability, management, regulatory 

action, and policy development. OPE and 

program offices will work in partnership to 

inform potential applicants, program 

providers, administrators, policy-makers 

and funders through disseminating 

evidence from ACL-sponsored and other 

good quality evaluations. 

It is ACL’s policy to integrate both use of 

existing evidence and opportunities for 

further learning into all of our activities. 

Where an evidence base is lacking, we will 

build evidence through strong evaluations. 

Where evidence exists, we will use it. 

Discretionary notices of funding 

opportunity will require that successful 

applicants cooperate with any federal 

evaluations if selected to participate. As 

legally allowed, programs with waiver 

authorities should require rigorous 

evaluations as a condition of waivers. As 

appropriate, ACL will encourage, 

incentivize, or require grantees to use 

existing evidence of effective strategies in 

designing or selecting service approaches. 

The emphasis on evidence is meant to 

support, not inhibit, innovation, 

improvement, and learning. 

Transparency 

ACL will make information about 

planned and ongoing evaluations easily 

accessible, typically through posting on the 

ACL website

information about the contractor or 

grantee conducting the work and 

descriptions of the evaluation questions, 

methods to be used, and expected timeline 

for reporting results. ACL will present 

information about evaluation designs, 

implementation, and findings at 

professional conferences. and ad hoc 

meetings

Evaluation plans will be published in 

advance. ACL will release evaluation 

results regardless of the findings. 

Evaluation reports will describe the 

methods used, including strengths and 

weaknesses, and discuss the 

generalizability of the findings. Evaluation 

reports will present comprehensive 

results, including favorable, unfavorable, 

and null findings. Once evaluations are 

complete, ACL will make public 

comprehensive reporting of the findings in 

a timely manner and with sufficient detail 

so that others can review, interpret, or 

replicate/reproduce the work. ACL will 

archive evaluation data for secondary use 

by interested researchers, typically 

through building requirements into 

contracts to prepare data sets for 

secondary use. 

Independence and Objectivity 

Independence and objectivity are core 

principles of evaluation. Agency and 

program leadership, program staff, service 

providers and others should participate 

actively in setting evaluation priorities, 

identifying evaluation questions, and 

assessing the implications of findings. 

However, it is important to insulate 

evaluation functions from undue influence 

and from both the appearance and the 

reality of bias. To promote objectivity, ACL 
protects independence in the design, 

conduct and analysis of evaluations. To this 

end:

• ACL will conduct evaluations

through the competitive award of

grants and contracts to external

experts who are free from conflicts

of interest.

• The director of the Office of 

Planning and Evaluation has 

authority to approve: 1) the design 

of evaluation projects and analysis 

plans and 2) the release and 

dissemination of evaluation reports

• ACL evaluation staff strive for

objectivity in the planning and 

conduct of evaluations and in the 

interpretation and dissemination of 

findings, avoiding conflicts of 

interest, bias, and other partiality

Ethics and Equity

ACL-sponsored evaluations will be planned 

and implemented to safeguard the dignity, 

rights, safety, and privacy of participants 

and other stakeholders and affected 

entities. Evaluation participants will always 

be able to verify the validity of an 

evaluation by having direct access to an 

ACL staff member. Evaluators should abide 

by current professional standards 

pertaining to treatment of participants. 

Evaluations should be equitable, fair, and 

just, and should take into account cultural 

and contextual factors that could influence 

the findings or their use. ACL will use 

culturally responsive practices, sustained 

and intentional community/stakeholder 

engagement, and include systemic and/or 

structural analyses. ACL-sponsored 

evaluations will comply with both the spirit 

and the letter of relevant requirements 

such as regulations governing research 

involving human subjects. 

For more information about ACL 

U.S. Department of Health and Human 

Services, Administration for Community 

Living, Washington DC 20201 

Phone: (202) 619 – 0727 

Fax: (202) 357 – 3555 

Email: ACLinfo@acl.hhs.gov

Web: http://www.acl.gov