Reporting season is in full swing, and TCEC has already held two sessions on this topic. This newsletter details the answers to some questions that came up at those sessions. If these questions don’t address what you were hoping, then come join us for the next monthly Q/A held on the first Wednesday of every month from 10:30-11:30. You can also peruse our reporting resources, including a new  FER Pre-Writing Workbook that your team can use to write your reports. 

We are new to the program and don’t have any information about what was done before we got here in regard to CX. How or where can we find this information?

In the last round of CX, LLAs submitted a BER in 2021. Your program should still have access to the CX BER in your local records and/or in OTIS. If this document still cannot be found, the narrative summary of your workplan should describe the 

If an interim report is required to be written, can that information be folded into a FER later? 

Yes.  You can do this in a few ways. One option is to treat it as a cumulative report where you keep adding jurisdictions as you continue to facilitate policy change throughout your county. Another way is to write the FER for the other jurisdictions, and then put the interim report(s) in the appendix. Another option is to copy and paste sections from the Interim Report and fold them in throughout the FER. It mainly depends on what actually happened and if there was a lot of overlap or sequence in the activities between jurisdictions.

Is the January - June and 10th Progress Report (end of contract period) still due July 31?

No. All deliverables, including FERs, BERs, and Interim Reports, are due by 5 pm PT on the last day of your contract.  For many competitive grantees, the end of your current contract falls on June 30, 2025.  

For LLAs, a 2-year contract extension moves the end of your contract to 2027. This means that LLAs will submit 01/25-06/25 deliverables, including BERs and Interim Reports, by 5 pm PT, along with all the rest of your progress reports on July 31st.  Then in 2027, LLA FERs will be submitted.  For more details about LLA FER/BER deadlines, please read on to the next question.

In the Q&A that LLAs were provided after notice of our contract extensions, we were told that a BER for all current objectives would be required for the 1/1/25- 6/30/25 progress report period. And that BERs and FERs for objectives continuing through the extension period will be due June 30, 2027. Is this still correct?

No, a BER is not required for all objectives at this time. The reporting requirements depend on your LLA’s situation and if you changed your objectives or communities of focus. 

For example, if you changed both your community or your indicator, you’re basically wrapping up the current work and starting a new. In this case, you would submit a BER to cover your project's work up to 2025. Then, the work you perform in a new community and/or new indicator beginning July 2025 will be summarized in a FER submitted in 2027.  

Basically, you close the previous work and start new with the next extension work.  Since LLAs are required to have a coalition objective, your work with coalitions will continue, and therefore, no wrap-up report is needed this year. Instead, you’ll submit a BER for your coalition objective in 2027.

Please see an updated breakdown in our newsletter from last fall as well as the updated Q/A document that CTPP posted to partners on 9/25/2024.   

Does the report need to achieve a certain number of points to be accepted?

No. You may be thinking about progress report scores. FER scores are described here. Your final progress report, which includes FERs and BERs, are scored by your PC, and they determine what “passes” or not.

We are working with immigrant populations who are very fearful about being engaged in anything, let alone public policy. We plan to mention this.  Our project was started during the pandemic, which was a very unique time to be standing up a project and engaging the community when we couldn’t do anything face to face. Do I include that in the report?

Yes. FERs, BERs, and Interim Reports should all include the vital context in which your project worked.  The report isn’t meant to sugarcoat or present only successes. It is crucial to show the challenges and situations when things don’t go as expected. We all learn from each other’s mistakes and celebrate each other’s efforts when you include all of the good, bad, ugly, and essential context.

What will happen to the evaluation reports at the end of the contract? Will they be shared publicly, or is it for internal use only?

Anything submitted to OTIS should be treated as a public document. For this reason, it is important to anonymize any information included in the reports, such as contact information, full names, or pieces of information that could be combined and reveal the identity of people. FERs can and have been used in research studies and published summary reports. 

Where can I find a template for writing an interim report?

An interim report is essentially the same as a FER or a BER. What makes an Interim Report unique is that it focuses on one community and is due after the completion of a policy objective. The content as well as the guidance and resources for writing all three (FERs, BERs, and Interim Reports) are all the same. You could access sample FERs from Rover, from Tell Your Story, or your project’s previously submitted reports in OTIS or your own local records. 

The competitive grants are only 26 months so we are doing lots of intervention work in this final 6 month project period. Do you have suggestions about writing these reports when we are still in the thick of doing the work? i.e., we don't some key "implementation and results" info yet nor conclusions.

The evaluation team needs to have enough time to analyze and summarize the data well before the due date. For this reason, it may be necessary to have a cut-off, such as 30-60 days before the end of the contract. One audience member stated they require all data to be in by May 15th so that they can include it in the FER.  We would also recommend continuing to write the report, leaving placeholders, and filling it in when the last-minute data comes in. This does not mean the work ends; we would like to emphasize that the relevant data collection must be completed well in advance. 

Do section headings in our FERs and BERs need to match the headings in the Tell Your Story scoring rubric?

Yes. Each FER should have a clearly labeled heading for each required section of the report body (Abstract, Aim & Outcome, Background, Evaluation Methods & Design, Implementation & Results, and Conclusions & Recommendations). BERs should have all of the same except for the Abstract, which is not required for Brief Evaluation Reports.

Where can we find templates for the required table of evaluation activities and timeline of key activities?

Templates for the required graphics can be found under "TYS Data Visualization" on our Final Evaluation Reports page.

What is the deadline for submitting FERs and BERs to TCEC for review?

Please see this news article from TCEC about getting help with your FERs and BERs!

Is there a limit to how much supplemental information can be included in the Appendix of a report?

There is no limit to how many files you can include in the Appendix. When including data collection instruments, you will need to upload them to OTIS as separate files.