There’s a nice profile of Barbara Dorf, HUD’s Director of the Office of Departmental Grants Management and Oversight, in this Federal Times report about recipients of the National Public Service Award. In it, Barbara is quoted talking about HUD’s Logic Model for grants: 

“Anytime you make a change, everything is ugly,” Dorf said, referring specifically to HUD’s Logic Model, introduced in 2003 to analyze grant applications. “Then by the second year, people said they could deal with it. In the third year, people said they loved it. And by the fourth year, [grant recipients] were asking why all the other agencies weren’t doing this.” 

With Logic Model, Dorf said, “we put [our grants] out there with a common face. There are five factors for awards — five basic things that HUD looks at. So we created a model that incorporates these factors.”

The result has been a valuable tool in analyzing not only the applications, but the funded programs as well. The agency is getting better data because the process allows for the reporting of activities, output measures and outcomes. The grant recipients give HUD their projections and then report against those projections, and the outcome is a data model. It’s better reporting and better data, Dorf said. 

This is indeed pretty darned cool!