April 08, 2024
Announcing the President’s Management Agenda Learning Agenda: Public Participation and Community Engagement Evidence Challenge
By The Evidence Team
On April 8, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) announced the launch of the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) Learning Agenda: Public Participation and Community Engagement Evidence Challenge. Through this effort, OMB and GSA are offering up to $195,000 in cash prizes to Challenge Solvers to develop a toolkit with methods and metrics to help federal agencies evaluate the effectiveness of their public participation and community engagement (PPCE) activities.
This challenge is part of a broader effort led by OMB to facilitate connections with external experts to generate critical evidence needs shared via the Evidence Project Portal on Evaluation.gov. This particular effort focuses on the need for evidence articulated in the PMA Learning Agenda by the question, “What PPCE approaches are effective in increasing reach, improving inclusivity, and promoting public involvement and trust in Federal decision-making?”
The President’s Management Agenda (PMA) Priority 2 envisions the delivery of excellent, equitable, and secure services and customer experiences to the American people by and across Federal Government. Achieving this goal requires improved strategies for direct engagement with Americans of all walks of life to reimagine the delivery of Federal services. As Federal agencies embrace the importance of PPCE, they are trying new and innovative ways to extend engagement opportunities to the public, in particular communities who historically have been excluded or whose views may not be well represented through traditional public comment processes. To help agencies develop effective approaches for meaningfully engaging with the public, OMB recently published a Request for Information on the Federal Register.
As a complement to the valuable input being collected via the RFI, the PMA Learning Agenda: Public Participation and Community Engagement Evidence Challenge will develop an evaluation toolkit that compiles methods and metrics Federal agencies can use to evaluate the extent to which the PPCE efforts they adopt and implement are effective. The toolkit should support agencies in rigorously evaluating their PPCE activities to build evidence about which approaches offer an improvement to the status quo. Interested Challenge Solvers will first complete a Technical Concept Paper for Phase I of the Challenge. Technical Concept Paper submissions are due by May 21, 2024. Judges will select three winners from Phase I to each receive $15,000 from GSA and continue with the Challenge to develop their PPCE evaluation toolkits in Phase II. The selected winner of Phase II will win $150,000 from GSA. Additionally, the winner of the challenge may have the opportunity to collaborate with a Federal agency in a pilot implementation of the Solver’s evaluation toolkit as part of a PPCE activity, to the extent allowable. If the Solver expresses interest, OMB may facilitate a collaboration between the Solver and a Federal agency High Impact Service Provider to implement the toolkit to evaluate a specific PPCE activity. (Note that there is no guarantee that the winning Solver will have the opportunity to conduct a pilot implementation.)
Learn more about the Challenge here, or participate in the Challenge by visiting: Challenge.gov.
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