Making Program Acquittals Work for You

By Kate Caldecott

As published by AIGM 03 Feb 2016

Closing out a grant program should not just be a matter of financial housekeeping. Done correctly, the acquittal process lets you know whether or not a program is working, and what changes should be made in the future.

If you want to understand how well your grant program is working, then a well-designed acquittal process is a must.

Often financial acquittal is done as a standard process, but the process of collecting well thought-out project data for proper project assessment is less common. Integrating the two processes will help ensure better reporting compliance by linking program results to financial performance.

This is the time to find out if the program worked, so ask the big acquittal questions of grantees:

• Did the grantee perform the activities proposed in the application?
• How many people/areas/ units did they serve/ support?
• Did those activities result in the anticipated outcomes? Any unanticipated ones?
• What unexpected challenges or roadblocks were met along the way?
• What changed as a result of the program? What were the learnings?
• How would the Program Manager change the program if they could?
• How would the Grantee change their project if they could?
• How would members of the target population change the program if they could?

From there, once you start to receive your acquittals from grantees, you need to undertake an internal formal review process. Each project needs to have some form of internal assessment by you against what you are looking to achieve. Just like you assess at the application stage, you make a final overall project assessment at the acquittal stage. Typically, you categorise these review questions around the following:

Only by doing that and collecting the data, can you produce key analysis reports that tell you how a particular grantee, and later a particular strategy, performed.

For many grantees, the process of evaluation and acquittal reporting can be intimidating. You may want to think about how to support your applicants to think about better evaluation in the application period, rather than leaving it to end of the process which will be way too late.Ideally, it is important to establish a climate where both grantor and grantee understand the acquittals and evaluation processes as a time, not to prove themselves, but to learn.

Ask the right questions in the right place

At acquittal time, you will want to know how well your program and your grantees delivered. Including the right questions on your application and acquittal forms can greatly streamline the evaluation process.

Application form:

• Make sure your application form asks how many people/units the grant intends to serve/support. Ask for a number if relevant.
• Think to about adding in some key classification questions such as gender, age and activity type that forms baseline measure later on.
• Also, ask applicants to predict what desired outcomes* their project will achieve.
• Use both multiple choice and open-ended questions as it is a mixture of feedback that guides you.
  
  

Acquittal form:

• On the acquittal form, ask grantees how many units were served/ supported and how to compares with the original target.
• Also, ask them how close where they to achieving the desired outcome. What were the changes as a result of the program?
• Build in space for asking about learnings and insights. (These often form a great feedback tool when reviewing your program).
  
  

Acquittal review form:

This is usually the step that Program Managers let languish.

• On your own assessment form, you need to indicate how well the project went.
• Some measure of performance around project management and outputs/outcomes achieved is beneficial as well as key learnings for yourself and your grantees is important.

Run report:

• Compile all the results together in overall report (using an Excel spreadsheet).
• Look for patterns, insights and improvements for your next grant cycle.

* Some long-range outcomes (impact) may not be measurable until long after the grant/acquittal have been completed.