Appendix B - LTO Email

Appendix B

Evaluation Team Contact Materials for Evaluation Template – Invitation Email

Dear <FIRST NAME> <LAST NAME>,

On behalf of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, MDRC is gathering information on prior and on-going evaluations to assess whether they can be linked to administrative records to estimate long-term impacts. This work is part of the Assessing Options to Evaluate Long-Term Outcomes Using Administrative Data study, which is funded by the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. We are in the process of collecting information on your evaluation, <EVALUATION NAME>, and need your help to review and supply information.

This review of your prior work is part of a new effort by OPRE to determine the feasibility of linking administrative data sets to program evaluation data. Data are being collected to assess the practical and legal feasibility for accomplishing the linkages, to assess potential costs, to determine data ownership, and to identify prior history of linkage, past findings, and current availability of relevant data and metadata. The information collected on each evaluation will be submitted to OPRE, along with a memo that summarizes the findings and identifies the most promising targets of opportunity.

The attached template contains the information we could find on <EVALUATION NAME>. Can you please review the information in the template, confirm or correct as needed, and fill in any missing information? We expect it will take you 1-2 hours to review and fill in the template, depending on the availability of information. To give you a concrete illustration of the information we’re looking for, we also attached an example of a completed template based on the WorkAdvance evaluation.

Please return the completed template by <DATE> if possible. We will send you a reminder on <DATE>.

Please note that your participation in this data collection is voluntary and your information will be kept private.

We appreciate your help in this matter and believe this review of evaluations will contribute to a greater understanding of the opportunities and limitations of pursuing long-term outcomes in possible future work. If there is someone else from your evaluation team who can help answer some of our questions, we would greatly appreciate your providing their name and contact information. Otherwise, please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about this request.

Sincerely,

Richard Hendra, MDRC

PRA Statement: An agency may not conduct or sponsor, and a person is not required to respond to, a collection of information unless it displays a currently valid OMB control number. The OMB number for this information collection is 0970-0356 and the expiration date is 03/31/2018.