Submitted to: Washington, DC 20024 Submitted by:
9300 Lee Highway Fairfax, VA 22031
May 3, 2021
Supporting Statement for
Paperwork Volunteer
Generation Fund Bundled Evaluation Part
B. Collection of Information
AmeriCorps
250 E. St., SW
ICF Incorporated, LLC
https://www.icf.com
Reduction Act Submissions
Employing Statistical Methods
For this evaluation, most of the data collection will involve qualitative interviews or focus groups of small samples. We will administer one survey of all organizations that have participated in volunteer management training/capacity building to examine their experiences, perceived impacts.
The universe of projects to be included in this data collection is shown in Exhibit B-1. Since the full universe of projects will be included, no statistical sampling methods will be implemented.
Exhibit B-1. Estimated size of universe to be sampled
Population |
Universe: grantee/individual organization |
Sample: grantee/individual organization |
Organizations participated in volunteer management training/capacity building |
14/9600 |
14/9600 |
For the organization survey, we will include all organizations that have participated in volunteer management training or capacity building (~9600) from 14 grantees received AmeriCorps Volunteer Generation Fund grants in 2022-2023. These grantees were identified by ICF through an extensive grant application review and the organizations will be further identified by the grantees and or their program implementers.
We will generate descriptive statistics for each item in organization survey. Descriptive analyses including means, frequencies, standard deviations will help to answer questions about program design, implementation, and the resulting outcomes.
All the statistics produced will be descriptive. No inferential statistics will be used.
No unusual problems are anticipated.
The organization survey will be administered one time in fall 2022.
For organization surveys, the list of organizations will be provided to ICF by participating grantees and/or their program implementers. The list will include names and emails.
Before each data collection, participating
grantees will email a pre-notification and encourage all perspective
respondents to participate in the survey. Within one week of the
pre-notification, ICF will follow up with a recruitment email
providing a link to the
15-minute survey URL programmed by
Qualtrics. Before responding to the survey, participants will be
asked to read the consent form describing the purpose of the survey.
The form assures that participation is voluntary and that responses are confidential and provides contact information for the study lead and Institutional Review Board (IRB). After providing consent, participants will proceed to answer the survey. Respondents will be given one week to respond to the survey. The research team will continue to monitor the completion. We will send two reminders on a weekly basis to non-respondents. Respondents will be sent a “thank you” for their participation.
We estimate the response rate will be around 20%. Organizations that receive the volunteer management training are not direct AmeriCorps grantees (i.e., State Commissions). The estimate is grounded in the experience of conducting survey of nonprofits that are not grantees of the agency.
For example, in the Social Innovation Fund National Assessment, we achieved 35% for non-selected applicant organizations and 12% for the nationally representative sample of non-profits. A non-response bias analysis will be conducted using auxiliary data, including demographics, from the sampling frame. Any strong predictors of non-response may be candidates for building a response propensity model, which could then be incorporated into the non-response adjustment as part of the survey weights for this group.
The survey design, data collection procedure, and analysis approaches have been reviewed and approved by the AmeriCorps Office of Research and Evaluation. In addition, as described in Section A.8., the research plan has been reviewed by an external Technical Working Group consisting of six nationally recognized experts in evaluation of national services and a Field Working Group consisting of six program leaders in AmeriCorps. Finally, the survey instrument, consent form, and recruitment letter were reviewed and approved by ICF IRB.
Agency Unit
Amy Borgstrom, Associate Director of Policy, COO Immediate Office, AmeriCorps, 202-606-6930
Mary Hyde, Director, Office of
Research and Evaluation, AmeriCorps,
202-606-6834
Lily Zandniapour, Research & Evaluation Manager, Office of Research and Evaluation, AmeriCorps, 202-606-6939
Jehyra M. Asencio-Yace, Research Analyst, Office of Research and Evaluation, AmeriCorps, 202-956-9736
Contractor
Xiaodong Zhang, Project Director, ICF, 703-251-0883
Jing Jun, Senior Analyst, ICF, 703-225-2328
File Type | application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document |
Author | Holbrook, Brynn |
File Modified | 0000-00-00 |
File Created | 2021-10-07 |