Federal Grants Management: Improving Transparency

This white paper complements the Improving Outcomes report by examining more fully the important challenge of effective grant program communication and transparency. It argues that federal grant programs want to communicate to advance three discrete transparency objectives: improving outcomes and operational quality, strengthening accountability, and demonstrating results. It offers examples of different approaches grant programs have used in the past to make progress on these three transparency goals.

It considers ways to measure whether grant program communication efforts are working as hoped and ways to make grant program communication efforts more effective. It also talks about multiple bodies of research that can help grant programs communicate more successfully and recommends that grant programs start working together to find, build, and share relevant research to make progress on their transparency objectives.