white paper on performance management for community ... - FACA

NASCSP 2013
UNDERSTANDING THE NATIONAL PERFORMANCE INDICATORS OF ROMA
The National Performance Indicators (NPIs) are connected to the Six National Goals of ROMA,
and provide specific areas that can be used to demonstrate the outcomes of CAA interventions.
The NPIs represent a considerable amount of work and deliberation by some of the best and
brightest Community Action leaders. There is considerable agreement in the field that the
measures are indeed representative of the work of CAAs and of the outcomes of CAA program
participants.
In some of the NPIs, activity effectiveness is measured by comparing the target number of
outcomes expected with the actual number of outcomes achieved. These success rates have
been high, as evidenced by the most recent CSBG Annual Report, which also compares reported
outcomes over time.
Nevertheless, in every focus group, listening session, survey, and interview conducted by the
ROMA Next Generation COE over the past four months, we have repeatedly heard “There are
too many things to report.” It’s important to remember that not every agency is expected to
report on every indicator. While there are a large number of individual indicators included in
the NPIs, the list is actually an a la carte menu from which individual agencies should report
only on outcomes appropriate to their activities. The list began in 2004 with a core set of the
outcomes most commonly reported by local agencies but increased over time as local agencies
expressed frustration at not being able to report outcomes not listed. The national reporting
system has tried to balance the tension between comments from the field that assert there are
too many things included and those that assert there is not a specific place to report the
entirety of each agency’s outcomes.
Other challenges inherent in the use of the current NPIs include the following:
While individual indicators in the NPIs were carefully considered and debated by
stakeholders, the connection between indicators and goal achievement is not
articulated.
As there is no report on the number achieving the Six National Goals (only the numbers
achieving the indicators of the goals), it appears that local agencies, who enter the data,
and State CSBG Offices, who aggregate the data, are responding to individual elements,
not reporting how the elements are coming together to achieve overall national goals or
the Community Action mission.
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