During our August CoP webinar, John Bartkowski and Caroline Newkirk from Mississippi’s OD2A program joined us to talk about their Subgrantee Process. In this post John shares a little bit of background on the development of their mini-grant proposal rating process. You can download a copy of the word document at the end of the post.
Among its other activities, Mississippi’s OD2A project is focused on providing subgrant opportunities each year to promote opioid misuse prevention.
The request for proposals (RFP) for Mississippi’s OD2A subgrantee solicitation was developed by the state’s Prevention Coordinator, Jan Dawson, at the Mississippi Public Health Institute. Ms. Dawson requested and received evaluator feedback on the RFP prior to its release.
The evaluators have had extensive prior experience with subgrant processes and used the approved RFP to develop the proposal rating matrix for this facet of the project. With that consideration in mind, the application template mandated in the RFP served as a springboard to generate the proposal rating matrix.
This process is much like developing a grading rubric based on detailed directions for an assignment in an educational setting. The key purpose and components of each required application section specified in the RFP were used to create a corresponding rating domain governed by key questions and a weighted point value. The proposal rating matrix was circulated among project team members for approval prior to its use.
The matrix was designed to ensure that there is a common lens through which proposals are rated, and has worked effectively to maintain a consistent proposal assessment standard. Applicants’ proposal revisions and resubmissions, if required, are facilitated by collating constructive feedback from multiple reviewers using comments conveyed in the proposal rating matrix.
When refinements are integrated into the RFP, as sometimes occurs in multiyear projects with different subgrantee cohorts, the proposal rating matrix is checked against such revisions to ensure that expectations articulated in the RFP are consistent with the assessment standards found in the matrix.
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