Conducting Rapid Cycle Learning with Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Programs for Adults: Findings from the Strengthening the Implementation of Marriage and Relationship Programs (SIMR) Project

In the SIMR project, Mathematica and its partner, Public Strategies, collaborated with 10 HMRE grant recipients—five youth-serving grant recipients and five adult-serving grant recipients—to conduct iterative rapid cycle testing aimed at strengthening their services. SIMR focused on common implementation challenges related to recruitment, retention, and content engagement.

SIMR had two main goals:

1. to improve the service delivery of these grant recipients
2. to develop lessons for the broader HMRE field about promising practices for addressing common implementation challenges

This report describes the rapid cycle learning process and findings for the five adult-serving HMRE grant recipients that participated in SIMR. It shares how each grant recipients addressed implementation challenges and improved services through participation in SIMR and insights that can help other HMRE grant recipients strengthen their own service delivery.

In SIMR, each grant recipients developed, and tested improvement strategies tailored to their specific needs, service populations, and individual contexts, using an approach to program improvement and rapid cycle learning known as Learn, Innovate, Improve (LI²). Through their work with the SIMR team, grant recipients:

• Addressed pressing implementation challenges: Three grant recipients focused on improving recruitment, two focused on improving engagement in virtual services, and two focused on improving engagement in case management.
• Increased their capacity to collect and use data to inform decision-making: Through rapid cycle learning, grant recipients staff administered feedback surveys to participants, tracked recruitment data, and analyzed social media analytics. They reviewed these data with the SIMR team and developed insights to refine their improvement strategies.
• Developed skills for identifying and responding to emerging implementation challenges: At the end of each learning cycle, the SIMR team met with grant recipients to review and interpret data and determine next steps. When new challenges emerged, grant recipients were able to pivot to address them in later learning cycles.
• Strengthened capacity and developed tools and strategies to support strong implementation through the rest of the grant period: Grant recipients developed promising tools and strategies to improve recruitment, enhance the delivery of virtual services, enhance case management services, and deepen relationships with participants. At the end of SIMR, the grant recipients planned to continue using these tools and strategies.

Grant recipients and the SIMR team used the LI² framework to guide rapid cycle learning. LI² is an analytic and evidence-based approach to managing program improvement (Derr et al. 2017). Throughout the three phases of LI², researchers collaborate with practitioners to identify the root causes of a challenge (Learn); create innovative program improvement strategies that are participant-centered, informed by science, and sustainable (Innovate); and use rapid cycle learning methods to test and refine strategies (Improve). This report focuses on the Improve phase.

In the Improve phase in SIMR, youth-serving grant recipients conducted between two and four learning cycles. They collected different types of data to assess the success of the strategies they were testing, including interviews, focus groups, and surveys of staff and participants, workshop observations, program data, and data from nFORM (Information, Family Outcomes, Reporting, and Management), the management information system sponsored by ACF that grant recipients use to record participants’ characteristics and participation in services, monitor service use, and make decisions that are informed by data.

Through their collaboration as part of SIMR rapid cycle learning, the SIMR team and the five adult-serving grant recipients that participated generated insights and lessons to inform strong service delivery that are relevant to other HMRE grant recipients. The tools and strategies that grant recipients developed provide starting points for other organizations that want to strengthen their own HMRE services. Grant recipients interested in adopting any strategies presented in this report can do so using a continuous quality improvement (CQI) process to adapt the strategy to their specific context and then iteratively test it on a small scale to refine the strategy design and implementation:

• Build and maintain partnerships with other community organizations to strengthen recruitment efforts, such as strategies to identify and develop new partnerships along with strategies to strengthen or “level-up” existing ones.
• Be intentional about the shift to virtual services, such as strategies to equip facilitators and participants to troubleshoot technological challenges align with strategies for facilitators to deliver virtual content in an engaging manner.
• Reinforce virtual workshop content, by providing skill coaching outside of workshop sessions.
• Strengthen case management practices, such as strategies to leverage and enhance participants’ internal motivation.

Friend, Daniel, Avery Hennigar, Rebecca Dunn, Armando Yañez, Annie Buonaspina, Mark Ezzo, Camila Fernandez, Hannah McInerney, Alex Bauer, Scott Baumgartner, and Robert G. Wood (2023). “Conducting Rapid Cycle Learning with Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Programs for Adults: Findings from the Strengthening the Implementation of Marriage Programs (SIMR) Project.” OPRE Report #2023-042. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.