Road Maps for Change: Adult-Serving HMRE Grant Recipients’ Rapid Cycle Learning in the 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 brief presents five infographics—one for each of the adult-serving grant recipients who participated in SIMR—called “Road Maps for Change.” These infographics present the strategies that each grant recipient focused on in SIMR, how they changed over the course of rapid cycle learning, and lessons and insights for the field.  

In SIMR, each grant recipient 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. Two others focused on improving engagement in case management.
• Increased their capacity to collect and use data to inform decision-making: Through rapid cycle learning, grant recipient staff administered feedback surveys to participants, tracked recruitment data, and analyzed social media analytics. They then 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.
• Developed tools and strategies to support strong implementation through the rest of the grant period: Grant recipients developed promising tools and strategies to develop recruitment and referral partnerships, enhance case management, deliver engaging virtual services, and encourage peer and staff-participant relationships. At the end of SIMR, the grant recipients planned to continue using these tools and strategies.

Grant recipients in SIMR tested strategies using a rapid cycle learning approach. Rapid cycle learning is a method for quickly and iteratively testing strategies to strengthen programming. It often involves successive cycles—referred to as learning cycles—to pilot strategies, collect feedback from staff and participants on how these strategies are working, and gather data to demonstrate whether the strategies are supporting improvement. Based on what grant recipients learn, staff can refine and test strategies again in a subsequent learning cycle. The length of a learning cycle is dependent upon the strategy being tested and the program setting.

HMRE grant recipients and other human services providers may be familiar with continuous quality improvement (CQI). Programs can adopt rapid cycle learning as part of their CQI process to test programmatic changes. CQI is often used to support internal improvements; whereas, rapid cycle learning can be used either for internal improvement or in partnership with researchers to build evidence for the broader field.

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. Findings from SIMR suggest that adult-serving grant recipients could consider strategies that:

• Strengthen recruitment efforts by identifying and developing new partnerships to support recruiting efforts and by strengthening existing partnerships.
• Intentionally shift to virtual services by equipping facilitators and their participants to be able to troubleshoot technological challenges and by supporting facilitators in their efforts to deliver virtual content in an engaging manner.
• Reinforce virtual workshop content by providing skill coaching sessions outside of workshop sessions.
• Strengthen case management practices by leveraging and enhancing participants’ internal motivation.

Friend, D., L. Mattox, S. Baumgartner, M. Ezzo, and A. Jordan. “Road Maps for Change: Adult-Serving HMRE Grant Recipients’ Rapid Cycle Learning in the SIMR Project.” OPRE Report #2023-065. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023.