Introduction to BJA Performance Measures and Reporting

Transcript also available as a PDF.

GABRIELA CASTELLANOS: Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's BJA Introduction to BJA Performance Measures and Reporting Training. My name is Gabriela Castellanos and I am the TTA Specialist on the BJA Planning, Performance, and Impact Team. We are so happy that you've joined us all today, and we are excited to present this information as you prepare for the January submission period. For your awareness, this session is being recorded and will be posted to the BJA YouTube and BJA multimedia pages. Today, we're going to have some presentations by the BJA Planning, Performance, and Impact Team. Again, this session is being recorded and a copy of the presentation slides will be given to all participants following this training. If you follow--if you experience any technical difficulties during this session, please reach out to my colleague, Angela Beebe via private chat message or you can reach out to her via email.

Also, it's good to know that one common technical difficulty users experience is access to WebEx via browser versus the app. If you do have access to the WebEx app, we recommend that you use that platform instead. And as a part of the BJA Grantee Series--or Grantee Training Series today, we will be giving a brief overview of performance management at the Bureau of Justice Assistance also known as BJA.

Without further ado, I want to introduce you to our presenters, some but not at all members of the Planning, Performance, and Impact Team. The Bureau of Justice Assistance PPI Team provides wraparound training and technical assistance on data collection and analysis support to grantees and federal staff from program inception to closeout. Our presentation team consists of our Planning, Performance, and Impact Manager, Sara Debus-Sherrill and our PPI Project Team Task Lead, Eric Smith, who are responsible for team management and client coordination. They will be presenting throughout this presentation. And then there are the training and technical assistance team consisting of my colleague, Angela Beebe and myself. And we help to develop and conduct training for grantees and federal staff, similar to this training. And we respond to user helpdesk inquiries and requests for coaching.

Next is our agenda. We will start out with an overview of the performance management at BJA. We will then go over data reporting requirements. We will explore some common challenges and recommend best practices when reporting. And then we will provide some helpful resources and wrap up with our question and answer portion. I will now hand it over to PPI Project Task Lead, Eric Smith, to go over Project Management at BJA.

ERIC SMITH: Thanks, Gabriela. Hopefully you all can hear me okay.

Gabriela can give me a thumbs-up and I'll get going here. Perfect. All right. We'll now get into Performance Management at BJA. And let's talk about this in the context of BJA. Performance management is the process about which programs and grantees regularly collect data on the grant activities to determine whether they're implementing activities as intended and achieving their desired goals and objectives. Using those performance measures helps us to capture outputs and outcomes over time that enables pre and post comparisons that can be used to assess change. The performance measures and the resulting data support analysis to identify trends, patterns, and insights that can inform program decisions and improvements and demonstrate the success of grant activities and compliance to regulations.

You can find additional information and several resources on the Office of Justice Programs, the OJP Performance Measurement and Progress Reporting Information Portal at the BJA Performance website listed. And as Gabriela had mentioned already, we'll be putting in a number of links in the chat for you to follow along so that way you can access those later, but you can always find them on the BJA website.

So what does BJA use performance measures for? We like to use those to help us understand how funds are being distributed. BJA and OJP regularly track progress towards those goals and develop various reports using annual key performance indicators. We also track grant activity and progress towards those program goals. This enables BJA to respond to external requests and I'll touch on these a little bit more in a moment.

We also use data to identify errors of success and prevent potential errors for improvement. So those performance measures help us identify needs for TTA or revisions to program designs and implementation. Finally, BJA uses performance measures to comply with law and complete BJA's required reporting. The tracking of progress through performance measurement is required by multiple law and legislations, such as the GPRA, the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014, as well as a number of others. Some data is also required to be reported to various government agencies and to Congress or in responding to FOIA requests. So, what does BJA use data for specifically? Well, our team uses data to develop performance reports. These are snapshots that highlight program accomplishments and successes. We encourage the grantees to check out these and we're also in the process of developing many more. So be sure to check back soon to look at all the good work that grantees are doing across your programs. The data also supports different requests that we get and I touched on this a little bit a moment ago, but we support many different types of requests. That could be internal BJA inquiries. It could be congressional requests. That could be FOIA or Freedom of Information Act requests to support inquiries across the agency, across the Department of BJA. And we also use data to inform funding programs and TTA decisions. The results from the data-informed budget, strategic plans, and future funding, and help inform BJA priorities, NOFOs or Notice of Funding Opportunities, and our development of informational resources and guides.

So, you might be wondering, you know, what are the benefits to myself? What are the benefits to the grantees here? And there's tons of benefits for your organization and for your program. But first, you know, systemic--systematically monitoring those performance measures, as well as your own data can help you identify what's working well and what might need to--need to change. This helps you make those data driven decisions and manage and improve your grant program. Additionally, the data you provide allows BJA to provide targeted training and technical assistance resources to grantees that need it most. The performance measurement data can also be used as evidence that you are meeting your goals. This can help you--help you with your program sustainability, and help you advocate for additional resources for your program.

We're now going to spend a bit more time specifically discussing the data reporting requirements. And this is going to cover the what, the where, the when, the how of reporting data. And we'll review each of these in detail next. So what data do I report? The performance measures for your grant program can be found at the link on the screen and the link that's about to be dropped in the chat or searching BJA program performance measures on your standard web search engine like Google. BJA has established performance measures, i.e. questionnaires for each grant program. These measures were included in the original solicitation now called NOFOs that you responded to. And we encourage you to become very familiar with these performance measures before you report for the first time. I will say, periodically, we do update performance measures across different programs.
However, our team will provide advanced notice and training opportunities in the event that measures do get updated. The questionnaires can be used as a guide to track relevant data in your files and it can help you determine at what time intervals is easiest for you to collect that data. And when it's time to report, you can add those figures to get your reporting totals and we'll touch on reporting in a little bit later in this presentation.

Now, you're probably wondering what data do I report and every program has its own structured set of questions. And there are three general sections of questions and data that you will report on. The first is general award administration. The second is project specific and the last are narrative questions. This may vary slightly from program to program, but it's the general kind of layout and structure of all our questionnaires for each of the programs.

In the general award administration, these are questions that ask the administrative questions in nature about your grant activity. And I'll dive into each of these categories a little bit more in a moment. The project specific questions are for your program that measure outcomes of grant activities and demonstrate the accomplishments of goals and objectives of the BJA programs. And then lastly, there is a series of narrative questions related to the grantee's specific goals, objectives, barriers, and successes. When the grant is ending, grantees will also additional or answer additional closeout questions, which are a series of questions the grantees only need to respond to, of course, when activities have been completed and the grant is ending. So now we'll dive into each of these sections a little bit more.

The general award administration, and like I said, this captures information on grant activity during the period. If there was no grant activity, there are specific questions and responses that are required for you to answer. This is generally a brief section. But it's really important that you answer, you know, yes, if there was activity, and no, if there's not a reason for activity indicating why. And you can kind of see in the screenshot to the right. There are different options for why you may not have had grant activity, such as if you just received a grant award and you are still getting that up and running, you may have not started drawing on funds and doing any activity yet. And that's perfectly acceptable answer in those scenarios.

Diving into the next set of questions, the project specific questions, this is the bulk of the questions that you have, the bulk of the performance measures and the data that you are reporting on.

Each of the programs has questions customized to each program. And we encourage you--I would more than encourage you ask you to look at your specific questionnaires to look at the questions that you may be answering. And these questions range in a number of topics within each program and cover a wide range of areas, such as planning, training partnerships, among many others. You can see list there. That's not even inclusive all the different types of questions that you have. On the right, you'll see an example of a snippet of one of our programs, one of the questions and one of the multiple options for how you can respond to a different question. There are types of questions and each questionnaire that you may or may not be required to answer to or answer depending on your previous response.

So you might see the questionnaire, which is posted on our website and a PDF file that has more questions and you end up answering. But that may be dependent on the question that you answered and the follow on questions that you're seeing in your systems, which we'll touch on here shortly. And then the last section of questions are questions related to the narrative questions, and those are questions that you are required to complete in January, July, and at the end of their award and the narrative section grantees can highlight their accomplishments and discuss their challenges. And we'll dive into responding to those narrative questions a little bit more on the next slide.

So, when responding to those narrative questions, grantees should include a description of their program goals and when responding to the accomplishments, their challenge questions. So we've provided an example here on this slide. If a grantee has more than one goal, each goal should be listed with the corresponding accomplishment and challenge. Please feel free to number those goals and their corresponding accomplishments and challenges. So taking a look at the slide here, for example, the first narrative question reads, "What were your accomplishments, including any progress made towards achieving your grant funded program goals during the reporting period?" The grantee's response should first state that goal, followed by the accomplishment of that specific or that particular goal as you can see it on the left-hand side of your screen.

For the second question, which reads, "What challenges did you encounter if any within the reporting period that prevented you from reaching your goals or milestones?" Again, you should restate your goal and then state the challenge. This allows us to tie those challenges specifically back to the goals. Multiple--or many programs have multiple goals that they are reporting on. We want to be able to see and clearly identify what those accomplishments are or the--what those challenges may be across the--across the grantees and the programs. The narrative questions will largely be consistent across all the programs. Some of those may have some lingering updates that are happening but we're working on standardizing generally six questions across each of the programs, so that's what it should be look--that's what it should look like in your system.

So now, I'm going to talk a little bit more about developing your goals and objectives. And when you develop those for your programs, it's important to write well-defined goals and objectives to clarify your priorities and highlight criteria for success from the very beginning. So--and particularly, for new grantees who may still be working on finalizing goals for the grant, hopefully, this is--it's very helpful and formative in how we would like to see the goals and how you should work on developing those. And BJA has used the SMART mnemonic, which walks users through the important dimensions of a good goal or objective. They should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. So walking through this mnemonic, SMART--or specific, state exactly what your program will accomplish. Measurable, determine what evidence will be used to indicate progress, if needed, break large goals into smaller measurable goals to make it easier to measure progress. Achievable, make sure your goal is reasonable and can be accomplished within a certain timeframe. If it's too lofty, try to evaluate and break it down into something more manageable. Realistic, goals should be relevant to your program and the objectives of BJA's larger grant program. And lastly, timely, goals should have realistic deadline to keep tasks and activities on track. It is good practice to review and evaluate your goals semiannually to determine if changes are necessary and to assess your progress, but we also want you to, you know, work towards those goals and not necessarily change them for the sake of changing them. Make sure you use data to describe how you're doing, as well as anecdotes that describe the good work you are doing and its impact. I had touched about--or touched on the performance reports that we developed that publish--or share the highlights and successes of programs.

That information is collected in a data we want to be able to use and highlight the grant activity that is going on by our grantees. So diving a little bit further into an example of our SMART goal. So I'm going to read off an example here. Every member of the department will complete training on responding to individuals experiencing mental health crisis semiannually to increase competence and confidence in responding to mental health crises. So walking through the mnemonic here. Specific. Okay. Who is involved? In this case, the goal indicates every member of the department. Measurable, what are the parameters? In this case, it's a hundred percent completion. I think the key item here to think about is how you are then going to measure it and that can vary widely depending on your organization, depending on resources available to you. So part of, you know, making something measurable is understanding how you're going to collect that data on and ultimately, make it easier for you to report on that later on down the line. Looking at the next part, achievable. Is it feasible? And this is largely dependent or determined by the department independent on your organization. What might work for one grantee under one program may not work for another grantee under another program and that's okay. But we want to make sure that it's something specific to your organization and your program. Realistic, does this program relate to the program? The training expectation is that it will be beneficial. So in this case, looking at completing the trainings will lead to the increased confidence and competence in that area. And timely, so this goal clearly states that it's semiannually and that's the cadence for the goal.

And now, that being said, I'll turn it back over to Gabriela to talk a little bit more about where to report on this data.

GABRIELA CASTELLANOS: All right. Thanks, Eric. So BJA has two online tools that we use to facilitate performance measurement reporting. We have the Performance Measurement Tool, otherwise known as the PMT and we also have the JustGrants system. BJA is in the process of transitioning over to the JustGrants system but it's a--it's going to be a very lengthy process, so please be in contact with your Grant Administrator for more information on that.

Here is a list of award programs that are reporting into the PMT and they upload into JustGrants. Please note that some program awards require and they vary by fiscal year with the exception of the DNA Capacity Enhancement for Backlog Reduction, also known as CEBR, and BJA Postconviction, those two report semiannually and the listed programs report quarterly to the PMT.

Also, notice to the right of the screen, there are some PMT resources.

On the next slide, here is a list of award programs that solely report into JustGrants. Please note that as--just like the last slide, some program awards have reporting requirements that vary by fiscal year. If you are still confused on where to report your award data, please contact the PMT helpdesk and they can help you locate your award information. Here is the reporting schedule for PMT reporting. Note that some reporting requirements vary by reporting period. Reporting periods with a January 30th and a July 30th deadline require narrative questions and a JustGrants upload. The only time that these requirements would go outside of those two dates that I mentioned would be if you are filling out the last report of your award. This report requires performance measures, narrative questions, closeout questions, and an upload to JustGrants.

I'm now going to switch to give everyone a brief overview of how to use the PMT system. So give me a moment while I get set up. All right. And if I could just get maybe a thumbs up from one of my fellow presenters or like a verbal confirmation since I can't see you as I'm sharing the screen, that would be much appreciated. Awesome. Thank you, Liz. Okay.
So welcome to the Performance Measurement Tool, otherwise known as the PMT. It's important to note that this platform works best in Chrome and Edge browsers. On this, you'll note some important red notes saying the same thing as what I just said, as well as some important notice to users from the government.

But to access your awards page, you'll first need to log in using your email address and your password. If you've forgotten your username or password, if you're unsure whether you've been added to your award's PMT account, do not worry, simply contact the PMT helpdesk as they can help you reset your password or add you as a user to your award's PMT account. Okay. Once you have successfully logged in, you will be directed to the PMT landing page. This page shows access to all PMT systems that you hold awards with, as well as--this will include other PMT platforms such as OVC and OJJDP. So while my page contains only PMT systems relating to BJA and BJA PMT for CEBR and Postconviction, that will not be the same case for all users. But for the purposes of this training, we will only be exploring the BJA PMT.

So from here, you're going to want to click on the BJA PMT option to access--okay. So I'm going to get rid of that. To access your profile page. So now, you--that you're on your profile page, note that there are multiple accordion menus which can be opened by clicking, like so. You're going to click the Grantee Organization accordion menu and choose the organization associated with the award that you wish to edit. This is a test account that I'm going to use for the purposes of this training. I'm going to click on it to proceed. So after selecting your organization, you will be taken to the program award landing page. This page has two key sections. You will find a calendar with important reporting dates and deadlines. You'll also see, as I scroll down, resources specific to your award program. This could include resource guides, training materials, and one-pagers to help you navigate your tasks and the intricacies of your award.

Next, we're going to go to the Profile tab, right up here. This section contains contact information, which is updated every three months via JustGrants and it was entered by your Entity Administrator. If any of the details here need to be updated, please contact your Entity Administrator or you can go to your JustGrants page to ensure that this information is correct. Now, while you cannot edit your contact info in the PMT, you do have control over adding and managing users for your account. To do this, you're going to click right here for Manage Users. This will take you to a list of users associated with your organization. To manage users, if you would like to delete a user, you're going to click the Delete button next to the user's information. Or if you would like to add a new user, you're going to go--scroll down, click Add a New User and a form will appear where you can fill in the user's first name, last name, their email, and optionally their phone number.

After you complete this form and hit Save, an email will be sent to the new user with their login details as well as information on how to complete the rest of their account.

We're now going to explore the awards pages or the awards tabs. Now, these tabs will vary depending on if you are a primary grantee, a primary grantee with subgrantees, or just a subgrantee. Both of these tabs, the Federal Awards tab and the Manage Subrecipient tabs will contain awards associated with your organization. However, primary grantees with subgrantees will have two tabs for awards, with one option to select their own awards under Federal Awards and another option to select manage subrecipients to view, edit, add, or delete subrecipients from their profile. Under Federal Awards, and we're going to give it a minute to load as this test account has a lot of programs associated with it, so just give it a--give it a little second to warm up.

There we go. So under Federal Awards or for subrecipients, this will simply be labeled awards, you'll see the most recent reporting periods along with their status. So if the report for--period has been completed, you will see that as well. To view all the reporting periods, simply click View All Reporting Periods to access your historical data. So after the awards tabs, there is the Reports page. This page is where you can select current and past completed awards to download and upload to JustGrants, as well as download for your own records. You can download reports by reporting period, federal award number, data display, and format. A common user error is thinking that this tab is where you report for the current reporting period. However, the Reports tab is solely meant as a filing system for past awards.

You also have right here is the Help tab. That's your go-to resource. Here, you'll find contact information specific to your award program. For any general PMT-related inquiries, please contact the PMT Helpdesk. Their email address will be provided at the end of this training, as well as it's been provided throughout this training. But it's also at the bottom of every screen in the PMT. So I'll give it a second, in case, me scrolling down that fast cause some issues. But if you are able to see the bottom of my screen, you can see right here in this lettering. You can find the email for the BJA PMT Helpdesk, as well as the helpdesk number.

So once you finish with your reporting or you need to access another organization or PMT system such as OVC or OJJDP, you can log out simply by clicking Log Out. Please note that the system will log you out regardless after 30 minutes of inactivity. However, it is better to practice logging out of any screen in the PMT when you are not using it. This will prevent you from encountering any login loops that you could possibly encounter, as well as protect your information and keep everything in order.

So with that, that's the overview of the PMT platform. I'm going to move it on to the rest of the presentation. So, again, please give me a thumbs up if you can see the original presentation screen. Thank you, Angela. All right. And Sara. All right.

So for your convenience, here are reporting deadlines for JustGrants users. Do not worry while we are not giving a tutorial of the JustGrants system today, there are plenty of resources for JustGrants located in your JustGrants portal, as well as weekly trainings that the JustGrants team will host. Thank you, Angela, for sharing--for sharing that resource. But, yes, on the JustGrants screen, there are trainings, as well as an upcoming training from the BJA JustGrants team that will go more in-depth on how to use this reporting platform. So now I'm going to pass it on to Sara to go over common challenges and best practices. Go ahead, Sara.

SARA DEBUS-SHERRILL: Thanks, Gabriela. So we are going to talk about a few things you can be doing to make sure the data is the best it can be and accurate. So, first, let's talk about why is it so important for the data to be accurate. Earlier, Eric talked about some of the ways that we use the data at BJA. I just want to give a little bit more details here so people understand how important this is. So the data that grantees are reporting are used for a number of things, including what we have here listed below, as well as other critical functions. So this is used for legislatively mandated reporting, informing federal budgets, responding to questions from legislators, public statistics. We know this data has been used to testify before Congress. And this is also a source for us to see what grantees are doing that might become future promising practices for the field. See what--you know, what's working, what are some of the cutting-edge techniques going on and so we can start to look at that. Think about where BJA may want to focus future efforts. And then, of course, it's also important for accountability and ensuring that there is responsible use of federal funds.

And I cannot underscore enough that you are really the best person to identify if the data is correct. So I will be talking about a few things we do on our end, but the truth is you know your programs, you know your projects best, and so you're the one who, when you look at what is entered into that report, you will know if that number seems correct or something seems a little off about that. So we really ask you to be our partners in this and do everything you can to make sure that that data is accurate.

So I want to talk about a few common challenges that come up with reporting that you may want to be working with our team and internally within your team to address. So the first is that you may not have the data available that we are requesting. And we just want to remind everyone that these data requirements are a requirement for the grant, and so to remain compliant with grant, you need to make sure that you are participating in the reporting. And one of the best things you can be doing is, at the very beginning of the grant, really working to identify a plan for how you are going to collect all those pieces of information. If, for some reason, when that reporting period opens up, you do not have a piece of data despite your best efforts, what we ask is that you enter 999 into that field and then in one of the open-ended questions, provide an explanation for why you don't have that information at this time and how you're working to have that for the next reporting period.

Some other common challenges are when you have projects that are funded by multiple awards. So this could be multiple BJA awards or this could be a BJA award and an OVC award or a combination of federal and state or foundation awards. And in these situations, it's very important to make sure that you're not duplicating what you are reporting across the different awards. We don't want anything to be double-counted. So to help explain what I mean, let's say you have two BJA awards and let's say your program is one where you're serving clients. If you are serving a hundred clients through this program that's funded by two awards, we do not want you to put that a hundred clients were served for each of those awards, instead there needs to be a way to split that up across the awards.

So, for example, if the program is funded 70% by one award and 30% by the other, you could do a proportional division of those clients. So there were a hundred clients, so you would report 70 for the first award and 30 for the second. There may be another strategy that is more appropriate depending on your particular situation. So this is a sort of thing where you can work with us to identify what makes most sense. But that's just one example of how we avoid that double-counting issue.

Another common challenge is managing subrecipients. So if your program is in the PMT and if you have subrecipients, they can be directly reporting into the system. However, it's important to know that the responsibility for that data being accurate still falls on the prime grantee that was awarded the grant. And so it's important to come up with systems there to ensure that that data being reported under your award is correct, even if it's entered by subrecipients.

We also have some programs that have additional reporting requirements. So, if this is the case for your program, for instance, if there's additional documentation that's needed to support the data that you are entering into the system or sometimes we have programs where the grant managers will be collecting their own data separately, if any of those things are the case, you'll be hearing about that from your grant managers or from the orientation webinars for your specific award program. But it is helpful to know that there may be some additional requirements beyond what we're talking about today.

And for all of these or any other challenges that are coming up, we just want to let you know that our team is here to help you. You don't have to figure this out on your own. We would love to help you determine what is the best way to move forward with any of these unusual or more challenging circumstances for your particular project.

Next slide. Great. When it comes to ensuring data quality, there are some things that we do ask of the grantees. So some things that can really help with this are to assign a particular staff person who is in charge of all the performance data for the grant. So this will be someone who really understands what is required, what are the data systems going to be to provide that data, and they can be your expert in that. And then as mentioned a couple times now because it's so important, we really want all our grantees to be looking at what the required data is, what those questionnaires are at the very beginning of your grant so you can identify do you have all this data already or do you need to put something in place to collect some pieces that you are not already collecting.

That particular staff member that you have assigned, we hope that you will invite them to trainings like today. And this one is being recorded, so if they aren't here today or you don't know who that person is yet, you will be able to share this with them later. And we may also have other trainings through the course of your grant. If there are changes with the measures, for instance, we'll have trainings for that. Sometimes, we have trainings on particular issues where we're seeing grantees have difficulty with. So these are the sorts of things that would be good to get them engaged in. And then related to some of the challenges we talked about before, just making sure you're reviewing that data that the subrecipients are providing and verifying that that is correct and working on whatever system makes sense to prevent that double-counting of information, of data, either across awards as well as across reporting periods.

And we have this data collection guide that is in the chat now. And this has some other general guidelines and best practices for data collection, so this can be helpful as well.

Our role when it comes to data quality is we do a few things with this. So we do check the data on a quarterly basis. And we're looking for things like obvious errors or typos, anything that doesn't seem logically to make sense based on the combination of numbers that you're reporting for that particular reporting period, and also outliers, things that may be numbers that are substantially different from what you've reported in the past or from all the other grantees. Anything like that, we might reach out and ask some questions just to make sure that we understand what that data is and a double-check of if that is accurate as entered.

BJA grant managers may also be examining data tracking systems or requesting extra documentation on the data when they are doing site visits. So that's something to be aware of. And then one of our most important roles for ensuring the data quality is just that we want to provide help and support to you all so that you are well-equipped to do this. And so we hope you will reach out to us. If you need that help, we hope you will look at some of the resources we'll be talking about, and we just want to do what we can to support you through this. So I will switch it back over to Gabriela, who's going to talk about some of those resources.

GABRIELA CASTELLANOS: All right. Thanks, Sara. Okay. Here's some helpful resources. It's important to know which helpdesk to contact so that your issue or question can be resolved quickly. So you can contact the PMT Helpdesk if you have any questions on the following. Questions on performance measures, if you'd like to schedule a TTA session for staff on data collection, PMT reporting or understanding performance measures, if you have PMT questions and--or need an account created, if you need to unlock previously submitted reports, or if you need help creating a semi-annual PMT report.

You can contact the JustGrants helpdesk with the following. Account creation in JustGrants, navigating JustGrants to find progress reports, unlocking an account or help with your passwords, roles and permissions such as grant award administrator or entity administrator, if you are getting any error messages when you're reporting, or uploading and attaching documents.

On this slide are a few websites that are worth bookmarking so you can go back and reference them when these slides are sent out. So please remember, when the slides are sent out, to bookmark them. Specifically, I want to highlight the BJA Performance Measures webpage that has a lot of resources to help you report, as well as your performance measures. There are also various training videos on the BJA YouTube channel that may be useful as well.

All right. With all that being said, it is now time for the question and answer portion. At this time, if you have any questions, please enter them in the Q&A chat. To locate the Q&A panel, once again, you can click on the ellipsis that is at the bottom right side of the Webex window and click on the tab labeled Q&A. Choose All Panelists as the recipient. Type in your question and then enter--or click Enter once completed. So I will hand it over to Angela to read out some questions that haven't been gone to yet.

ANGELA BEEBE: So far, we have done a very good job of answering most of them as they come in. Most of the questions have been primarily about whether or not to log in to PMT versus JustGrants. It was asked if we could share the reporting schedule slide again.

GABRIELA CASTELLANOS: Sure thing. I will pull it up.

SARA DEBUS-SHERRILL: And, Gabriela, before you do that, can you actually show the slide that shows--the two slides that show the programs that report into each system? Because there seemed to be a few questions about this and one in the chat as well. So we want to make sure people understand, basically, there's these two paths, whether you're reporting into the PMT and then uploading an output of that into JustGrants or just doing JustGrants. So it really depends on which funding program your award falls under. So, quickly, maybe we can just show these so people can get oriented to that and then look at that timeframe for each of these.

GABRIELA CASTELLANOS: Of course. Okay. So I will leave this on the screen, in case, anybody would like to screenshot it or write down whether--if you see your program mentioned, I'll leave about 10 seconds for this, then I'll leave 10 seconds for programs that just upload to JustGrants, and then I will show the reporting schedules for both.

ANGELA BEEBE: A quick question “In the PMT When a subgrantee enters a comment in the Comment section of the Summary Review page, where they click the report has been"--oh, I have somebody that's added over. It says, "I cannot see their current"--just a second. I have two or three coming in at the same time. "I cannot see their comment unless I open it. Will the new PMT indicate that a comment has been entered so I don't have to open it every--you submit the report?"

ELIZABETH WAIN: This is Liz.

ERIC SMITH: Thanks, Angela. Yeah…

ELIZABETH WAIN: I can take that.

ERIC SMITH: Oh, take it. Go ahead, Liz.

ELIZABETH WAIN: Yeah, I can take that. So, currently, the way that the PMT is designed when you're looking at your subgrantee data as the prime grantee recipient is, for you--it is intended for you to open up the reports and see the data and see the comments. So, currently, that's how it's functioning and working and has been for quite some time. We don't have any--you know, updates in this in the--on our priority list to update that at the moment, but it is best practice to open up the reports and view those comments and view your subgrantee data before approving those reports. So thanks for your question, Julia.

GABRIELA CASTELLANOS: Okay. Here's the other slide for those who report just into JustGrants. I'll give that about 20 seconds and then I'll move on to the reporting schedules. Feel free, Angela, to state any more questions that are being entered in the…

ANGELA BEEBE: Yeah. We're--they're kind of coming in. One of the main ones, it's, "Does JustGrants allow subgrantees to enter directly or is that limited only to PMT?"

ELIZABETH WAIN: I can take that as well. This is Liz. So currently at the moment, JustGrants does not have the ability to capture subgrantee data reporting, so that's why we continue to use the PMT for that information.

GABRIELA CASTELLANOS: Okay. Here is the PMT reporting schedule. And here it is for JustGrants.

ANGELA BEEBE: One question was about the--an organization just accepted their grant award and are still in the process of hiring, so they wanted to confirm that they will need to submit a performance report in January and that they'll be able to note that they're still hiring and don't have client data yet, if that is okay.

ERIC SMITH: Yeah, I'll take that, Angela. So, yes, if you don't have any grant activity yet, one of your first questions will ask about that, and if you answer no, you'll answer one of the reasons why and that'll be your reporting for that period.

ANGELA BEEBE: Okay. The next question is, "Will we have to set up a PMT for our subgrantees if we're reporting in JustGrants?"

ERIC SMITH: So if you're reporting just in JustGrants, you do not need a PMT account. However, as Liz had just mentioned, there is no subgrantee reporting functionality within JustGrants at this time.

ANGELA BEEBE: Okay. At the moment, that's all that has been entered at the moment that have not been answered or addressed.

ERIC SMITH: I did see a couple questions on the resources. All the--all the slides will be sent out, the recording will be posted here in the coming days. So for anyone who joined late or wants to go through this, then click directly on those links through there. You will get those in the next couple days. I see a question on completing PMT or JustGrants entries prior to January. The reporting period is open on the first of each month, so it won't--not possible to enter an information before then.

ANGELA BEEBE: There was a question about not seeing--the person is not seeing their award for PMT or--on JustGrants and who to follow-up with. I would say to contact the helpdesk, so BJA Helpdesk. Again, for those--for the slide deck, we will be sending the slide deck out after the meeting today, as well as a copy of the recording once--later this--in the training. Thank you. So it's just that Sara had a clarifying question. “So grantees will need to report in PMT and the team will report in JustGrants.” This was coming from earlier.

ERIC SMITH: So, Sara, I'm not sure which program you're referring to, but if your--your team may report into PMT and you may be uploading your reports into JustGrants but you want to be reporting data into--to both.

ANGELA BEEBE: At this time, the other questions are being answered, so I don't have a question right now in the queue…

GABRIELA CASTELLANOS: Okay. We'll give it about five more minutes, in case, any trickle in, as well as give our panelists enough time to answer if they want to answer just in the chat.

ERIC SMITH: I will also mention, we are doing another training session similar to this in January. I don't think the invites--or the registration link has gone out for that yet. So if you have additional questions or want to send others to a similar training again in January, that will be coming you all's way soon.

GABRIELA CASTELLANOS: I see a question from Kelly Miller. It says, "Does the questionnaire include the data that is also required to go into JustGrants?" Yes, it does. That's to my understanding. You will fill out the questionnaire in your PMT account, download it as a PDF, and then submit it to JustGrants. I don't believe anything--any other questions would be required.

ERIC SMITH: Again, as Sara had mentioned, we want to support you all through this process. So if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to our team, give a call, send an email. We'll get you set up with the appropriate person to resolve whatever issue or challenge that you may be facing.

GABRIELA CASTELLANOS: All right. We're going to stay on for about three more minutes just to make sure all questions are being answered. And then if no questions are left, we will wrap up at 4:00. As we wait for other questions to be answered, I want you to know that while this session has concluded, you can still find us through Facebook, X, YouTube, and subscribe to our newsletters. Those are all listed below. You can also find more resources via the BJA website, which is also listed on the screen. We encourage you to stay connected and we hope that you enjoyed this training. Again, slides--this session is recorded and slides will be shared in a PDF form shortly after this training concludes, so please be on the lookout for those in your inboxes. But we really appreciate you all taking the time to reach out and absorb this information, so thank you so much to everyone.