We have always reported for the October deadline because there are a lot of special awards conditions that have reports on the first nine months and then annually thereafter. So we collected our data like the artratic reports and that is also how we treated annual reports from the PIs.

Another reason is because we want to get an annual report before we give out second year’s funding. So we collect those reports after nine months and then annually and then that is always before the next funding date or before they want to know cost extension about the reports. 

Tons of time across our staff. We have 10 people involved in different aspects of reporting the initial review of all those annual reports. That takes a lot of time during October and November , like 30-40 hours of time to read those reports.

Wendy Mitman Clarke:

I pretty much block February through the end of March just for writing. I also take extra time to interview PIs and even sometimes I go even farther and interview people the PIs have worked with. Writing also gets several levels of editing. I do not take on any other big in depth projects at that point for writing or research.

We are not sure whether we're going to continue to collect annual reports at the subproject level or at the main project level. We certainly have to connect the impact statements to the subproject level, but a lot of the metrics don't necessarily get connected to the subproject level. So we haven't fully made that decision yet about collecting that annual report for a project but it's something we're thinking about.

The idea is to  look at each of these projects and decide what the emphasis is in terms of these areas of focus. Some of them will be pretty self explanatory, but then some, like the extension area,  could be more nuanced. And you can go in there and I can put percentages in based on what we think our extension effort is going to be in that year.

We're all starting to track some of our social impacts and accomplishments and write about them, but it would be interesting if we are creating metrics for our own programs.

A little bit about the development of our reporting system: when I originally came on, everybody was sending in spreadsheets and there were all kinds of typos. I used the software program that essentially designed what the graphic user interface for each of these modules might be and then we hired a web programmer who helped us before on another website. He puts this system together for us. I can't recall what the cost is,  but I'd say it was probably somewhere in the neighborhood of maybe 10 grand. We had kind of a maintenance contract with them for the last few years until they retired. 

What I did was I put together a kind of a work Action Group with a number of our agents and specialists to look over the reporting forms and the options within those forms that I've developed.  It comes up with a level of training as to how to develop guidance documents and in-service training for people to kind of teach them how to use the system.