When your organization has a new grant, program, staff, or stakeholder, everyone will need to learn and share the skills and understanding to get things done fast and compliantly. Every awardee and program participant must be accountable to the terms of its grant agreement, and to its beneficiaries and stakeholders for its mission. You need programs to launch rapidly, be well-managed, and complete intended missions successfully. Particularly in complex federal financing and construction programs when multiple subrecipients, contractors, and developers are involved, program managers will get stronger results by including a steady flow of technical assistance (TA) running alongside financial assistance from beginning to end.

Creating a robust TA effort can help reduce the things that keep you up at night. A new program or a major issue comes with its own set of “unknown unknowns” until someone, usually the awardee or its advisors, designs policies and procedures customized to the chosen product lines or projects. From there, TA can include participant capacity assessments designed to find gaps in skills or knowledge needed to launch and administer programs and funds. Ongoing TA protects against emerging capacity gaps. When used in tandem with compliance monitoring, TA maintains capacity throughout the delivery system and life of the program. At the end of the program, TA can help extract lessons learned, which can be used to iterate future programs to make them more effective. 

Who benefits from TA?

Note that all program participants and stakeholders, including community members, local organizations, and government agencies, also benefit from TA. These groups often have a vested interest in the success of a project, but they may not have the technical expertise needed to fully engage. By providing TA in addition to robust external communications, grantees can develop stakeholders who are well-informed and capable of contributing. This can lead to greater buy-in and support, as stakeholders feel more confident in their ability to participate and influence outcomes productively.

Further, the individuals or groups who are the ultimate recipients of the project’s benefits are another key group that can benefit from TA, particularly if they will be making program decisions such as selecting a contractor for single-family rehabilitation, or when they must provide timely access for inspectors or appraisers. Instead of simply dropping press releases announcing programs or reporting milestones, aim more informative targeted communications to beneficiaries, especially including TA with clear explanations of benefits and process instructions, can help ensure that they are able to fully access or use benefits effectively.

My experience with fieldwork for federal programs showed me that residents and business owners were able to provide initial identification of critical community needs, but often lacked access to information, models, connections, and financial resources to make improvements happen. Over the years, I monitored or designed and participated in teams launching TA for small business economic recovery in lower Manhattan after the World Trade Center was attacked on 9/11, and also for a wide range of affordable housing and community development topics for cities across the country participating in the nationwide Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) family of programs (such as the Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) and CDBG disaster recovery (CDBG-DR) grants). My experience reinforced my convictions about the importance of knowledge transfer, and using TA to enable effective, compliant, and timely application of funds to analyze and solve community issues.

TA helps build stronger relationships

Providing TA can also help build stronger relationships between you and key players. By investing in the capacity of your entire delivery “eco-system”, you demonstrate commitment to the success of the project and the well-being of the community. This can lead to greater trust and collaboration, which underpins successful, effective implementation, and enables your project to better weather any setbacks.

The costs of TA: Affordable options are available

There’s a perception that delivering TA must be expensive. In the past, while larger grantees could afford to provide robust in-person TA and nice-looking publications, smaller grantees encountered difficult resource limitations in producing materials and events. Smaller organizations may have more constrained budgets and limited staff and travel budgets. Post-pandemic, with widespread public familiarity with, and access to, inexpensive internet meeting applications and websites, almost all federal grantees will have sufficient resources to provide at least basic TA to all program players. Grantees serving wide geographies have been especially successful at using internet meetings to serve larger numbers of program participants with a wide range of training and TA very cost-effectively. In some places, to enable low-income and other vulnerable persons to easily participate, libraries or community centers provide no-cost spaces with Wi-Fi for “listening” events for remote information sessions and webinars.

Working with a diverse group of organizations

Another challenge a grantee may discover is varying levels of expertise and capacity among its subrecipients. Grantees may work with a diverse group of organizations, each with different levels of experience and knowledge. Ensuring that all participants receive the appropriate level of support requires careful planning and coordination. An approach to consider is to identify lower capacity sub-awardees or vulnerable beneficiary populations and “push” TA assistance out to them, while providing a website where higher capacity participants can “pull” down the specific resources they seek.

Some pro tips

• Do not forget that you, the awardee, also need TA to launch a major program that is new to you, or to significantly update or expand an existing program. A key component of capacity building needs to start with providing training and TA for your staff, delivery systems, policies and procedures, and oversight or audit staff. Federal funding agencies usually provide compliance TA to awardees/grantees and will help you network with other awardees to exchange ideas and solutions. The agencies may also have toolkits and other TA available for program participants, such as toolkits the HUD Exchange makes available for its programs; CDBG disaster recovery and pandemic grants, for example. And, of course, you should hire and can contract for technical, compliance, and operational expertise as well.
• Require (in contracts or assistance agreements) that each program participant will accept and complete any training or technical assistance as directed by the grantee or funding agency. At a minimum, this should include launch TA, closeout TA, and any TA needed to resolve an issue such as an audit or monitoring finding or concern.
• Note that communication barriers can also pose a significant challenge to reaching stakeholders. Effective TA relies on clear and consistent communication between you and everyone participating in your programs. For many federal grants, grantees must comply with equal opportunity, civil rights, limited English proficiency, and beneficiary equity provisions that raise the stakes for communications; You must communicate to difficult-to-reach groups effectively AND compliantly. 
• For your highest-need subrecipients or severely time-constrained critical projects (such as those for disaster response or recovery), consider a strike-team model that embeds a subject matter expert within a governmental or nonprofit subrecipient. The role of the expert is to provide hands-on training on specific funder eligibility and federal cross-cutting requirements and procedures. An additional benefit is that by actively participating in day-to-day processes, subject matter experts can give feedback on areas for improvement and enhance communication between the grantee and its subrecipients at the staff level. 

Programs take time, and TA needs to continue beyond launch, through all phases. Sustaining technical assistance over the long term can be difficult. Create communications channels for subrecipients, stakeholders, and beneficiaries to submit questions, and provide just-in-time webinars or other TA to immediately address common areas of confusion or miscommunication. Taking a thoughtful approach will help your projects to timely, effective completion while building relationships to support your current and future endeavors.