From Compliance to Capacity

Can performance reporting do more than demonstrate compliance? This brief examines the Administration for Children and Families’ shift from traditional Program Improvement Plans (PIPs) toward a more focused approach designed to help child welfare agencies identify priorities, track meaningful measures, and use data to guide improvement. The first 30 A Home for Every Child PIPs were substantially shorter than their predecessors, with fewer strategy areas and less repetition, while still maintaining a set of measures tied to each jurisdiction’s priorities.

For Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) practitioners, the brief offers a useful way to think about program performance and continuous improvement. Rather than collecting data simply because it is required, TANF teams can identify a small number of measures that help answer practical questions: Where are participants getting stuck? Which services are reaching families? Where is capacity falling short? What needs to change? Teams can then use regular data reviews to identify a constraint, test a response, and see whether the next set of data shows movement. This approach can help make performance data more useful to frontline staff and program leaders, and turn reporting into a tool for improving how TANF services are delivered.