Guidance on Project Outcome Statements and Impact Reporting

Like most other Federal agencies, USDA-NIFA must continually make the case to the Administration and to Congress to support funding for their research programs, including funding for the research capacity grant funds that NJAES receives. USDA-NIFA is required to report on the performance of the research funds that they allocate to us. To demonstrate the value of research capacity grant funds, USDA-NIFA relies heavily on the information you provide in your annual project reports to support their budget requests to the USDA Secretary, to the White House, and to Congress.

1. Explain the issue. What problem does your research address, and why is it an important problem? The intent here is to convince anyone who reads your statement to care about this research.
2. Describe what you are doing/what you did. Give a concise description of your tools and methods highlighting anything innovative that you are doing. Please avoid any jargon, acronyms unless previously described, and abbreviations.
3. Share what you learned. Explain or enumerate any specific outcomes or results of your research obtained during the reporting period. Use of lay language is especially important here.
4. State the impacts (actual or potential). Tie your research findings back to the issue that prompted your research. Whenever possible, include numbers and extrapolations of your likely impacts. Be as explicit as you can about the scope and scale of these impacts, and identify the stakeholder groups likely to benefit from any impacts.
   Impacts that can be expressed in quantity terms (reductions in healthcare costs, the economic value of increased crop yields or reduced crop losses, quantifiable improvements in air or water quality, etc.) make the most compelling arguments. We recognize outcomes may not be immediately observable or quantifiable for much of the research that we support here at NJAES. However, even laboratory-based researchers can discuss the potential national/public outcomes or benefits to current or future generations of their research and research findings and the influence that your work has had in the scientific community

Remember that you are writing for multiple audiences. Stakeholder groups for your research can include not only your colleagues in the scientific community, but also industry representatives, producers and consumers, government officials, media, the general public and for University leadership. This is why impacts should be simply stated in lay terms as to what you are doing and why it is important.

We know that impact reporting appears to be much easier for our applied researchers, but laboratory-based researchers should not dismiss the importance of impact reporting for your work. It may be even more important for you to be able to explain the potential impact of your work on the public good. Please appreciate how vital it is, especially in today’s economic and political environment, to take every available opportunity to educate others about your research and the importance of maintaining and enhancing research investments. NJAES and other funded project reporting is one such opportunity.