OES and Treasury increase portal sign ups by non-entitlement units through to-do lists

The State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds program (SLFRF) provides $350 billion in funding for eligible state, local, territorial, and Tribal governments to support their response to and recovery from the COVID-19 public health emergency. Treasury seeks to support approximately 27,000 small cities and towns, referred to as non-entitlement units of local government (NEUs) to meet their SLFRF reporting requirements in order to promote transparency, responsibility, and equity in the use of funds.

OES and Treasury collaborated on three randomized evaluations that redesigned emails sent to NEUs to encourage them to sign up for and submit their spending reports on Treasury’s portal. OES found that messages simplifying the steps NEUs need to take through to-do lists increased portal signup by 3.1 percentage points (p < 0.001; 95% CI [0.019, 0.042]) – a 13 percent increase in signups relative to the group that did not receive the to-do list email. Messages that emphasized the ease of submission, included peer comparisons, or acted as additional reminders had no discernible effect on the timeliness of report submission.

OES publishes new intervention packs

OES has recently published intervention materials from three randomized evaluations conducted in collaboration with Treasury in 2022. In our newest resource “Timely Reporting Intervention Packs: Low-cost interventions to increase timely reporting by local governments” we share more details on each of the interventions we evaluated and capture the behavioral insights that were incorporated, with the hope that agencies can continue learning from previous efforts.