Massachusetts FY24 SJSP

The Massachusetts Statistical Analysis Center (SAC) requests funds for a core capacity-building project. The Office of Grants and Research (OGR), which houses the SAC, manages more than $279 million in state and federal grants. The SAC recently transitioned OGR from collecting grant application and award information on paper forms to an online data collection platform. The SAC would use this grant funding to develop, and pilot test a process to clean and analyze new grant reporting data and to create public-facing dashboards for two major grant programs: the Body Worn Camera Program (BWC) and the Services Training Officers Prosecutors Violence Against Women Formula Grant Program (STOP VAWA). This project would enhance the SAC’s capability to analyze data that can inform criminal justice grantmaking practices and make data easily accessible to internal program staff, external partners, the public, and other stakeholders. This project will also build the foundation for publishing similar OGR grant program data through dashboards and increase accessibility for internal and external audiences. The pilot dashboards would allow for analysis and presentation of data and findings through visualizations that can be used internally to inform grantmaking decisions or information requests from the Office of the Governor. The dashboard would aggregate data from the quarterly progress reports for the BWC and STOP VAWA grant programs each in a single interface, increasing the accessibility and ease of use for data that is currently stored across multiple Microsoft excel documents, and is very time and labor intensive to aggregate across time and grants. Additionally, data will also be published for public use via the state website, significantly increasing access to information about criminal justice grantmaking.