GRAMMY Foundation: A Grant Management Tool

Each year the GRAMMY Foundation, a division of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, solicits grant applications from over 17,000 public high schools promoting music education as a key part of their curriculum. When the Foundation asked AED to conduct a low-cost statistical research project on its pool of applicants, AED converted their hardcopy survey to a secure, online reporting tool that captured and tracked the hundreds of submissions.

The application asks music directors to describe their school's music program via 20 discrete choice questions and a brief essay. The questions are weighted so that reviewers can tabulate a shortlist of top scoring schools. Finalists are subsequently asked to submit audio and print materials for review by a panel of music industry and education professionals.

To prevent data entry errors typical of the hardcopy version, AED programmers coded the online version to verify automatically the accuracy of submitted data before saving it to the database. In addition, they incorporated the weighted percentages to provide grant reviewers with an instant ranking of the schools by their scores. For security purposes, AED also encrypted the online form to prevent unauthorized retrieval of the submitted data en route to the database.

Once the form was fully tested and launched, the Foundation sent a postcard to the music directors of all public high schools using addresses from a commercially available list of high schools, notifying them that the applications were available on the Internet. Two weeks later, the Foundation sent e-mails to 8,000 addresses from a commercially available list, followed by another e-mail reminder a week later. Within two months of launch, 148 schools had completed the online survey.

AED researchers located aggregate demographic statistics for each responding school from the Common Core of Data database (U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics -NCES). The demographic statistics included the total number of students in the school, the number of students in each major ethnic category, the number of students in the school qualifying for free and reduced price lunch, and the geographic setting of the school. They then linked these data to the online survey responses saved with each record.

The data collection and statistical analysis culminated in a 20-page report on high school music program participation rates submitted to the GRAMMY Foundation. Download full report to GRAMMY Foundation. (PDF 133 KB)

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