How to apply for a grant

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Screen shows Workplace Injury Prevention Grants. Learn more about Return on Investment.

Woman's voice provides the following narration.

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Nau mai, haere mai, welcome to ACC's learning module for workplace injury prevention grants.

The focus of this module is to help you to learn more about return on investment in the context of a grants application.

ACC is legislatively required to produce a favourable return on all investments for injury prevention purposes. Therefore, we focus our investments on activities that will be the most effective in preventing injuries, ensuring value for money for the people who fund the scheme - that's the businesses and workers.

To help us estimate the return on investment you'll need to provide key information about your intervention as part of the full grants application process. We explain this throughout the module. We use this information, along with other assumptions, to model the benefit projection of the proposal over 10 years.

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Screen shows What is Return on Investment (ROI). Woman's voice continues.

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The first section of this module provides an overview of return on investment which we refer to as R-O-I. Safer workplaces mean people can return home safely to their whānau.

Workplace safety grants fund injury prevention interventions that look to reduce harm and injury to people in the workplace. It is important to understand how R-O-I will be used in the evaluation of injury prevention proposals.

However R-O-I is only one component of a successful workplace safety grant application.

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Screen shows diagram with three circles explaining further requirements for an application. These read Will result in a reduction in harm in the workplace. Clearly aligns to one of the investment priorities. Demonstrates maturity of the health and safety system.

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ACC also requires evidence that the initiative will result in a reduction in harm in the workplace, clearly aligns to one of the investment priorities, demonstrates maturity of the health and safety system.

At a high level, ACC utilises a core model with a simple set of inputs to calculate R-O-I. These concepts that are shown on screen will be explored in more detail throughout this module. Visual

Screen shows six circles with the words Target population, type of injuries, how many people you will reach, uptake on your intervention, what impact the intervention will have, and decay rate. These all factor in to R-O-I.

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From a cost perspective R-O-I estimates the avoidance of claims and associated injury and rehabilitation costs to the ACC scheme.

Our R-O-I model makes assumptions around the number of claims that will be avoided if the intervention realises its projected benefits.

In simple terms, ACC expects a $2 return, at least, on every dollar invested in a project.

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Screen reads How do you document R-O-I in your Grant Application. It shows an animated drawing of a grant application.

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The next section of the module will help you to understand how to document your R-O-I as you complete your grant application. Start by thinking about how you will demonstrate your chosen intervention or interventions will achieve the results you're looking for.

You'll be required to outline your intervention logic. An intervention logic describes the logical relationship – the cause and effect - between the proposed solution or intervention and the expected outcome. You must be able to clearly demonstrate how the proposed interventions activities will result into outcomes and benefits for the target sectors in ACC. We refer to this as The Logical Pathway.

We recommend starting with some informed assumptions that will feed into the six key input areas.

Target population - outline clearly who will be the target population of the intervention, state which industry or sector groups you will be collaborating with, and how many workers will be engaged.

This will demonstrate the projected reach of a project i.e. how many businesses and workers will be reached by the intervention.

Types of injuries - you will also be required to identify the relevant injury claim categories that are being targeted. This will demonstrate the opportunity for future claim savings. Outline how many people or groups your intervention will reach from the target population. This is usually an approximate percentage.

Of those reached within your target population, how many do you expect will take action? We call this uptake.

What impact the intervention will have i.e. how effective do you predict your intervention will be?

Decay rate is the assessment of how many workers will stop using the change over time out of the total who initially uptake the intervention. This will be explained in a video tutorial later in this module.

From an R-O-I perspective, ACC requires the breakdown of costs required to design, develop, and deliver projects within the intervention.

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Screen shows six circles including the areas where information and research can be found and reads Published research, ACC published data, Industry sector groups such as CHASNZ, Worksafe NZ and Stats NZ.

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To access key information for your application we recommend using the websites and resources on screen. These include ACC published data, WorkSafe New Zealand, Stats New Zealand, published research and industry sector group information such as CHASNZ.

In summary, when thinking about key inputs for R-O-I, here are the three top questions to consider. Who are we getting to? That's the reach. How well are we getting to them? Effectiveness or efficacy. And how much are we spending? That's the investment.

The next part of the module will demonstrate how R-O-I is calculated at ACC and walk through an example.

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Screen reads Examples of how R-O-I is calculated. It shows a calculator on the right hand side. It then swipes to another slide which reads R-O-I Theory worker uptake reach. It shows a graph of reach and decay reach over 10 years. A male voice takes over the narration.

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Worker uptake reach - The uptake reach is mapped by a cumulative sigmodal curve as shown here and there is a delay leg at the beginning where an intervention is being designed.

Once in delivery, the reach accelerates until market saturation is reached where it slows down. In this case there is a 2-year lag and the sigmodal curve tops out at 17,000 full-time equivalent employees.

In the first year of delivery, a calculated amount of cohort is reached and this reduces year on year as decay takes effect. This is calculated for each year going forward until all 10 years have been mapped. In this example you can see that the 17,000 full-time equivalent employees reach is eaten away by the decay each year.

The claims avoided is calculated based on the cumulative FTE reach. Each year it's important to note here that ACC's Grant scheme only provides 3 years of funding, so at year four the knowledge extension and sustainability plans need to takeover to continue the reach into the market.

Bringing all the individual years' decay reach data together shows us the cumulative result.

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Screen reads Walk through of an R-O-I example. This is followed by a demonstration of an Excel spreadsheet with data.

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Here is a walkthrough example calculation using the trucking and logistics industry as a target.

Claims cost - To establish the average claims cost per claim the transport postal and warehousing industry is selected and the sub-industry classifications are filtered to trucking and logistic. This gives a view of the total lifetime claims cost of $38.5 million with an average claim cost of $6,457. On the industry extracts, the same industry filters are applied and this provides analytics and business demographics.

You can see it shows a total of 10,673 businesses that have 6,651 claims and 2.7 fatal claims.

These have been averaged over a 3-year period. It also shows an estimated FTE of 48,282 along with claims rate information and other various stats. Of interest is the graphics here on estimated FTE per business size and the claims rate per FTE per business size.

This gives us an idea of what different sized businesses the workforce are participating in and where higher claims rates are occurring. In this case most of the industry is in large businesses – greater than 100 FTE and the claims rate is fairly high and consistent across the small to large business sizes.

Also you will note here that the AEP flag is set to 'no' as we exclude the accredited employers from the workings. With a target industry set we can specify the intervention model calculation inputs - the uptake efficacy and decay. In this case, 30%, 4% and 30% respectively.

You'll also note there is two additional models for the knowledge transfer and fatals. The knowledge transfer is generally left as is and does not have a large impact on the overall R-O-I fatality claims however, do cost ACC a significant amount more than other claims.

So establishing the efficacy in this base can be useful. The investment cost is entered here along with the lag years and the industry growth rate. On the result side of the page, this case shows 184 claims avoided providing a benefit of $1.8 million from an investment cost of $700,000 giving us a return on investment of $2.59. This is a simplified internal Excel-based calculator that ACC uses to assess grant applications.

Once a grant is established, there is additional work needed to refine these assumptions for input into ACC's full R-O-I assessment tool.

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Screen reads R-O-I what's needed to calculate claims avoided. 

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R-O-I and what's needed to calculate claims avoided. Through the life of the intervention, ACC requires you to provide information on who you have reached with your intervention.

This is so that we can compare those reached against those that have not and determine the number of claims avoided. This information would include the intervention being implemented, including but not limited to, training services or products or even conferences - anywhere you would make impact on the industry, their workers, and their safety environment.

The best information to provide ACC is the company names, their ACC numbers, and their NZBN numbers – that way we can pull them together analyse the claim trends before and after delivery of the intervention and compare them against the balance of the industry.

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Screen reads Any questions? For any questions on R-O-I please contact us on injury prevention grants at A-C-C dot co dot nz. Screen changes to read Or visit our website www dot a-c-c dot co dot nz forward slash for dash business. The ACC logo is at the bottom left of screen.

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Should you require further support, please contact the team at injurypreventiongrants@acc.co.nz or you can visit our website at acc.co.nz/for-business.

From the workplace safety team at ACC, we wish you the very best with your application.