America Achieves’ Tech Hubs Graphics Support 

January–June 2024

Challenge

In October 2023, the Biden-Harris Administration’s US Economic Development Administration announced the inaugural 31 designated Tech Hubs: regoins around the country with “cross-sector consortia... [and] strong federal support for each consortium’s vision to grow its critical technology ecosystem and become a global leader over the next decade. Designated Tech Hubs became eligible to apply for Implementation awards supporting projects in workforce development, startup support, technology maturation, infrastructure, and governance.”

In short: a federal program that gave groups around the country the chance to win grant money to develop the region’s “technology ecosystem” and become another Silicon Valley, Austin, or other fast-growing metro built around a technology industry.

Around this same time, the NY-based economic nonprofit America Achieves launched its “Good Jobs Economy” Initiative, which set out to support a number of these 31 designated Tech Hubs in their grant applications. The application itself was dense, written in “legalese,” and came with strict submission requirements (page counts, font sizes, etc.). America Achieves saw at least two opportunities to offer support:

1. Translate the opaque requirements of the grant paperwork into an easily digestible guide, perhaps through annotation.
2. Provide regions with help creating support graphics for the number of spots in the application where including images would be advantageous. 
   

Approach

The grant application was complex not just in content, but in structure. It was divided into three distinct narrative types, each with different goals, requirements, and constraints:

• Overarching Narrative, covering the consortium and project as a whole
  
• Risk Mitigation Overarching Narrative, addressing cross-project risks such as cybersecurity, infrastructure, and staffing
  
• Risk Mitigation Plan – Component Project Narratives, which repeated similar risk criteria at the level of each individual project
  

Applicants were expected to respond to all three clearly, precisely, and within strict formatting and page limits – requirements that were easy to misinterpret and difficult to visualize when working from the original legal-style guidance.

While other America Achieves Technical Advisors rewrote and simplified the application text itself, I focused on making the constraints and expectations visible. I designed a Visual Guide for each narrative type that paired an annotated sidebar with a full-length example narrative written in placeholder text.

Each Visual Guide began with a cover page outlining the purpose of the section, its rules (page limits, word counts, formatting constraints), and a checklist of required subsections. From there, the guide introduced the companion sidebar: a persistent, adjacent reference that explained in plain language what each section was meant to accomplish and approximately how much space it warranted.

By running the sidebar alongside a filler narrative of the exact allowable length, the guide helped applicants see at a glance both what was being asked for and how much room they actually had to say it. This approach translated abstract requirements into a concrete, spatial understanding that teams could use as they drafted their own submissions.

Outcome

The Visual Guide became a practical part of America Achieves’ technical assistance to regional coalitions applying for Tech Hubs Implementation funding. By making dense requirements and strict page limits easier to understand, the guide helped teams focus their narratives and submit clearer, more compliant applications.

Of the 12 regions that secured $504 million in Implementation funding in the first round of awards, six were regions that had received in-depth support from America Achieves. That success continued in a second round, when the Economic Development Administration awarded an additional $210 million to six more Tech Hubs, bringing the total to 18 funded regions, seven of which had received America Achieves’ support.

These grants support long-term regional strategies in workforce development, advanced manufacturing, and other critical technology sectors. While the work is ongoing, the early results demonstrate how clear, well-designed guidance can materially improve outcomes in complex federal grant processes.

America Achieves HQ