Affordability Portal 2.0

Team: IP | F5 + Tableau I US Digital Response

How might we improve access to benefits by cutting down on the time and paperwork required to sign-up for programs?

Problem: The Affordability Portal seeks to raise awareness of programs for which low-income residents are eligible and cut down on the time and paperwork required to sign-up for programs.  Currently residents must apply to multiple programs individually to get a discount and cannot easily leverage previously submitted documents used to apply. 

Solution: F5 and Tableau, worked to design a mobile-friendly application that enables residents to apply to multiple programs building on Expedia's screening tool in a secure, private, and efficient way.  Rather than the resident enter data into many applications in parallel, the resident enters each piece of information once while logged into their secure profile.  Programs then pull the required data, at the request of the client, from the secure profile.  This simple solution is low-cost, feasible to implement, and can exist alongside current systems. 

This solution was made possible through work done by Human Services Department, Department of Education and Early Learning, and Seattle Parks and Recreation to test the feasibility of cross-enrollment across programs.  We proved out that verifying eligibility across programs would be near impossible to standardize and too complex to automate.  This is primarily because each program, often for state or federally mandated reasons, requires different verification documents, defines household members differently, and calculates income differently.  Thus, a simpler solution was born that would achieve the same resident-facing outcome without significant business process changes, expensive data integrations, or complex algorithms.

Contact: Leah Tivoli, Innovation & Performance, leah.tivoli@seattle.gov