Overview

Successful cash assistance programs can be broken into four key areas: applicant intake & approval, the application, payment integration, and ongoing support. In addition, many organizations documented how their program would interact with other civic entities with the hopes that their programs could act as case studies for cash assistance programs implemented at a larger scale by government organizations.

Intake, or the process of how you find, qualify, and verify applicants, has a downstream impact on both the applicant experience and how you can manage your organization’s data. When designing their intake process, organizations often took advantage of previously established relationships with both their direct clients and community-based organizations.

Automation vs. Speed in Implementation

• When designing for speed, it’s worth considering the impact intake might have on the effectiveness of your verification process and protection against fraud. Many organizations allowed for an acceptable amount of fraud risk in order to get cash assistance out to their applicants quickly to provide emergency relief.
• Investing in the automation of your participant intake can impact how quickly you get assistance to applicants. It can be tempting to introduce automated applicant approval from the start but waiting until a fully automated application is implemented before distributing funds can unnecessarily delay getting funds to those in need.
• To allow for a faster rollout, it was often helpful for organizations to include a manual step, or a gate, in the intake process. For example, in the National Domestic Workers Alliance Cash Assistance Platform, a human must manually click on a button that approves a batch of applicants at one time. This manual step allows the team to mitigate risk and catch unknown bugs within the platform without holding up deployment.
• Because you may not have direct contact with your potential applicants, identifying fraudulent applications in a digital cash assistance program can be difficult. Working with community-based organizations and allowing applicants to apply in smaller batches helped to keep the risk of fraud low for many organizations and allowed them to catch vulnerabilities quickly.

Building an effective application extends beyond the interface and requires intentionality around how people will find the application, how the status of applications will be tracked, where the application will be deployed, make architectural decisions, and assure applicant security and privacy.

Interface Design and Respecting Applicants Privacy

• Because the payoff for completing a cash assistance application is high, it can be tempting to underinvest in the user experience of the application. However, these users are often in complicated or challenging circumstances so reducing friction for them is key to their success. For example, when the National Domestic Workers Alliance improved the look and feel of their phone number and access code entry fields, they saw an immediate increase in the number of applicants that were able to successfully complete their applications.
• Many seemingly necessary steps of an application are often redundant and should be removed to ensure that applicants can receive assistance securely and safely. For example, organizations often found that, with the help of their legal teams, multiple consent and agreement forms could be combined to reduce the number of steps to complete an application. While this change might sound trivial, these reductions in steps reduced the perceived difficulty of completing the application and improved applicants’ perceptions of the programs and supporting organizations.
• Organizations should avoid using complicated applications to reduce the number of qualified applicants as it’s an imprecise method for reaching applicants that are most in need. Instead, organizations should focus on identifying the fewest number of questions possible to quickly identify applicants that could best be served by their program.
• In order to garner trust in the community, it is critical to consider the dignity of the applicant throughout the process. For example, offering multiple languages and highlighting relationships with trusted CBOs consistently increased the rate of application completion.

Building Trust

• Some organizations saw drop-offs of 30-50 percent because applicants thought the cash assistance program might be a scam. Organizations found that reaching out to applicants via community-based organizations (CBOs) with established relationships with their clients was an effective way to get more potential applicants to trust the program.

Support and Documentation

• Regardless of how automated the application was, it was consistently helpful to have customer support available to answer questions throughout the process. Organizations often used a combination of chat and phone support, prioritizing chat support when possible and reserving phone support for more critical issues.
• Applicant-facing documentation on your platform should clearly state how data will be used and abide by state-level privacy laws including making it clear who is administering the fund.
• Effective management of the platforms and operational processes were critical to each organization’s ability to scale its assistance. For example, the National Domestic Workers Alliance developed internal-facing applications that would allow their customer service representatives to easily update applicant records during support calls.

Hosting and Data Management

• To reduce the amount of infrastructure you need to manage, the best place to host your application is in the cloud with a managed service. For example, NDWA’s cash assistance platform was built with Elastic Beanstalk on AWS, but this type of application can be deployed similarly with other infrastructure providers.
• No single platform was deemed best for tracking the status of applications and organizations sized their databases based on the size of their applicant base. For example, organizations with a smaller number of applicants often used simple spreadsheet-like databases while organizations with a large number of applicants would use larger databases with advanced features such as free text search.
• When determining a data management tool to use, it’s important to balance the accessibility of the interface with the ability to find specific data points or trends. For example, Airtable is an incredible tool to keep data structured and accessible, but is not great at complex queries.

Privacy & Security and Fraud

• Unfortunately, many professional hackers will target non-technical organizations because they believe it will increase their chances of finding vulnerabilities. This tendency means that data security is especially important for cash assistance programs.
• There are three generic types of fraud to be aware of:
  • (A) Recipient fraud
  • (B) Professional fraudsters/ hackers
  • (C) Staff fraud
• Collecting more data increases both the risk of being a target of a cyber-attack and the cost of a successful cyber-attack. To minimize risk, only ask for the data that you need, and automate the deletion of data that is no longer needed (e.g. after applications have been processed)
  • For example, different services you may be using in the cloud (payments, text messaging, analytics, etc) will likely be logging and keeping the data for a certain period of time.
• As much as possible, keep names and sensitive data within surfaces that you control.
  • For example, you may be using a shared database with other teams/groups to store sensitive data. Realize that this data can be accessed by unknown individuals if you don’t have complete control over the service. As a precaution, managed cloud service providers will expose audit logs for data access (or similar), if properly configured.
  • You may be able to implement certain types of access control on surfaces you control. These access limitations can help ensure sensitive data is only shared within your organization to those who actually need it. For example, someone on a customer support team might need to see name and payment status, but they don't need to see other stuff (e.g. physical location). If you’re using Google Docs, this can be done by curating the list of accounts information is shared with. If you’re using a more advanced backend, this can be done through the software’s setup or configuration.
• Regardless, simple reminders to staff about data security (e.g. erasing downloaded participant data, putting screen locks and passwords on devices with access) are always helpful.
• For extra-sensitive data, tools can be used to remove certain abuse vectors, like human misuse and access to data. For example, using a chatbot as an initial interface removes the human element and prevents unnecessary access to information.
• If you’re able, creating a “data inventory” early in the development process can be extremely helpful. By mapping out what data is collected from whom, and noting where that data is stored (and who holds access to that data), it’s easier to understand any potential threats or gotchas.

Implementing payment includes making decisions as to how you’re going to distribute payment as well as what payment technologies you’re going to use. Each organization implemented a payment process that was different and was heavily influenced by the makeup of their applicant base and their preferred approach to receiving cash.

Meeting Recipients Where They Are

• Given that many applicants may be under or unbanked it’s useful to offer flexible payment options when possible.
• Regardless of the form of payment chosen, fund distribution must be discrete because of the potential for government audits.
• It was generally agreed upon that providing funds via no-fee debit cards is more secure than cash. Additionally, for unbanked residents, cashing checks sometimes involves payment of predatory fees.
• Some common payment platforms that were deemed successful are:
  • ACH Transfers for the banked
  • Money Orders that allow immediate access to cash
  • Mastercard Akimbo
  • Hyperwallet
  • Prepaid debit cards

Ongoing support includes both an organization’s ability to ensure that applicants are able to make use of their cash assistance as well as helping the applicants engage with your organization in an ongoing way.

• Cash assistance programs can provide an opportunity to start a relationship with new clients while showing them your ability to meet their needs and ultimately build trust. For example, One Fair Wage uses initial interactions as an opportunity to see if applicants are interested in getting involved in organizing and advocacy while also offering them assistance.

When thoughtfully implemented, cash assistance programs can serve as case studies for government and non-government organizations interested in running cash assistance programs at a greater scale.

• Pilots and guaranteed income experiments are acting as a crucial model for government organizations interested in offering cash assistance. Each additional well-documented cash assistance program provides insight into what does and doesn’t work when working to get assistance to those in need.

It was hard for organizations to measure demand, both generally and by specific location. This lack of clarity can make it hard for organizations to know if they’re distributing funds equitably or who they might be missing.

• Participating organizations agreed that they could benefit from a shared solution with a strong governance model to help each organization more effectively identify and verify applicants. A shared solution would help organizations identify potential applicants and also provide the data necessary to understand the impact of cash assistance programs at scale.
• Many organizations noted that, while providing cash assistance, there is a missed opportunity to refer applicants to other services, benefits, and funds they may qualify for. One nuance is that, if not done well, applicants can be off-put if they’re referred to programs that aren’t a good match for them. For example, an applicant that would benefit from cash assistance may not want or need help with financial literacy, and offering an applicant financial literacy classes could seem patronizing.

Conclusion

Cash assistance allows people to rebuild their lives on their own terms when distributed through effective, secure, and trustworthy technology. By understanding how organizations put cash in the hands of families who needed it at the beginning of the pandemic, we ensure that we are better prepared for future crises. The same technology can be used for new services, such as rental assistance, and adapted to the needs of both organizations and recipients.