Table of Contents
- Executive Summary
- Introduction
- Aligning Around a Clear Vision
- Determining your Funding Strategy
- Choosing Your Partnerships with Community-Based Organizations
- Privacy Best Practices
- Implementing Your Program
- Managing the Program
- Delivering Cash
- Building Toward the Future
- Additional Resources
- Worksheet 1: Putting your Cash Assistance Program Strategy in Place
- Worksheet 2: Program Checklist: Use two weeks into your program
Delivering Cash
Key takeaways from this section:
- Know whether your recipients are unbanked or have traditional banking options
- Understand the pros and cons of one-time payments versus recurring ones
- Decide how you will communicate with applicants throughout the process
- Decide how you’ll issue notifications to applicants and recipients
- Understand how you’ll deliver cash based on what’s best for your recipients
- Decide whether you’ll rely on a payment manager
- Decide how you’ll offer customer service
"We all know these very, very disturbing stories of people going hungry… so we try to do this in a way that is dignified and restoring humanity”
The final step in the process is determining how to distribute funds based on the needs of your community. There are a variety of options including prepaid single use cards, reloadable multi-use cards, checks, and direct deposit. Earlier in the guide, we discussed technology platforms for cash delivery. In this section, we cover other considerations for cash distribution.
How do your recipients manage their money? Are they unbanked? If so, you’ll want to consider options that do not require having a bank account. The best way to select your payment method is to first understand how your recipients can most easily accept and cash a payment.
How will you notify recipients that they’ve been approved? Applicants that are experiencing increased need will have a lot of anxiety and concerns about their application, including confirming that it was successfully submitted and received and awaiting notification of their adjudication status (approved or denied). It is important that you set up a system for notifying the applicant of their status, whether they’ve been approved or denied, and when they should expect to receive funds (if they were approved), so that they can monitor the delivery. This might include regular email or SMS updates to the recipient.
Do your recipients need an in-person drop-off or pickup option? Concerns about privacy and data security can conflict with social distancing measures. Still, you should consider the concerns that your community members and stakeholders will have, either as it relates to the data you are collecting about them and the risk of misuse or asking them to show up somewhere in person. A few organizations conducting in-person pickup or delivery of checks or gift cards have also used this as an opportunity to deliver paper goods or food items.
What form do you want the payment to take? Despite calling this cash assistance, we have yet to encounter any group offering paper money to their recipients. The options we’ve seen include debit cards, prepaid cards or cash cards; gift cards; direct deposit such as Venmo, Paypal, or ACH; and checks.
Do you want to use a third-party program manager? By this, we don’t mean one of the payment platforms we mentioned in the technology section above (such as Usio or Hyperwallet). Here, we are referring to strategic partnerships with organizations such as the National Domestic Workers Alliance who, through their platform Alia, are partnering with cities, states, and other organizations, allowing them to use their entire system for their cash fund. GiveDirectly has also partnered with other organizations, such as Propel, but handles the application and payment distribution process.
How are you going to manage customer service? Cash recipients need to have some way of getting in touch to resolve issues and ask questions. Some organizations are providing support by conducting outreach calls to verify approved applicants’ information or to confirm that they received their payment, while other organizations are monitoring email inboxes for incoming inquiries. Other organizations are conducting a follow-up survey with the recipient about their experience, their use of funds, etc. In either scenario, you should expect that your organization will see a significant increase in inbound requests and be prepared to respond.
There also needs to be a way for cash recipients to seek technical assistance when they need it—and CBOs aren’t always the best to fill this function, as they often don't have technical resources or expertise. One of the benefits to using a third-party card distributor is that they can also provide technical assistance and customer support.
“This is not just a software solution where we give users a login and disappear. We have relationship managers. We offer customer service in English and Spanish. We offer card owners real help from human beings.”
*Note that if you are involved in running a cash assistance program and you have lessons of your own to share, believe that we left something out, or believe that we got something wrong, please let us know. We’ll be collecting feedback through the end of July. Thank you!