Name: Startups Are Finally Taking On Food Stamps | Backchannel
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Startups Are Finally Taking On Food Stamps | Backchannel

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Working closely with local community organizations and actual clients using the app allowed the team to find other barriers quickly. Program administrators send out text reminders, in lieu of the paper mail that’s often ignored, when it’s time to send in renewal materials. An in-house bilingual team at Code for America also answers client questions via SMS.The tech behind the new crop of food stamp apps may be simple, but the user testing was not. Code for America developers also had to deal with local government bureaucracies often laden with outdated or unnecessary barriers. For instance, Code for America employees convinced one county director to eliminate an additional form they hadn’t seen any other county use. The director didn’t even know the practice was still in place.“When you’re working with many different layers of government, you can often end up with friction,” says SaraT Mayer, Chief Program Officer at Code for America.Propel founder Jimmy Chen, who cut his teeth as a product manager at Facebook before joining the social-impact incubator Blue Ridge Labs, initially set out to change the enrollment process. But when canvassing Philadelphia grocery stores, his team found that many of its potential clients—around 80 percent, Chen says —were already signed up for benefits. Like Graybill, the problem was in using the program: They didn’t have a way to check their balance without a lengthy call process. So the company pivoted to its current form: apps that functions like mobile-banking for EBT benefits.Lyndon Jackson founded Panacea Financial, a smartphone app, with the same purpose—giving EBT users a way to monitor their benefits on their phones—but his motivations are much more personal. Both he and his lead developer grew up on food stamps, so his initial product testing involved family and friends. “When I was talking to some of these people, it was very exciting because basically they had been ignored,” says Jackson. After receiving $25,000 in seed money from a Chicago pitch competition, the company is still testing. But Jackson is optimistic about its ability to grow quickly, citing relationships with other local civic ventures like MRelief, an app that connects users with community services via SMS.Propel’s founder hopes to make money by selling advertising on the app to grocery stores. FreshEBT already boasts coupon and rewards partnerships with several major chains. In contrast, Code for America now supports its CalFresh work with a combination of government funding and philanthropic dollars. It recently signed a two-year contract with the California state government for $3.6 million to continue work on the program. Given the instability of both government funding and early startups, it’s hard to say if either model is more tenable than the other.The FreshEBT has also had a significant impact on its users. In a study with Duke University, Propel found that average SNAP recipients spent more than 80 percent of their SNAP benefits within the first nine days, completely exhausting the sum by day 21. But when given an in-app tool that showed them a weekly budget instead of the entire balance, users stretched their monthly balance by two days—about six meals a month.Mobile presents a big opportunity to innovate for low-income users. According to the Pew Research Center, 10 percent of Americans are “smartphone dependent,” meaning they have no other form of internet access at home. Americans making less than $30,000 are 13 times more likely to be smartphone-dependent than those making more than $75,000 a year. CalFresh developers found that one third to about one half of searches for the application came from mobile phones, a platform on which the old site was unusable.“One of the things we noticed is that the food stamp office is full of hundreds of people waiting in line and a majority of them have a smartphone in their hand,” says Chen. “Social services had in some ways lagged behind what technology could do.”Correction: This article originally stated that Panacea Financial received $5,000 from a Chicago pitch competition. The company in fact received $25,000. This article also originally misspelled SaraT Mayer’s name; we regret the error.

Working closely with local community organizations and actual clients using the app allowed the team to find other barriers quickly. Program administrators send out text reminders, in lieu of the paper mail that’s often ignored, when it’s time to send in renewal materials. An in-house bilingual team at Code for America also answers client questions via SMS.The tech behind the new crop of food stamp apps may be simple, but the user testing was not. Code for America developers also had to deal with local government bureaucracies often laden with outdated or unnecessary barriers. For instance,...

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Startups Are Finally Taking On Food Stamps | Backchannel

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