🎉Announcing Georgia & Illinois Applications
Illinois residents and seniors in Georgia with no earned income can now apply for SNAP through our website. This past quarter, mRelief has released two new applications to add to our existing lineup of applications in California for Yolo & San Francisco counties. We now serve all residents of Illinois and Georgia seniors who are eligible for the Elderly Simplified Application Project (ESAP). ESAP is a streamlined application and certification process. It uses a simplified, two-page application, waives the recertification interview requirement, uses data matching to reduce the amount of client-provided verification, and extends the certification period to 36 months for elderly households with no earned income.
Of clients who completed an application on our site, 74% came to us through a paid channel. Seeing ads for SNAP can help in two major ways: by reducing the stigma that might prevent people from applying, and making applying seem simple. Advertisements normalize and encourage people to apply for SNAP, promoting dignity in the process and serving as a reminder that there are other people in a similar situation. Ads also convey that the process is attainable. The first step is just clicking on an ad rather than navigating a state’s complicated website.
The status quo for people in Illinois is to use the state’s website (known as ABE) where they can apply online. One benefit of our site over ABE is our mobile responsiveness. Of Illinois clients who completed an application, 81% did so on a mobile device. Below you can find examples of ABE on a mobile device compared with ours. mRelief’s site is more mobile-friendly because you can read an entire question without having to scroll, and the question text and answer options are larger. Once someone completes our application, we programmatically fill out ABE to submit the application.
The state of Georgia does not have a website where people can apply for SNAP through ESAP. The status quo for Georgia applicants is to print off a PDF, fill it out, and then mail or fax it in. In our flow, clients complete the application online and then we fax it in programmatically through Twilio, a cloud communications platform. This is a smoother process as the user doesn’t need to have a printer or fax machine, find the right place to send it, and then put it in the mailbox or fax.
When asked about the application process, Joyce from Illinois said, “Easy, it was very easy. [mRelief] was a big help.” Brenda from Illinois had applied a few years ago and wasn’t eligible for very much and never applied again. Until one day, she was on Facebook on her phone and saw one of our ads. She said filling out our application was “very easy, very easy, I thought it was great.” Brenda shared that she has health concerns and her SNAP benefits will allow her to buy healthy, plant-based foods that were too expensive for her to afford before.
mRelief’s application provides a way to apply for SNAP that creates a lower barrier of entry than the status quo. This is particularly important for the SNAP application, as it can be a lengthy process requiring many steps, and serves a population that already has enough stressors. We’re eager to implement similar solutions and scale our application to more states while we aim to enroll 1 million people for SNAP by 2020.
