Conferences in August
Rose Afriyie spoke at the APHSA Education Conference in Memphis about the public and private partnerships that mRelief has developed to help families enroll in the SNAP program. She outlined the origin and impact of partnerships with DoorDash, Microsoft, Google, Lyft, Twilio and Civis Analytics.
During her session, Rose led an exercise on motivation, and everyone shared what keeps them motivated to help families access social services. Helping people meet their needs emerged as a theme from the group. One attendant shared, “Knowing that I am helping families at their most vulnerable time of need.” Several people said that the team they work with keeps them motivated.
At the end of the session, she shared about mRelief’s plans to help with timely recertification.
I presented at Twilio’s annual customer and developer conference Signal. Twilio is a communications platform that allows software developers to programmatically send text messages and make calls through its web services. mRelief has used Twilio’s platform to send text messages since 2014. At their annual conference, they provide updates on communication technology and invite their clients to present on how they use Twilio.
I began by providing an overview of the SNAP enrollment process, and then shared how we use text messaging and voice to help people enroll in the program. I walked the audience through our end-to-end process and showed the text messages that clients receive to find out if they qualify, application, attend their interview and submit all verifications.
After the presentation, the questions from the audience focused on how we accommodate different languages and how our staff supports the automated text messaging flow.
