During the first two months of the COVID crisis in America, the city of San Antonio Texas was facing a crushing demand of public assistance applications. Faced with a manual process and suddenly working from home, combined with a recently approved $50 million increase in relief funding that needed to be distributed, city administrators needed help.
Luckily, San Antonio had worked with an enterprise Government Technology (GovTech) provider, Kinetech, a year prior on developing a mobile-first solution for utility assistance. They knew Kinetech’s technology was easy to configure and did not require any major changes to the cities existing databases or underlying processing.
Instead, it simply fed data into the existing systems, and added screening and other security features to help validate eligibility. Applicants apply with their mobile devices and the city processes the submissions with their existing funding and machines. Best of all, for every application submitted by phone, hours of transcription work for the equivalent paper application were eliminated.
In under 12 days, the City of San Antonio and Kinetech were able to a get a production ready application out to city citizens. The solution is accessible via any internet-connected device (iPhone, Android, laptop, etc).
Screenshot of the City of San Antonio's new streamlined online applications
The new application brings the entire process online for rental, mortgage, utility, and relocation assistance, replacing a time-consuming manual process. Less than a day after deployment, residents initiated over 1,100 applications via the new app; during peak demand, the application has handled intake of more than 3,000 applications in a single day.
The city has already committed $16 million of the initial $25 million allocated for relief. Because the city received additional federal funding, the City of San Antonio’s Neighborhood & Housing Services Department (NHSD) will process, approve, and distribute an additional $25 million in emergency assistance via the new app, bringing the total to over $50 million dollars.
Within 12 days, the two-person development team built the new application and successfully deployed it. In less than a week, more than $2.2 million in assistance was requested. With the help of Kinetech’s GovTech solution, our process is now fully digital, and our case workers can quickly provide feedback and help prevent residents from becoming homeless.
Without the app, applicants and city case workers would have had to put themselves at risk to submit applications in person. The manual process required caseworkers to individually contact each applicant, determine eligibility, issue the application, then process it once the applicant returned it with supporting documentation, which often presented a challenge. With the app, everything, including supporting documentation, could be submitted through a phone.
The new applications are easy to use on mobile phones enabling social distancing and reaching a broader swath of citizens
In addition, eligible applicants fall within 125% of the federal poverty line and 80% of the average median income (AMI) and do not always have access to personal transport or printers / photocopiers to submit required documentation. The new solution addresses this by allowing applicants to submit photos using their personal devices (over secure and encrypted connections) eliminating the cost of printing supporting documentation (utility bills, lease agreements, government IDs, etc) using the device’s built in camera.
The app San Antonio deployed with the expertise of Kinetech is called a “low-code” solution because it does not require a major programming infrastructure development but simply works with existing systems.
With a full solution possible in a matter of weeks, organizations may quickly implement a low-code app solution that is easy to use, improves personalized service, and nearly doubles throughput. San Antonio saw a 70% increase in applications processed in the months after implementing theirs.
This approach provides several other key benefits:
If you want to try this application out, Kinetech is offering a free license to public administrators right now. You can also contact us here or read our guide on three simple ways to speed up application processing.