Smart Chicago was happy to march in the Bud Billiken Parade along with the Gray Era Brass, Youth-Led Tech instructors and participants, and other community member. Here’s pics:
We also helped them manage their first mass texting campaign during the parade. More to come on that!
Note: this is a guest post by Rose Afriyie of our partner mRelief.
How do you keep your finger on the pulse of user needs? At mRelief.com, a startup with non-traditional users — beneficiaries of public assistance — this is a question that we constantly ask ourselves. We are helping our users solve for long wait times by providing them an avenue to help them assess their eligibility for public assistance through text messaging conversations and online questionnaires that help them gauge whether it is worth it to complete extensive applications. These forms return response pages and text messages that help them determine their eligibility and local resources through a partnership that we have with Purple Binder.
Our users don’t have a lot of economic power in society. An average online mRelief user is paid $1,321 a month and those who text in to determine their eligibility make $150 less in earned income. When you have decreased purchasing power, technology is seldom built with your needs in mind. But in interviews and surveys, our users have shared that they are humbled by our willingness to learn how we can better serve them and provide relief to the process of asking for government help.
Since we launched in September last year in Chicago, we had to commit to some listening strategies— activities we engaged in to hear our users and meet them where they are. Considering that we had 134 percent online user growth between May and June and that between June and July we almost tripled the number of text messages processed by our system, we think we are on to something. We would love to share one key listening strategy that contributed to getting us to this point: The CUTGroup.
Landing Page Before CUTGroup:
Landing Page After CUTGroup:
Civic User Testing Group (CUTGroup)
Since we launched mRelief, we conduct quarterly user surveys to get a sense of what makes our users tick. In 4th quarter of last year, the revelation was 82 percent of respondents didn’t pay for SMS which gave us the affirmation needed to launch our SMS strategy in November 2014.
But the most in-depth survey by far has been the CUTGroup test we participated in during Q1 of this year, an initiative from Smart Chicago to to help developers listen to the needs of their users. It combines observational analysis with insightful questions through surveys.
CUTGroup insights on our website usability combined with Google Analytics data on form completion and bounce rate were catalysts for redesigning our entire site with key leads on what should be areas of focus. Especially helpful was the notion that our icons on our pre-CUTGroup landing page were not clearly understood by 4 out of 6 of the users who mentioned our icons.
Other features that were the result of usability feedback led to rethinking our calculator by positioning a link to it near income questions and making all popovers/help text pop out as soon as a user enters data into a field. Based on typos, resulting from auto-correct and human error, we also revamped our SMS experience with more notices and additions that left users feeling like they weren’t penalized for mistakes. We helped users who texted in stay on the same text message if they made an error– all made possible through observational analysis in the CUTGroup.
Golden Nuggets for Future Consideration
I live 8 minutes from the Martin Luther King Community Service Center where we launched our first pilot involving case workers who served as navigators for our tools. There are times, on my way to work, that I will stop in and just wait with the folks we serve. I will listen. Observe folks — the phones they use, the questions asked about eligibility and surmise what the growing pain points are. For many startup co-founders, in-person surveys are time-intensive and are an “and” strategy combined with other world wide web magic. So, I also want to share two dope insights that we hope to integrate into listening strategies for the future:
So chime in, folks, tell us how are you listening?
See how we have integrated learnings into our site at www.mrelief.com
mRelief is also currently looking to pair with folks who have expertise in Angular JS. E-mail us at [email protected] if you are interested in supporting tools that modernize public benefits for all.
As part of the CivicWorks Project, we’ve helped launch a partnership between Promptly.io and A Safe Haven to provide the Promptly text-based followup services to A Safe Haven clients.
A Safe Haven is a social enterprise that provides comprehensive and vertically integrated approach uniquely designed to address root causes of poverty and homelessness for social and economic development to achieve sustainable self-sufficiency.
A Safe Haven serves individual adults, families with children, youth and has programs for veterans and residents who are reentering society after serving prison time for nonviolent crimes. A Safe Haven helps to provide individualized case management, shelter, food, treatment, education, job training, access to employment and affordable housing. A Safe Haven has served more than 65,000 clients and provides services daily to 1,200 people.
Prompt.ly is a product from civic tech company Postcode.io. The consulting company was founded by three former Code for America fellows (Andy Hull, Reed Duecy-Gibbs, and Tamara Manik-Perlman). Promptly was originally a Code for America project created for the San Francisco Human Services Agency. During the fellowship year, the team discovered that one of the most common problems with social service delivery was that recipients of CalFresh (SNAP benefits) would be disenrolled because a letter wasn’t received or responded to in time. They created the Promptly app which sends a text message to the recipient when they need to contact the office. This means that people have time to respond to the message before they get disenrolled.
One of the challenges that face A Safe Haven is following up with their clients after they’ve left the program. Clients often move and it’s not always easy to maintain contact people once they’ve left. If A Safe Haven was aware that somebody needs additional services – such as career counseling – then they can offer it if It’s also more difficult to track progress over the long term.
Through the CivicWorks Project, we’re providing A Safe Haven a license for Prompt.ly. A Safe Haven will use the software to text follow-up messages to their clients to see how they’re doing. This will enable A Safe Haven to both track the progress of their former clients as well as reach back out to residents who may need further assistance. We’ll be blogging about their progress as time goes on.
Special thanks to the inimitable Christopher Whitaker for running the show on this.
For more information about A Safe Haven, check out their website here.
Last week I spoke at the Personal Democracy Forum about the Jackie Robinson West Little League baseball team, open data, and what we should do as practitioners of civic tech and members of society.
Here’s a video:
And here are the notes I used for the talk:
Yesterday morning here at PDF, we heard, for the first time I can remember in the world of civic tech, a lot about the workers and the masses. Specifically, the morning sessions around Civic Tech and Powerful Movements:
Reckoning With Power
Eric LiuCreative Collision: How Business and Social Movements Will Reshape Our Future
Palak ShahPutting Labor in the Lab: How Workers Are Rebooting Their Future
Carmen RojasLabor Codes: The Power of Employee-Led Online Organizing
Jess KutchPowerful Platform, Powerful Movements
Dante BarryThe Net as a Public Utility
Harold Feld
In the summer of 2014, in the city of Chicago, Illinois, a youth baseball team called Jackie Robinson West came out of nowhere (well, at least according to the vast millions of Chicagoans who don’t follow such things) to compete for the World Championship in the Little League Baseball World Series.
It was a team of African-American kids from Chicago’s South Side, and they competed and won at the highest levels. They beat some kids from Las Vegas to play for world championship. Their uniforms said, “Great Lakes”, which makes sense when you’re looking at a map of the world for a world series.
They lost, but valiantly. For about a week and a half, a segregated city was united on something completely incontrovertible: that these kids were awesome, and they were ours. Cue the parade, the T-shirt sales, the mass joy. This was a shared experience that politicians and regular people crave— to be in communion. A surprise summer experience. So we had a parade. The route was amazing.
The kids were on floats and they got adoration.
Then, one morning in February we learned in breaking news fashion that Jackie Robinson West’s U.S. title was vacated. They had placed players on their team who did not qualify to play because they lived outside the team’s boundaries.
We discovered that a coach from an opposing team from the suburbs of Chicago (the Evergreen Park Athletic Association vice president) had discovered this fact and brought it to the attention of the officials at Little League Baseball.
This matter is based on the stuff that civic tech is made of— boundaries, maps, points, addresses, data, records, municipalities. It felt so “us”. Civic tech methodology.
And I realized this vice-president of a suburban little league baseball association was one of us. Just another person who used public data to answer a question— to achieve his civic goals. And he was right. He was a whistleblower. Based on dots. Based on facts. To be fair— based on true data.
But what should we do— those of us in civic tech— what should we do? what should we work on? Mass joy.
At Smart Chicago, that’s what we focus on. Smart Chicago is a civic organization devoted to improving lives in Chicago through technology. We work on increasing access to the Internet, improving skills for using the Internet, and developing meaningful products from data that measurably contribute to the quality of life of residents in our region and beyond. Our three primary areas of focus under which we organize all of our work: Access to the Internet & technology, Skills to use technology once you’ve got access, and Data, which we construe as something meaningful to look at once you have access and skills.
Our Civic Works project, funded in part by the Knight Foundation, a program funded by the Knight Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust to spur support for civic innovation in Chicago. Part of what we do is support an ecosystem of products, people, and services to have more impact. One of the products we support is Textizen, a web platform that sends, receives, and analyzes text messages so you can reach the people you serve. Mass joy through voting on dance competitions.
Another project is Smart Health Centers, a project that places trained health information specialists in clinics to assist patients in connecting to their own medical records and find reliable information about their own conditions. We employ people who have never been a part of the IT industry and give them good jobs helping people with computers. Mass joy through knowledge and jobs.
Another is the Civic User Testing Group, a set of regular Chicago residents who get paid to test civic apps. We tested our product, Expunge.io, with real people. The joy of clearing one’s name and being heard.
I am a father of two boys, both of whom have played youth baseball for years. There’s joy there, I know it. You’re at third base, don’t stay here.
There’s a rainbow over home plate. Go get it.
We have choices every day when we wake up. Let’s make sure we make the right ones.
Smart Chicago’s Dan O’Neil, Demond Drummer, and Laurenellen McCann attended the Knight Media Learning Summit in Miami. The event is in it’s fourth year is specifically for community foundations, place-based foundations and media organizations looking to develop partners to bring information to their communities.
Dan spoke on the first day on a panel about entitled: KCIC Deep Dive Presentations; Design Thinking and Learning Together.
Here locally, the Knight Deep Dive supports our Deep Dive project. Previous to this, the KCIC grant supported our CivicWorks Project – a project that spreads resources and energy around the civic tech movement in Chicago.
We have four projects that fall under the Deep Dive Project:
Dan went into detail on our progress so far. You can catch the entire talk below – or skip to 46:02 to hear Dan talk about our work.
Immediately following Dan’s panel, our own Laurenellen McCann led a panel discussing Community, Technology and Partnerships. The panel included Demond Drummer as well as the founder of the Resident Association of Greater Englewood (RAGE) Aisaha Butler and Chicago Deputy Commissioner for Planning and Development Kathleen Dickhut.
Laurenellen went into further detail about her work with the Experimental Modes Project. Specifically, she talked about how people are not just inventing new technology but rather remixing old technologies in new ways and that the number one tactic for this work was collaboration.
Demond, Aisaha, and Kathleen also spoke about their work on the Largelots program and the role that collaboration played in developing it. The Large Lot Program is a housing land use approach that was developed as part of the Green Healthy Neighborhoods public planning process. was built to make the process of purchasing City-owned land through this program easier for residents. It was initiated by Demond Drummer while he has at at Teamwork Englewood, built by DataMade, and funded by LISC Chicago with support from the Boeing Corporation, and the Knight Foundation for LISC’s OpenGov for the Rest of Us project.
You can view the entire presentation below:
You can find our more information about the event including videos of all the panels on the Knight Foundation website.
CDOT Textizen Poster
As part of the CivicWorks Project, we maintain a Textizen instance so that local nonprofits and government agencies can get feedback from residents. Our most recent partnership was with the Chicago Department of Transportation and their placemaking survey.
We wanted to give a few highlights of what we learned doing the survey as well as talk about how your organization can take advantage of Textizen.
Total number of participants: 2117
English: 1887
Spanish: 220
Total Texts: 13485
Completion Rate: 58.5 %
Age Range: 41% of English respondents were 15-25, 36% were 26-35
Most Active Times: 9am and 7pm
The Chicago Department of Transportation also ran a Mindmixer campaign at the same time as the Textizen poll. Mindmixer helps governments get feedback from residents by letting them post ideas on different topics. One of the most popular ideas on this Mindmixer poll was the idea to create a suburban bus station on the empty lot at Michigan and Roosevelt.
The Chicago Department of Transportation will use the results of the campaigns to further develop their Complete Street design guidelines. You can find our more information about the program on the Chicago Department of Transportation website.
Textizen Record set for most participation in a Spanish Language Poll
This CDOT campaign had the most participation out of any previous Textizen poll with 221 total responses. CDOT achieved this by deploying an equal number of ads and using different photos. CDOT also gave presentations at Spanish speaking audiences to help spread the word.
The campaign also hit several community blogs which helped spread the word throughout different neighborhoods.
Next step: Crunching numbers
The next step for CDOT is to take the Textizen and Surveymonkey results and merge them together. The team will then start to run analysis so they can give better guidance to policy makers. When the CDOT team makes their recommendations for placemaking, the document will likely have a lot of technical information. CDOT intends to interject results from the survey into their recommendations so that they can tie their results back to people.
To keep up with the progress, you can visit http://www.chicagocompletestreets.org/ for more inforation on CDOT’s efforts.
If you think that Textizen could help you government agency or non-profit, feel free to start a conversation with us here!
