Digital Doorways to Public Benefits: Advocates Guide to Championing Security and Access for Beneficiaries

In 2025, the Digital Benefits Network at the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation partnered with Public Policy Lab to conduct in-depth qualitative research examining how digital identity processes—like creating and managing accounts and proving one’s identity—impact real people applying for public benefits. This project, Digital Doorways to Public Benefits: Beneficiary Experiences with Digital Identity, amplifies the lived experiences of beneficiaries to provide new insights into people’s experiences and offers state and local agencies actionable recommendations to improve digital identity processes. To accompany the Digital Benefits Network’s virtual session “Digital Doorways to Public Benefits: Championing Security and Access for Beneficiaries” on October 8, 2025, our team created this short resource document to support individuals and organizations advocating for improvements to digital identity processes.

Given the H.R. 1 SNAP cost shifts to states based on payment error rates, and new work reporting requirements in Medicaid, state agencies will likely require additional and consistent touch points with beneficiaries in the coming years. We believe it’s imperative that the process of interacting with agencies, for example, reaccessing portals and accounts, is as easy and straightforward as possible to enable access and program administration.

It is not necessary to become an expert in digital identity to advocate for improvements to your state’s digital identity implementation.

Below, we include resources to help you approach state administrators with confidence, including: 

• Tips for using the Digital Doorways research to advocate for improvements and engage with state leaders
• Background resources about key digital identity terms + technologies
• Questions to understand your state’s digital identity implementation + advocate for improvements

How to use the Digital Doorways Research

Our research with beneficiaries includes insights about key challenges beneficiaries face when creating and managing accounts and proving their identities. It also provides actionable recommendations for state and local agencies. If you’re an advocate, the insights from our research likely resonate with what you have heard from clients in the past. These findings do not replace the need to understand and lift up client experiences from your context, but hopefully illustrate that:

• Your clients are not the only ones facing similar challenges with these processes, and 
• That there are steps agencies can take to improve client experiences with this technology. 

You may want to:

• Use the insights from the research to bolster information about client experiences in your own context. Our insights show:
  • Beneficiaries often prioritize access over privacy, despite deep concerns about data use. 
  • Multi-factor authentication can create significant barriers for people with unstable housing, or limited tech access. 
  • Beneficiaries experience challenges using biometric verification, and have varying levels of comfort with the tech.
  • Outdated and insecure approaches like security questions and knowledge-based verification also present customer experience issues. 
  • Beneficiaries consistently seek human support, even if it costs them time.
  • Read the full-length report for more detailed overviews of our findings.
• Use multimedia resources from the report (published with consent of participants) including photos, quotes, and videos to communicate the real-world impact of these processes on beneficiaries.
  • Share the project overview video that highlights beneficiary voices.
  • Review the full-length report for embedded photos + quotes, and additional video clips. 
• Refer to the recommendations to give state agency leaders concrete suggestions for changes, with different resource and investment requirements.
  • Recommendations focus on building trust, improving account creation and authentication, and identity proofing
• Share the executive summary with agency leadership and other partners to quickly explain the research findings and recommendations

Background resources: What is Digital Identity?

Being empowered with the right terms and information can equip you to advocate more effectively for improvements that support clients.

Interested in reading more about biometrics and equity/security concerns? Check out the DBN’s evidence base for links to key resources. 

For more resources on digital identity, please visit our Digital Identity collection on the Digital Government Hub.

Questions to Understand and Improve Your State’s Approach to Digital Identity

If many people are unable to get through an application’s front door, even the best modernized system will fail to meet people’s needs.

When engaging with your state about digital identity processes, you may be engaging proactively because you know your state agencies are working on a new system or modernization project. You may also need to engage with your agency in response to issues you learn about directly from clients. 

Questions to understand client challenges

Understanding Client Issues

If you learn about issues with your state’s digital identity implementation based on client challenges, you will want to gather additional information to help understand the source of the issue.

1. Clarify the issue or issues at hand. Is the client having problems with one or more of the following:
   • Creating an Account
   • Email or phone number requirements associated with account creation
   • Password reset or recovery processes
   • Multi-factor Authentication
   • Language access (e.g., account creation or identity proofing prompts unclear or unavailable in client’s language)
   • Identity document access
   • Completing knowledge-based verification (e.g., questions not generating, unable to respond to questions successfully)
   • Completing biometric verification (e.g., technology not recognizing their face as a match, issues uploading photo ID documents)
2. Is the client having an issue at the point of application or when attempting to log back in to a portal to manage their benefits?
3. Is the client having this issue when they use a certain kind of device (e.g., only when using their mobile device, or when using a laptop/desktop computer)?
4. Is the issue happening when using the state’s benefits portal itself or when using a third-party technology provider (e.g., a company contracted to conduct identity proofing)?
5. Are other clients that you or colleagues work with experiencing the same or similar issues?

Questions to understand the state system

Reviewing the System

You can gather a significant amount of information by reviewing the online application or portal itself, and seeking additional public documentation. 

1. Have there recently been changes to the portal’s digital identity processes (e.g., did the agency recently add identity proofing or integrate with a new account credentialing process)?
   • When looking at the portal, are you seeing a new step, or process that you haven’t seen before?
   • Is there any statement (e.g., website banner) or press release from the agency about changes? (This doesn’t always happen but sometimes does!)
2. Is the account system (if used) on the portal a state single sign-on or are the account credentials specific to the portal?
   • The answer to this question will inform what agency likely has authority to make changes. If an agency has integrated with a state single sign-on, you may need to engage with your state’s central IT department to discuss changes.
3. How do the agency’s practices compare to the recommendations in the Digital Doorways report?
   • These recommendations are not an exhaustive list of best practices, but do provide evidence and standards-backed suggestions for improvement. You can consider what your agency might already be doing well (e.g., offering a variety of multi-factor authentication options for clients to select from) and identify concrete opportunities for improvements (e.g., updating password creation requirements, offering multiple pathways for individuals to prove their identities, if relevant).
4. Does your state make relevant data publicly available, for example metrics on successful log-ins, account creations, and identity proofing instances?
   • For example, the California’s BenefitsCal application publishes quarterly metrics and usage metrics reports, which include information about successful/total account logins, dropoff rates during applications, data on account creation through an intercept survey, and some data points on help desk support topics.
5. If relevant, who is providing the identity proofing service? If a private company, which one?
   • What other states are using the same service? Can you connect with advocates or partners in those states to learn more about client experiences with the tool?
     • See DBN’s 2024 point in time research for point-in-time information about identity proofing vendors: 2024 Edition: Account Creation and Identity Proofing in Online Public Benefits Applications – Digital Government Hub
   • What documentation is available about that vendor’s approach to identity proofing?
   • Can you find any documentation about the contract your state has with the vendor in question?

Gathering Information from the Agency

Discussions directly with staff and leadership at the benefits agency are also a key source of information.

1. Is the approach the agency is taking (to account creation, authentication, or identity proofing) required by agency policy or statute in your state? (e.g., CA Unemployment Insurance Code which requires use of NIST standards)
   • 💡 This may be a good question to research independently and to ask your state program administrators.
2. Has the agency conducted a Digital Identity Risk Management/Assessment process?
   • If so, can the agency share their Digital Identity Acceptance Statement or other documentation outlining their approach to public-facing identity management?
   • ℹ️ A Digital Identity Risk Management Process, as outlined in NIST’s  Digital Identity Guidelines, provides a framework for identifying appropriate identity management controls based on the risks associated with an online service (including what transactions someone can complete and the data they are able to access). For more resources on the DIRM process + tools, visit: BalanceID: Enabling Secure Access and Managing Risk in SNAP and Medicaid.  
3. Does the state regularly examine failure rates for authentication and identity proofing? Does the state have consistent access to that data?
   • Examples of data that might be helpful include: 
     • Authentication failures: Percentage of attempts to authenticate that fail. 
     • Account recovery attempts: Number of account recovery processes that users initiate.
     • Overall proofing pass rate: Percentage of users who successfully prove their identity.
     • Proofing fail rate: Percentage of users who start the identity proofing process but are unable to successfully complete all the steps. 
     • Estimated adjusted proofing fail rate: The Proofing fail rate after it has been adjusted to account for proofing processes terminated due to suspected fraud. 
     • Proofing abandonment rate: Percentage of users who start the proofing process, but drop out without actually failing the process.
     • Proofing attempts per successful user: Number of times each successful user tries to prove their identity before succeeding.
     • Completion time: Average time it takes a user to complete the proofing process.
4. What data or information does the agency have from their call center?
   • What proportion of calls are related to account access or identity proofing issues?
     • What proportion of those calls are successfully resolved for clients?
   • Based on this data, are other clients experiencing issues related to accounts or identity proofing?

Get in Touch

This guide is meant to be a living document. What other questions would you ask to understand your state agency’s approach to digital identity? Let us know at digID@georgetown.edu.