The Sprint 2 Report: Michigan UI Claimant Experience by Civilla and New America examines challenges in Michigan’s unemployment insurance (UI) system and provides human-centered design recommendations to improve accessibility, clarity, and user experience.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) report highlights the disproportionate hardships faced by Black and Latina mothers during the COVID-19 pandemic, exacerbated by systemic inequities.
Created for use in the Digital Doorways research project, this design stimuli shows the steps of submitting an application, sharing personal information, and verifying identity for Massachusetts' online application for Unemployment Insurance.
In this updated primer, the DBN describes how identity proofing and authentication show up in public benefits applications and outlines equity and security concerns raised by common identity proofing and authentication methods.
The report beings by briefly describing the challenge that disabled workers face in accessing UI and the benefits of reforming the system to better serve these workers. The report then presents a list of considerations for UI reform in the areas of administrative process and technology improvements as well as considerations for policy change.
This toolkit is designed to assist state and local TANF agencies in accessing, linking, and analyzing employment data from unemployment insurance (UI) systems.
In February 2023, the Digital Benefits Network at the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation released a dataset documenting authentication and identity verification requirements that unemployment insurance (UI) applicants encounter across the United States. This resource outlines high-level observations from the data and more information about the research process.
The Texting Playbook provides guidance and well-researched strategies to help state agencies implement texting in support of Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, and other benefits programs. It provides an overview of how to start texting clients; the types of messages to send, including real examples; Federal Communications Commision (FCC) policy guidance; how to encourage opt-ins and collect consent; how to avoid coming across as spam; and a cost analysis of texting.
This post argues that for the types of large-scale, organized fraud attacks that many state benefits systems saw during the pandemic, solutions grounded in cybersecurity methods may be far more effective than creating or adopting automated systems.
