FormFest 2025 Recap: Avoiding Forms Altogether with Automatic Enrollment

Avoiding Forms Altogether with Automatic Enrollment

This FormFest session highlights how forms can be avoided by automatically enrolling residents in public programs. Using the City of Philadelphia’s Zero Fare program as a case study, the city explored how local governments could use administrative data to streamline access to benefits. Zero Fare provides subsidized transit passes to low-income residents, aiming to improve access to jobs and essential services while reducing household costs. In two years, the program reached over 35,000 residents and continues to grow thanks to the efficiency of its model. Most participants (90 percent) are auto-enrolled from a list of eligible residents—no application form required. This is thanks to the Office of Integrated Data for Evidence and Action (IDEA), which operates the city’s cross-systems data hub. In this FormFest session, speakers shared how quality administrative data can reduce the need for forms, as well as the practicalities of implementing this approach.

Main Points

• Philadelphia launched the Zero Fare pilot in 2023 to reduce transportation barriers for residents living at or below the poverty level using automatic enrollment.
• Cross-agency data sharing, coordinated by the Office of Integrated Data for Evidence and Action (IDEA), enabled identification and outreach to eligible residents at scale.
• The pilot achieved strong participation outcomes, with 95 percent of eligible residents receiving cards and 65 percent actively using them.

Lessons Learned

• Automatic enrollment can significantly lower administrative and paperwork barriers for vulnerable populations.
• Secure, well-governed data collaboration across agencies is essential to implement programs quickly and responsibly.
• Short pilot timelines can still produce meaningful policy learning when evaluation and infrastructure are built-in from the start.

Actionable Takeaways

• Invest in integrated data infrastructure to support eligibility identification and cross-agency coordination.
• Design enrollment processes that minimize resident burden while maintaining strong privacy safeguards.
• Use pilot programs to test, measure, and refine service delivery models before pursuing long-term funding.

In this session, speakers Nicola Coakley and Cassandra Henderson from the City of Philadelphia discussed how they used automatic enrollment for Philadelphia’s new Zero Fare public transportation program. In Philadelphia, Coakley stated that one in five people in Philadelphia lived at or below the poverty level, with 38 percent of residents finding transportation the main barrier to employment, according to surveys. By auto-enrolling eligible Philadelphia residents, the city hopes to minimize barriers to accessing these benefits, especially for an initiative without guaranteed long-term funding. 

Launched in 2023, Zero Fare aims to reduce the cost of transportation and increase mobility for Philadelphia residents who live at or below the poverty level. However, the Zero Fare program was only guaranteed funding for two years, which meant that Coakley and Henderson’s teams only had a short period of time to get the program up and running. 

They used this as an opportunity to build policy-learning initiatives into the Zero Fare program for future use. Using key data elements from sources like police data, child welfare services, early intervention programs, public health data, behavioral health services, and homelessness services, the Zero Fare program determined who qualified for the program—Philadelphia residents between the ages of 18 and 64 living at or below the poverty level. Eligible participants then received Zero Fare cards in the mail. 

But the crucial part of the auto-enrollment process was the data collection from other government agencies, which required using existing data infrastructure to identify eligible residents, along with securely processing data from different sources. Philadelphia’s Office of Integrated Data for Evidence and Action (IDEA) combined administrative data from various sources to create a centralized database for this program. IDEA also ensured that data was securely used, as each agency had to approve the use of data pulled by IDEA. The Zero Fare pilot was ultimately deemed successful, with 95 percent of eligible residents receiving a card and 65 percent of these residents using their Zero Fare card. 

The Zero Fare pilot demonstrated how governments can leverage administrative data, cross-agency collaboration, and thoughtful program design to rapidly reduce access barriers. By prioritizing automatic eligibility identification and outreach, the city minimized administrative burdens for staff while achieving meaningful scale within a short funding window. The program’s results—high delivery and usage rates—suggest that when infrastructure, governance, and safeguards for data use are aligned, auto-enrollment can translate policy intent into real mobility gains. While challenges remain around inclusion, sustainability, and lifecycle management, this pilot offers a strong model for how governments can use data responsibly to expand access to essential services and measure success through tangible participation outcomes. Ultimately, the Zero Fare program has been deemed successful and continues to serve low-income Philadelphians using public transportation.