Texts and calls increased Child Care Stabilization Base Grants awards for child care providers in Minnesota
 The American Rescue Plan (ARP) allocated approximately $24 billion in Child Care Stabilization Grants (CCSBG) to the Department of Health and Human Services to help stabilize the child care labor market in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent evidence found that CCSBGs were effective at increasing child care employment and wages nationally. However, about a third of child care providers failed to take up these grants in Minnesota.
Minnesota’s Department of Human Services (MN DHS) aimed to identify methods to enhance equitable access to CCSBG among child care providers in the state. We worked with them to design and evaluate a multimodal communications bundle of emails, one-way text messages, and semi-scripted phone calls.
We found that outreach by text increased awards of CCSBG by 3.8 percentage points, while combining calls with text outreach increased awards by 5.2 percentage points. Among child care providers with no prior awards, outreach that included calling increased awards by 12.4 percentage points — an effect five times larger than outreach by text alone. In contrast, among child care providers previously awarded grants, outreach by text alone increased awards by 5.3 percentage points. The findings suggest that specific types of interventions work for specific target populations by addressing different behavioral barriers.
Streamlining income verification reduced application processing times and barriers to approval in Virginia’s ERA program
In response to housing instability in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Department of the Treasury administered the Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) programs, which collectively provided over $46 billion to state, local, territorial, and Tribal governments to prevent eviction and housing instability. Individuals were eligible for ERA assistance if their household income fell below an area-specific threshold, and when the procedures used to verify eligibility caused a bottleneck in distributing assistance, Treasury encouraged streamlining income verification procedures.
Virginia’s Department of Housing and Community Development (VA DHCD) simplified income documentation requirements through a fact-specific proxy (FSP) that used the applicant’s ZIP code as a proxy for income eligibility. We partnered with them to conduct a retrospective impact evaluation to understand if streamlining the requirement for providing individual income eligibility documentation improved access to assistance for low-income renters in the state. The results show that using a FSP made getting out much-needed rental assistance faster and more likely for individuals facing housing instability during the COVID-19 pandemic. A prior evaluation we conducted about the Kentucky Housing Corporation’s FSP showed similar impacts.
Recent media featuring OES
Blueprint for the use of social and behavioral science to advance evidence-based policymaking: OES was highlighted in the latest publication from the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which provides a framework for integrating social and behavioral sciences into evidence-based policymaking across the federal government.
RadioLab podcast “Hold On”: The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and OES, along with the national administrator of the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline 988 system, made changes to the integrated voice response (IVR) system and messages that callers hear when calling 988, and tested the changes using a randomized evaluation. The updated caller experience increased the likelihood of being routed to a call center and increased the likelihood of each call being connected to a counselor. Listen to the Radiolab episode "Hold On" and learn more about the evaluation on our website.
GSA.gov blog “Notify.gov is helping government meet families where they are”: Last fall, GSA’s Public Benefits Studio launched Notify.gov, a new government notification service. This recent blog discusses how members of the OES team are partnering with the Department of Human Services in Norfolk, Virginia to design and evaluate an intervention using Notify.gov meant to help families learn about Medicaid renewal deadlines and eligibility requirements to help them retain their health insurance.
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