Demos not memos: A look back at 2022
In 2022, USDR’s way of celebrating in the virtual world — the “stretch clap” — took on an even bigger meaning. To all our partners we saw “stretch” this year, this one’s for you!
This coming March, we’ll mark three years of U.S. Digital Response. Three years of communities coming together to help one another through crisis. Three years of responding at the speed of need. Three years of nurturing the seeds we planted to ensure we’ve built resiliency into our efforts, not just response.
We know at the end of the year, the tone is usually reflective — not necessarily looking toward the horizon. This year, we’re actively doing both. In a year of such intentional growth for USDR and our partners, we cannot help but steal a glance forward while we celebrate the achievements of 2022.
At USDR, the foundation built in 2022 means we can continuously show up alongside our partners for the long term. We formally established our Economic Stability Program to develop a more effective and equitable system for delivering public benefits — with the ultimate goal that more people can get the support they need. Our Elections Program was announced, focusing on building simple and effective digital tools to serve election officials and so they can focus on elections. To ensure we could keep meeting the surge of support needed to assist our partners, our staff grew — by 17 people. We doubled down on unemployment insurance benefits and now offer support for language access. We brought on new partners to help them expand broadband access in their communities and close the digital divide. We launched a new focus on user research to help make sure more voices are integrated into the design of government services.
Looking at the hard data, we’ve worked in 37 U.S. states and territories over the last three years with over 250+ governments and organizations on nearly 400 projects. One hundred sixty-two partners have worked with USDR more than once.
Of course, it takes more than numbers to truly showcase the heart of USDR. We saw communities across the country expand on the work that was established during the COVID-19 pandemic, essential and transformational work that served the needs of our nation’s people. Digital services and effective delivery are more important than ever, and public servants have redefined what it means to serve.
Working off of all the momentum from the last few years, we have so much to look forward to as we enter the new year. But first, we’re feeling a little sentimental for a few of our favorite moments from 2022. Check them out below:
1. How relieving administrative burden for one city helped house more people facing homelessness
When the City of St. Louis Homeless Services Division received funding to expand their homeless services, they knew it was a unique opportunity to quickly meet the urgent needs of their community. But, the team was already stretched thin. They needed to quickly scale up their ability to respond, which meant streamlining their complex and manual processes.
Thanks to a creative partnership with Google.org, USDR was able to deploy a group of Google Fellows to work directly with the St. Louis team and create new workflows that would be easy for the team to maintain. Through tools such as Airtable, the team created time-saving automations and data migration, erasing at least 30 hours of administrative burden each week.
On average, the team in St. Louis serves approximately 100 households in a year. Implementing these new tools helped the program grow its work to over 700 homes within a few months. In part because of time saved, they’ve cut the average time to place a resident in a home from 90 days to 27.
“USDR was able to take our program’s unique needs, understand it, and train our team on a new tool. It was all amazing at how I was able to pick it up because USDR was able to partner with me.” Amy Bickford, Chief Program Manager, Mayor’s Office of Children, Youth and Families & Dept. of Human Services — Homeless Services Division, City of St. Louis
2. The true speed of need: a request from a partner turned into a new tool within 48 hours
Right before the midterm elections, one of our partners requested a simple public-facing wait time tracker for their six early voting sites. Nothing fancy, just a table on the website for voters to see how long the wait times are at each site during the early voting period.
Within two days, our team had delivered a scalable tool. What’s more, we were able to deploy it to four other partners all before the midterm elections hit. Altogether, our team helped support 22 partners during the midterm election operations and our election management tools and resources were used across 11 states and territories.
3. Delivering a multilingual user experience for retroactive pandemic unemployment assistance
A state workforce agency approached USDR with an empathetic ask: they needed to reopen applications to claimants previously denied unemployment benefits and determine if they were eligible to receive retroactive pandemic unemployment assistance payments. The team knew it could be confusing for claimants to hear from the agency at this time, and it could be stressful. What’s more, their call center was already under significant strain — how could they help mitigate more calls regarding reopened claims?
Together, USDR and the agency helped create a self-guided experience for claimants so it would be easy for them to find answers. Through user research and design, the team created a series of materials that focused on building trust and providing clarity with claimants. The materials were tested with English and Spanish-speaking claimants, helping ensure equitable access to benefits.
“The work speaks for itself; everyone we’ve worked with has always been a professional with a clear specialization. It made it pretty easy when it came to this mountain of a problem and we didn’t have the internal capacity to engage with it the way we needed to. USDR has been our pandemic partner.”- State Workforce Agency
4. Building a community: scaling civic technology one story at a time
This fall, USDR launched its new event series — Scaling Civic Technology: A Series on the Engineering of Public Service. Hosted by Alex Allain, CTO at USDR, each panel focused on the technology we built, the challenges we overcame, and what we learned along the way. From our Federal Grants Portfolio, to our Poll Worker Management Tool, to Transitioning to Civic Tech — we heard directly from the volunteers and staff who helped make these efforts happen. We’ve had over 300 people register for these talks, and we look forward to seeing where 2023 will take us!
5. Power from the people: 950 deployed volunteers
Harkening back to the early days of USDR, our volunteers are what we lovingly refer to as our “secret sauce.” A group of big-hearted, highly-skilled individuals who dedicate their extra time to work alongside our partners. From talented and empathetic user researchers who help scope projects and make sure our partner’s needs are met, “second mountain” career pursuers working hard to assist our nation’s election officials, to curious professionals helping make broadband pricing more transparent — our volunteers bring years of experience and a “listen first’’ attitude.
“Volunteering for me is something that helps me feel connected to the world around me.” — Grace Zec, USDR volunteer
Want to become a part of U.S. Digital Response’s community story in 2023?
- Join our community of supporting funders
- Join our newsletter list
- Raise your hand as a volunteer
- Reach out to request pro bono technical support
- Check out our open positions
