This landscape analysis of the approaches to public benefit program enrollment can help policymakers and administrators understand how to design an enrollment process to increase benefit program participation for eligible people. This brief concludes the first phase of an evaluation of the City of Philadelphia’s Zero Fare pilot, which provides free transit to some low-income residents and largely uses automatic enrollment. This analysis is intended to place the Zero Fare approach in the wider context of public benefits enrollment processes and to provide program administrators with information when designing public benefit programs.

Why This Matters

Public benefit programs for people with low incomes play a vital role in US society. When people struggle to make ends meet, these systems of support can help them meet their basic needs for food, housing, health care, child care, transportation, and more. However, many people eligible for these programs do not participate, preventing the programs from achieving their potential impact. Therefore, it is useful to examine the comparative advantages of enrollment approaches to identify which options may lead to greater participation.

Key Takeaways

• The traditional process of accessing public benefits involves six steps. These steps can pose challenges for both recipients and administrators as they work to access or provide benefits.
• Several variations on and alternatives to the traditional access process have been tried. These options address recipient and administrator burdens—such as managing data, partnerships, and burdensome paperwork—to varying degrees. The City of Philadelphia’s Zero Fare pilot’s approach sidesteps the traditional process entirely, employing automatic enrollment. Most residents selected to receive the benefit are sent a card in the mail without applying.
• Our landscape analysis finds that automatic enrollment, compared with other enrollment approaches, has the potential to lead to high program participation rates. It minimizes barriers to take-up for eligible people and is structured to present diminishing administrative costs and burdens to program administrators.
• We find that Philadelphia Zero Fare’s enrollment process design is well poised to result in comparatively high participation rates. It has minimized barriers to take-up for eligible people and is structured to present diminishing administrative costs and burdens to the program’s administrating departments over time.

How We Did It

We developed a framework through which program administrators can think through the design of the enrollment processes with the aim of maximizing participation. Based on a review of 17 programs across the country and other scholarly sources, this framework evaluates how well different enrollment methods address the administrative burdens felt by the recipients of these benefits and the burdens felt by the administrators of benefit programs. The final product of this framework is an enrollment typology matrix. The matrix scores a list of key enrollment types based on the degree to which they alleviate recipient and administrator burdens.