Why This Matters

Public benefits agencies serve people and families with different characteristics who may face challenges to accessing their services. How agencies design their systems and policies can affect whether they reach the populations they are interested in serving. To inform these decisions, agencies may wish to learn more about these people, such as where they live, whether they are disproportionately located in certain geographic areas, and whether they may also face challenges to accessing public services.

This report shows how agencies can go about understanding these questions for the populations they seek to serve. We use examples of county-level analyses for a public benefits agency in Georgia to show how other agencies can adopt a similar approach to examining their populations of interest. With this information, agencies can

• identify where to target outreach and allocate resources to reach their populations of interest;
• determine whether to consider modifying program design to address access challenges for the people they wish to serve; and
• examine where populations of interest and challenges to accessing programs may occur together, suggesting that efforts to target this population may be served by addressing access challenges.

Together, this information can help agencies efficiently allocate their resources and design their service delivery efforts to better meet the needs of the people they are trying to serve.

Key Takeaways

Understanding populations of interest

• Measures of prevalence for particular groups—meaning the number of people in the population of interest out of the total number of people in a geographic area—can help agencies compare the relative concentration of different people across different geographies, even if they vary in size.
• Mapping the prevalence of individual populations of interest can help visualize the geographic areas where agencies can expect to find these populations.
• Different populations may be more prevalent in different geographic areas, and some areas may have high prevalence of multiple populations. However, it is not always the case that targeting areas with a high prevalence of one population will reach many people in another population.

Understanding challenges to accessing public benefits

• People may face a variety of challenges when applying for or accessing public benefits, such as limited internet access, limited English proficiency, or limited access to transportation. These challenges have implications for how agencies design their policies.
• Mapping characteristics associated with access challenges can show the geographic areas where individuals facing these challenges are more prevalent. This can help agencies choose to address these challenges differently depending on the area.
• Different characteristics associated with access challenges can be distributed differently across geographic areas. Some challenges are likely to occur in the same area as other challenges, which can indicate that agencies may want to implement efforts to address them together. Others are not in the same area, suggesting strategies may need to differ.

Understanding how populations and challenges overlap

• Some populations of interest may also have characteristics associated with access challenges. If agencies are trying to reach these populations, they may wish to be aware of the types of challenges people tend to encounter, as this promotes a more holistic understanding of how people interact with the public benefits system.
• Mapping the overlap between a population of interest and an access challenge can help show whether agencies should expect to find challenges in the same areas as the populations they want to serve. If they are located in the same areas, agencies may consider working to address the access challenge as part of their efforts to target the population.
• Agencies should not assume that every population and challenge will be in the same areas. It is important to consider the unique needs of different populations and people facing different access challenges.

Conducting these analyses is relatively simple

• These analyses leverage public data and relatively simple analytic techniques. Other agencies could easily adapt this approach to fit the needs of their community.

How We Did It

Our research team conducted an analysis of populations of interest for the state child care subsidy agency in Georgia. We used publicly available data sources to determine the share of each county’s population that is part of each population of interest and mapped these proportions. We also examined characteristics related to challenges applying for or accessing Georgia’s child care subsidy program. We combined these data and mapped the overlap of the populations of interest and access challenges.

This report presents a selection of these analyses as examples for the kinds of things other agencies can learn by adopting a similar approach. For a step-by-step explanation of our approach, see our companion report: How to Map Potential Need for Public Benefits, Populations of Interest, and Access Challenges: Guidance for Using Publicly Available Data and Analytic Approaches.