What we've learned so far

codeforamerica / ebt-near-me

A mobile app that shows the nearest places you can use an EBT card nationwide.

http://ebtnearme.org

MIT License

9 stars 15 forks source link

What we've learned so far #57

Open lippytak opened 9 years ago

lippytak commented 9 years ago

From @lippytak on February 14, 2015 19:11

Write it up! For now let's just drop notes here as they come up naturally.

My opinionated summary:

In CA ATM use case is more compelling/important but much lower volume and harder to reach the right people (Adwords are meh). Probably lower value in other States.
CA ATM data quality is ambiguous and getting access to updates is pretty painful
In CA more people are looking for EBT restaurants than EBT retail stores, but that's probably because the entire restaurant program is completely confusing. For example, I'm pretty sure most people can't use their EBT card at restaurants, and nobody actually has a list of participating restaurants in CA.
IMO low/no value in forking/redeploying EBTNearMe...better thought of as a distributed data collection effort
Lots of open questions about how users are using this (looking for something now? nearby a specific location? new to SNAP?)

Copied from original issue: lippytak/ebt-near-me#118

lippytak commented 9 years ago

TANF programs outside of CA are MUCH smaller, so the ATM surcharge problem is smaller, too: https://github.com/codeforamerica/health/issues/18

lippytak commented 9 years ago

Current EBTNearMe users are trying to:

Find restaurants (we don't do this)
Find EBT retail stores (we do this)
Find free ATMs (we do this)

Other:

Most users (88%) are often looking for stores or restaurants that accept CalFresh
And 70% say 'finding stores and restaurants' is the 'most difficult or frustrating part of using their benefits'

See survey details on the Health wiki

lippytak commented 9 years ago

Adwords lessons:

~80% of users are on mobile
Costs about $1 to get people to click on a marker (either store or ATM)
About 10x more people are looking for EBT retail stores than free ATMs in CA
ATM ads are lower volume but perform better

Details below (copied from here https://github.com/lippytak/ebt-near-me/issues/112):

overall

ATM keyword view: atm

Stores keyword view: stores

lippytak commented 9 years ago

Consistently only 50-60%% of users who hit www.ebtnearme.org ever click on any markers. Don't know why.

screen shot 2015-02-14 at 11 31 25 am

lippytak commented 9 years ago

At least in CA, the quality of the ATM is anecdotally pretty bad, and we don't have a good way to either validate the data or update it when reports come in: bit.ly/ebtnearme-feedback

lippytak commented 9 years ago

Still don't know what exactly users are trying to accomplish when they hit the site

Looking for the nearest store/ATM near by?
Looking for something near their home or place of work?
Want to print something out?
Just getting onboarded to the program?