To cut to the chase, this post is about a prototype food stamp calculator for use by advocates, built with PHP and JavaScript. (It works fine in Firefox; the design and functions are buggy in IE.)

Here’s the back story:

One of the most successful content projects undertaken by Legal Services of Northern California has been its web-based California Food Stamp Guide (FSG). As part of that project, we had discussions about building a California-specific food stamp calculator, and then further discussions about the purpose and function of such a thing. Should it be client or advocate oriented? In either case, should it be more of an “estimator,” i.e., a screening tool to get a reasonable, in-the-zone estimate of monthly benefits? Or a tool to make more precise food stamp budget calculations, such that one could check and challenge the calculations in individual cases made by a local welfare office? Among the editorial team that worked on the FSG, there was great interest in having a calculator, but no actual consensus emerged about how best to approach it.

One distinctive idea did emerge, however. Rosemary French at the Benchmark Institute promoted the idea of a calculator that would serve as a pedagogical tool. Her notion incorporated these key elements to make it an effective advocate teaching tool: The calculator should make accurate, complete calculations based on all the possible economic and circumstantial elements that make up an actual monthly benefits determination; it should reveal how changes in a relevant dollar amount or in the application of a client’s individual circumstances (e.g., medical expenses, daycare expenses, etc.) affect the outcome; and it should display the calculation as a whole, on a single page, rather than in steps that cannot be viewed in relation to each other.

Rosemary’s idea was the one that inspired us to try something different from the array of other food stamp calculators out there. For various reasons we never quite completed the project, but we do want to share with the larger advocacy community what we did accomplish: a prototype for a California-specific advocate tool for calculating monthly benefits that honors its pedagogical purposes. (Again, it works as intended in Firefox; not so much in IE.)

Hopefully, use by advocates should be self-explanatory. Start entering numbers and selecting options and the budget calculations shall be revealed dynamically, on the right. The calculations are all based on current food stamp program eligibility standards in California, but can only be made accurately for households in which everyone is eligible; the prototype does not make calculations for mixed households in which one or more members are ineligible. There are Ajaxy pop-up help pages that can be used to provide explanations and links to other resources; one can also save a calculation as a bookmark or print out the results; and other touches.

The PHP and Javascript coding, which includes use of jQuery, was done by the esteemed Scott Trudeau. (Ed Lachgar, on the LSNC IT staff, built the PHP print functions. The layout and visual design were done here at the Webdogs 2.0 labs, so don’t blame Scott for what it looks like.) If anyone has questions or interest about the PHP and JavaScript coding, feel free to contact Scott for details, explanations, etc.

Although we have no immediate plans to do more with this project, we are posting all the prototype code for those who may be interested in adapting, modifying or just playing with it. It’s yours for the taking:

Download the source code.

First, the context.

Yesterday I posted a message to the LStech list to get leads from the legal services tech heads about web-based Food Stamp calculators. The thing that prompted my message is the work I and a half dozen other advocates in California are doing, as a labor of love, to update the widely used California Food Stamp Guide LSNC created eons ago, based on a California Food Policy Advocate’s version of the venerable FRAC Food Stamp Guide. That editorial “content” work is the heart of the project, but a couple of the folks working on the project asked if we could also add a Food Stamp benefits calculator to the online guide, tailored to the California program. Hence, my message to my fellow legal services tech heads.

Predictably and helpfully, I got a slew of responses from the field which brought me pretty much current on what is out there and the variety of coding approaches used by the advocacy community. Among the most notable examples:

• ASP implementation by the Food Stamp Outreach Project (New York)
• ColdFusion implementations by Project Bread (Massachusetts)
• PHP implementation by VermontFoodHelp.org [updated May 2010]
• Flash implementation by IllinoisLegalAdvocate.org
• HotDocs implementations by Pine Tree Legal Assistance (Maine) and GeorgiaAdvocates.org
• PHP implementation by Michigan Food Stamp Partnership

I also was provided with an interesting Excel-based calculator by my first responder, Michael Bowen at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, an approach also used by Massachusetts Legal Services. And several folks drew attention to the
Food Stamp Pre-screening Eligibility Tool at USDA/FNS, an application that will screen for all 50 states and which for some folks may be all they need in a basic calculator.

Given this rather spectacular array of choices, I felt motivated to see what a basic Google search for “food stamps calculator” would turn up, which turned out to be a lot. I spent some time grazing the search results and went five-pages deep, which is deep for me. (I cannot remember the last time I went past even the first page of search results at Google.) There was a lot there, including innumerable state food stamp program sites with various types of calculators. And, to my surprise, a link to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities summary, Food Stamps On-line: A Review of State Government Food Stamp Websites. (Who knew!)

My favorites? It is way too early to tell. I need to earnestly take a look at the several very interesting advocate-oriented implementations, listed above, to see how each works — which is to say what is the character and flow of the questions, how it addresses usability, what and how the calculator attempts to accomplish its goal, how “understandable” is the display and the wording used, is it stable or brittle, does it work across the most commonly used browser, yada yada yada. Again, working on the calculator thing is a lesser part of the overall project but we are determined to come up with something that is an authentically useful complement to the Food Stamp Guide itself.

Oh, yeah, there actually was a “favorite,” or better said a surprise among the calculators: The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services has created The Marriage Calculator: Financial Consequences of Marriage Decisions on Food Stamp eligibility! That one stopped me cold when I clicked through to it.