More than you ever wanted to know about Food Stamp calculators
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.