Habitat for Humanity

Two Habitat affiliates use this, starting with San Antonio and Guadalupe Valley. They take in around 4,000 applications a year. Clearing them used to be the job nobody wanted: every so often the whole team would come in on a Saturday and spend most of the day working through the pile together, and the backlog still ran eight to twelve weeks.

Now it's part of an admin's normal week. The system flags the clear disqualifications, someone verifies them and sends the rejection, and the close calls or obvious typos get a request for more information instead. They go in once a day or so, clear what came in, and the backlog is zero. No more working Saturdays.

It saved about $145k a year, across three lines. The biggest was $106k in credit reports: once the system was sorting applicants into automatic rejections and maybes, they made the call to stop running checks on anyone already in the no bucket, because paying to verify someone you're going to reject is wasted money. Maybes still get the check. Another $35k was temp and labor, since nobody has to come in on Saturdays to dig out of a backlog anymore. The last $4k was postage, now that responses go out as templated email instead of mail.

Before, every application got a manual read. Intake was electronic, but there was no intelligence on top of it, so a person flagged each one against the disqualifying criteria and wrote each response by hand. Now the responses are templated. The reasons the system flagged are pulled into the email automatically, and so is the path to fix them: a six-year-old bankruptcy means the applicant is a year away from qualifying, a $3,000 account in collections means paying it off clears their path. If the applicant got far enough for a credit check to run, the email includes the report for reference, which matters most when that report is the reason for the denial.

Their program lead was a power user of our City of San Antonio app. She was deputy on that program before she moved to Habitat, and she came to us looking for the same thing. It started as a conversation between the two of us, working out what the real problem was. I developed a solution that we were aligned on and I handed it to our team to build: a UX designer, a solution architect, and two engineers. I led product and ran the project on our side, and I was the technical seller who got the deal across the line with a teammate. It's been in production for nearly a year now, they use it every day, and they're already pushing for a phase two to expand it.