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 reduced operating costs across credit reports, temporary labor, and postage. Once the system sorted applicants into automatic rejections and maybes, the team stopped running checks on people already in the no bucket. Templated email replaced manual responses and Saturday backlog work.

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, along with the path to fix them.

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.