Testing a faster way to keep families informed about child care subsidies

Summary

The challenge

Care 4 Kids helps low- and moderate-income families in Connecticut pay for child care. But the renewal experience had become frustrating and opaque. A new case management system, a 20% surge in new applications, and thousands of reauthorizations coming due at once created a growing backlog. Incomplete applications piled up, and confusion about application status spread.

For families, the core problem was uncertainty. After submitting renewal materials, applicants often had no way to know whether their documents had been received or what would happen next. Many were asked to resend materials, use multiple submission methods, or wait for long stretches with no acknowledgment. Providers felt it too — delays in the subsidy process created financial stress for child care workers waiting on timely payments.

Mailed it in originally. They said they never received it, sent again. They never received it so I did everything at that point — fax and upload. Had to do it all over again after that…still hadn’t received anything back from Care 4 Kids at that point.

Parent

After user research and interviews, communication emerged as the clearest pain point. OEC and United Way were open to testing a practical, low-risk improvement. The goal: reduce uncertainty for families and help the program learn where its communication and process design needed to change.

The solution

The most immediate need families described was simple. They wanted to know whether their renewal documents had been received and what to expect next. We designed a pilot centered on that single, high-value moment — a text-message tool that alerted parents when United Way received their Care 4 Kids documents. Participants could also text back at any time to ask about processing timelines.

Co-designed with OEC and United Way, the pilot was deliberately lightweight. We built the minimum viable product in four weeks using Twilio and Ruby on Rails. Then we launched and live-tested it with nearly 180 participants over three months. The rapid timeline was deliberate: rather than building a comprehensive system, we tested whether a focused communication intervention could meaningfully improve the applicant experience.

Throughout the pilot, we measured impact. Phone, text, and online surveys captured how families felt before, during, and after the intervention — tracking not just whether the texts helped, but whether the pilot revealed broader patterns in how the renewal process broke down.

The approach tested two hypotheses at once. First: could text-message updates reduce uncertainty and improve satisfaction for individual families? Second: could a lightweight intervention surface systemic opportunities to improve trust, clarity, and service delivery across the entire renewal process? Those broader insights would be hard to find through research alone.

The results

• Built and launched a text-message pilot in four weeks, testing a low-risk way to improve communication for Care 4 Kids renewal applicants
• Increased parent confidence by 19% that renewal documents were being received by United Way
• Improved average satisfaction with Care 4 Kids communication among surveyed pilot participants
• Generated actionable recommendations to address communication gaps, process confusion, and service design issues across the broader application workflow

[I] thought messages were very helpful. You never know when Care 4 Kids receives documents, so it was great to know. Very convenient!

Pilot participant