Simple outreach can help low-income households claim benefits

Many eligible families do not use government assistance

Government benefits programs are highly effective, but a lot of people don't use them even if they're eligible. Safety net assistance can help lift people out of poverty and have other advantages, such as contributing to better health and education outcomes. Despite the availability of assistance, however, 20 to 50% of Americans do not use programs for which they are eligible.  

One question for researchers and policymakers is whether more complex—and more expensive—outreach approaches are more effective than simple, light-touch nudges in getting families to take up benefits.

What outreach approaches work

In new research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Elizabeth Linos, the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy and Management, and Jessica Lasky-Fink—both of the Kennedy School’s People Lab—along with coauthors Vincent Dorie and Jesse Rothstein, show that more complex or expensive interventions are not necessarily better than light-touch outreach.

The researchers wanted to know how government outreach could help very low-income families sign up for and receive important benefits, such the expanded Child Tax Credit and Economic Impact Payments (stimulus checks) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many families who were eligible were at risk of missing out, especially those with little or no income who don’t normally file taxes.

The researchers ran four large experiments with over half a million households in California to test different outreach strategies—including simple outreach emails and “robocalls,” as well as higher-touch approaches such as more precisely targeted text messages and a staffed hotline that made proactive calls to encourage people to claim benefits.  

The authors found:

• Simple outreach works. Light-touch reminders—including text messages, emails, and robocalls telling families they could claim benefits—consistently increased participation. Even small percentage increases translated into millions of dollars reaching families who needed the support.
• Simple strategies are cost effective. These light-touch nudges had a large return on investment. For every $1 the government spent on outreach, between $50 and $8,000 in benefits were delivered to families.
• Higher-touch strategies were not more effective. Proactive calls and more precise targeting did not appear to improve take-up beyond light-touch outreach alone. Additionally, these approaches are far more expensive.
• Context matters. The study suggests that when the barriers to applying for benefits are already relatively low (as they were during the COVID-19 pandemic, when claiming benefits was made easier), simple light-touch outreach may be a cost-effective strategy at connecting even hard-to-reach populations with benefits.

This research can help policymakers understand how to get people to use benefits. In at least some contexts, investing in simple, broad outreach campaigns may be more effective and cost-efficient than more elaborate strategies. While nudges alone can’t solve poverty—and the solution is not necessarily to do what is cheapest—policymakers need to invest in figuring out what works. They should think deliberately about when, where, and how to use higher-touch approaches, since they may not deliver much extra benefit.