How Seattle Built a Benefits Portal to Share Benefits Widely

It all started with a simple question: how might the city of Seattle better connect low-income households and residents to programs that lower their cost of living?

In November 2017, then-Mayor Jenny Durkan signed an executive order directing city departments to address the rapidly rising cost of living in Seattle. Multiple departments, including the Innovation and Performance Team and the Seattle Information Technology Department, were assigned to explore “a common affordability portal for city benefits” that would coordinate and streamline enrollment across multiple programs like the Utility Discount Program and the Child Care Assistance Program. 

Since the idea was planted almost a decade ago, this seed has flourished into what is now Affordable Seattle, which includes a single marketing hub for all city benefit and discount programs with an eligibility calculator and CiviForm, a robust digital platform that allows residents to quickly and easily apply for 16 different city programs. 

Steve Barham, Seattle’s Chief Analytics Officer, and Elise Kalstad, Affordable Seattle and Resident Services Manager, discussed the development and growth of CiviForm with Data-Smart, providing everything from insights on data-sharing to the open-source code collaboration for other cities interested in replicating their success.  

Start with co-development

The initial idea was grounded in co-design from the very beginning. Kalstad emphasized that everything was co-designed with the residents, community organizations, and program managers who asked for a better way to access city programs. “Residents often knew about the Utility Discount Program but didn’t realize they qualified for other benefits like assistance on childcare and food as well. And if they tried to access multiple programs, they were directed to a different program portal or a paper application for each one. The community-based organizations felt the pain of navigating many systems at another scale—each caseworker had a client roster of logins and applications to track. Residents were clear in their desire for a single system, one that connected them to many programs, and could reuse their data to apply for each additional program, without the need to reenter their information.” The wishes of residents and caseworkers laid the groundwork for what would later become CiviForm.

The earliest iteration of CiviForm was launched in June 2021 with early adopters including transit, childcare, and recreation scholarship programs. Their early successes helped future programs onboard. The Affordable Seattle team coordinated with program staff to simplify applications, align on common questions where possible, and tie into existing workflows for backend program enrollment. The co-creation helped with buy-in from internal staff, but the Affordable Seattle team also provided space and time for new program managers to become comfortable with CiviForm. No programs were required to immediately abandon their old methods: “We encouraged programs to retain a paper application as a low-barrier alternative way for residents to apply, especially those who face barriers to using technology,” said Kalstad. 

Prioritize data sharing agreements 

Another essential aspect of an integrated benefits model is data sharing. A 2025 executive order from then-Mayor Bruce Harrell outlined expectations for aligning, analyzing, and sharing data. Even though most resident-level data was already shareable across departments, the Innovation Team initiated a data-sharing agreement with the 12 city departments that administer benefits in Seattle. “It’s one of the best and most impactful data sharing agreement we’ve had,” said Barham, who considers this a foundational example of advancing data practices across the city. The possibilities that emerge when departments and agencies share their data are tremendously helpful for residents, especially behind the scenes. 

For example, at the same time the federal government made changes to eligibility for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), Seattle’s Fresh Bucks program e-benefits card provider made a change in rules. Suddenly, thousands of enrolled participants needed to provide their dates of birth. Since this was a new requirement, Fresh Bucks didn’t have their birth dates, and it would be extremely challenging and time-consuming to reach out to all participants and collect them. But without having dates of birth in the system, participants were at risk of losing access to food benefits at a crucial time. 

By enacting a data-sharing agreement, city staff were able to search across all the other departments that offered benefits and match participants in Fresh Bucks with their enrollment in other programs that had already requested dates of birth. This saved not just time and effort – on both the resident and staff sides – but also ensured continuous food access for thousands of existing users.  

Open source collaboration

The Innovation and Performance team and Seattle Information Technology Department were fortunate to receive support from philanthropic Google.org Fellows, who worked pro bono with the teams to develop CiviForm. Over nine months, Fellows turned resident and staff feedback into a working product, leveraging their expertise in product management, engineering, and user experience. 

As Seattle saw success in increasing enrollment through CiviForm, other civic and municipal agencies began to express interest in a similar portal. To provide this service to other civic entities, Google.org identified certified B-Corp Exygy, a company that supports and stewards public-sector tech, as the steward of CiviForm. As the steward, Exygy maintains the codebase and roadmap for the CiviForm platform, and helps to manage onboarding and usage of the tool by government partners. Importantly, each participating government is the custodian of all of its own data, which isn’t shared with Google.org or Exygy.

CiviForm is an open-source tool built on the tenets of centering the resident experience, using an agile framework to quickly iterate and improve, and with compatibility to any government’s technology environment. Being open source, any improvements in one area of the tool are shared across the entire collaborative model, benefiting all participating governments. “A pain-point for residents accessing government services in Seattle is likely a pain-point for residents in Arkansas. It’s an incredibly collaborative model to be able to spread the impact of new features widely across local governments in the U.S.,” said Barham. Currently, the state of Arkansas, the city of Charlotte, and the city of Bloomington are all using CiviForm, with others onboarding soon. Exygy offers a free membership to incoming governments who want to use CiviForm without managing an independent fork, and provides fee-based launch engagements and custom features. 

Align, don’t silo                           

“We talked to a lot of different cities and counties, and there is such a huge appetite to do this integrated benefits model, but their programs and processes are siloed,” reported Kalstad. She recommended that cities interested in setting up CiviForm or another one-stop portal should focus on standardizing application requirements across a few key programs to start. This helps with sustainability and workflow. “It needs to be bigger than one program for residents to truly feel the impact of CiviForm,” she said, “but you don’t need to tackle the whole city at once.” 

Kalstad and Barham agreed that finding a way to align with broad, city-wide goals is also important. Since the different departments and teams might not individually have the purview to implement CiviForm, starting small with co-development supported by a city-wide team, such as the Budget or Mayor’s Office can make the case for broader adoption. 

There is also a need to standardize and align definitions across the different programs. In Seattle, the childcare and utility assistance programs were foundational, but Acting Affordable Seattle Program Manager Miguel Jimenez still conducted a robust analysis of terms to identify common denominators and definitions to align program requirements across 20+ programs. He uncovered nine different definitions of “household size” in use across all benefit programs and identified two common definitions that all programs could align on. He conducted the same type of analysis for definitions of “income” and the types of documents collected as proof of eligibility. This resulted in the standardization and simplification of program requirements across the city.

Identify your champions

Kalstad regularly meets with case workers and conducts CiviForm training so they are prepared to use the system with clients. At a recent meeting, one attendee told Kalstad that she had been using CiviForm for a while and was thrilled that it made it simpler for her to connect her clients to multiple services. “We learned so much from the social workers,” Kalstad said, as they can share valuable feedback from users and clients, as well as express interest in updates and new features. 

Of course, having champions inside City Hall that are centrally located, such as the IT, Budget, or Innovation Office is also helpful. While multiple Seattle mayors have specifically made the benefits portal a priority, most cities have affordability or access goals that CiviForm could be aligned with.      

Understand and address concerns

Some program managers were anxious about moving to the new platform, worried that near-capacity benefits would become too popular and then become unavailable; they didn’t want to feature their benefit on CiviForm only for residents to find it full. Kalstad worked with them on how to manage this, including shifting from first-come, first-serve to equity-based approvals. Programs were also onboarded without losing their existing, former sites, so they could “pilot” in a low-risk way. If there were issues, they could revert to the old system. However, none of the programs found this necessary; in fact, the “no code” setup increased efficiency.

Since CiviForm is an application intake and communication form, not a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, it can be challenging to move data between the intake and existing program CRMs. The team is currently testing a middleware solution that would make it even easier for staff who are currently managing that gap.

On the user side, residents expressed some concerns about privacy and security. The close connection with the social workers means that they share evolving concerns; currently, protecting refugee and immigrant populations. In addition to remaining the data custodians, the city is also committed to other privacy measures. There will always be a guest option so that users never need to create and log in to an account, and all programs are opt-in. This means that rather than an immediate sign-up, residents are alerted that they’re eligible for other benefits, and they affirmatively consent to joining or signing up for the other program. 

Commit to continual improvement

CiviForm has endured and grown over three mayoral administrations in Seattle because of the results it delivers for residents, the champions inside and outside City Hall, and the dedication of the city staff. Right now, 70% of city benefit programs are onboarded to CiviForm, with just five more to add this year. 

In the future, the team wants to explore how AI tools could assist residents. An agent could help fill out forms or verify that the correct documentation has been submitted. With a human in the loop, this could help smooth many of the bumps residents encounter during the application process.    

In 2025, CiviForm was selected as one of the best inventions of the year by Time Magazine, and Barham and Kalstad are eager to see how CiviForm grows this year, under the direction of new Mayor Katie B. Wilson. What began as a straightforward question about connecting Seattle residents to city services has evolved into something far more significant: a replicable, resident-centered model for how cities across the U.S. can deliver on the promise of affordability.