**Challenge: **

The Office of Family Assistance (OFA) aims to promote the economic and social well-being of families, children, individuals, and communities by administering programs and grants at the federal level to states, tribes, and territories (STTs). The largest of these programs is the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, a $16.5 billion block grant. TANF grant recipients, or STTs, are legislatively mandated to collect individual case record data, which is then aggregated by OFA for descriptive analyses and program performance monitoring. This sensitive data is reported quarterly to the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) and annually to Congress.

OFA relies on their legacy TANF Data Reporting System (TDRS) to collect, validate, and store this data. The legacy TDRS system was developed in the late 1990s and has had minor updates since then, consisting solely of a backend system. The system is vulnerable to security breaches, isn’t accessible by all users, and requires substantial manual intervention by end users and system administrators to fulfill their reporting requirements.

**Opportunity: **

OFA sought to improve their data collection, storage, and aggregation processes in order to better inform policy decisions affecting vulnerable populations, prevent misuse of grant funds, and greater safeguard highly sensitive personal data.

We knew our experience in building complex applications would allow us to develop, deploy, and scale an updated application to exceed OFA’s data goals.

**Approach: **

We collaborated with the OFA team and 18F, to develop the TANF Data Portal (TDP), to replace their TANF Data Reporting System (TDRS). We are developing a new, secure, and user-friendly web-based application to improve the federal reporting experience for TANF grantees and federal staff. With TDP, grantees can easily and securely upload their data and be confident that they have fulfilled their reporting requirements. 

Ultimately, TDP enables users to:

· Securely upload their sensitive data through an intuitive user interface and access troubleshooting resources as needed.

· Receive prompt error messages regarding their data submissions, in a plain language format.

· Efficiently resubmit their data based on generated error messages and maintain records of previous submission histories.

· Be confident in having met their data reporting requirements via notifications throughout the file submission process and timestamped submission history logs.

· Effectively administrate the userbase and track data submissions; allowing them to derive greater insights and more powerful analytics.

· Self-help through a robust knowledge center of helpful resources to support easy onboarding and clear understanding of utilizing our application.

**Impact: **

· Mitigate >1,000 manual process steps per quarterly data submission cycle

· Transitioned 58% of total userbase (78 STTs) from unsecure data submission processes to TDP’s secure workflow

· Received operational ATO within nine-months from project kick-off

· Enable the allocation and data collection for >$16B worth of federal grant and program funds

· Developed with and exceeds accessibility requirements of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act mandating a WCAF 2.0 AA standard

**Customer Testimonials: **

· “TDP has greatly reduced the manual burden on my team for fulfilling our data reporting requirements. We also really appreciate having access to our historical records versus navigating a mountain of email chains from the previous system.” - STT Grantee

· “\[TDP\] is much simpler and less clunky in comparison to our previous process” - STT Grantee

· “\[TDP\] is a lot easier than how we were doing it; I’m like ‘this is a breeze’. I like it a lot!” - STT Grantee

· "Developing with our Tribal users in mind has been a huge priority for us and it is wonderful to see the Raft team mirror our values. The feedback we’ve received from our Tribal partners and Federal BIA colleagues has been wonderful and they look forward to having a streamlined submission process catered to their needs as well." - OFA Admin