Set Up Benefits and Benefit Application Intake
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define benefits, programs, and goals.
- Explain how to configure benefit applications.
- Summarize the steps for setting up benefit-application intake.
Benefits, Programs, and Goals
The initial step in setting up your Benefit Management org is creating the programs and benefits that your agency administers. Before moving on, let’s review the key components.
Benefits and programs are the forms of assistance that your agency offers to constituents to help them achieve certain goals. In addition to creating benefits and programs, you can use Benefits Management to assign programs to constituents. You can also assign select benefits that are part of a program. To manage benefits, create benefit types to categorize them.
Setting up goals for each program and benefit is important. A goal is a measurable milestone or expected result that caseworkers assign to participants. As part of benefit management, you should track progress toward reaching the goals. To this end, use Outcome Management to measure the effectiveness of programs based on collected data. To learn more, see Use Outcome Management to Create and Measure Your Public Sector Solutions Impact Strategy in Salesforce Help.
Record Management
In Benefit Management, you set up programs and benefit records to store details about each form of assistance, including eligibility requirements and minimum and maximum benefit amounts. Caseworkers can then assign programs, benefits, and goals as part of a care plan, or constituents can get help directly through their online benefits portal.
Tishon, the Salesforce admin for the city of Cosville, works for the Department of Social Services.
She’s responsible for creating records for all the benefits and programs that her department manages. To do this, Tishon uses the Public Sector Case Management app. Today, her to-do list includes creating a list of benefits for a low-income energy assistance program (LIHEAP). This benefit issues credits that families can use to pay their energy bills and provides other types of relief. The LIHEAP benefit record defines the benefit type, enrollment count, payout frequency, minimum and maximum benefit amounts, benefit schedules, and more.
To adhere to the policy requirements of the LIHEAP benefit, Tishon sets the minimum benefit amount to $50 and the maximum benefit amount to $250. This benefit is included in the Energy Assistance Program and has an Energy Assistance benefit type.
Tishon also defines a goal of Economic Stability and associates the goal with the LIHEAP benefits. This way, caseworkers can assign the goal and the related benefits to constituents as part of a care plan.
To learn how to create programs, benefits, goals, and care plans, see Social Program Management in Public Sector Solutions in Salesforce Help.
Benefit Application Intake
Applying for benefits can mean visits to government offices and long phone wait times to speak with an agency worker. Don’t forget the large stack of paper forms that need filling, often asking for the same information multiple times. No one enjoys that!
With Benefit Management, you set up digital application forms that constituents use to quickly apply for benefits online. There’s no need to start from scratch, though. Discovery Framework in Public Sector Solutions offers out-of-the-box tools for collecting and validating data. The framework includes an Omniscript template to streamline the creation of application forms.
Here’s an example of a benefit-application form created from the Omniscript template.
Required fields and automatic form validation ensure that submitted forms contain complete and accurate data, which prevents the need for corrections later on. Plus, the forms are dynamic, meaning that only relevant follow-up questions appear based on the respondent's answers to previous responses.
Because eligibility requirements vary across different types of benefits, it’s important to capture constituent data that’s specific to each benefit. By reusing the form templates, you can create separate applications with custom assessments to collect information for each form of assistance. For example, create an application form for housing assistance, and another form for unemployment insurance. Each form captures only information that’s relevant to the requested benefit, which speeds up application submission and reviews.
This Omniscript template includes steps with sample assessment questions for the LIHEAP benefit.
The template also gives you calls to Omnistudio Data Mappers, Integration Procedures, and expression sets.
Discovery Framework stores submitted application data from constituents in assessment question responses. Business Rules Engine uses the data from these responses to automatically determine the benefit amount for which the applicant is eligible. You learn more about eligibility calculations in the next unit.
Application Forms
Save time by reusing common assessment questions across multiple applications. Capture effective start and end dates for any submitted information that may change over time, such as income and expense amounts.
Tishon configures an application form for the LIHEAP benefit. First she modifies the assessment questions to collect eligibility information, such as household income, expenses, and housing and heating payment amounts. Then she organizes the questions into steps in the Omniscript form. You learn how this form works from the constituent’s point of view later in this module.
Your Public Sector Solutions org comes with the BenefitApplication Omniscript template, which contains sample assessment questions for the LIHEAP benefit. Modify this template as needed to align with the benefits your agency manages.
To learn how to customize the BenefitApplication Omniscript, see the Set Up Benefit Application Intake article in Salesforce Help.
After setting up benefit applications, you can add functionality to streamline application intake. For instance, trigger an Integration Procedure to perform basic screening of applications and automatically reject them, if needed, based on responses to certain questions. If the application passes basic screening, it enters a queue on the caseworker’s dashboard.
Before she realizes it, Tishon has created the LIHEAP program with associated benefits and goals, and an application form that constituents can use to request the assistance.
In this unit, you explored benefits, programs, and application intake. In the next unit, you discover in more detail how automation greatly accelerates prescreening and application reviews.