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It is hard not to get frustrated when we hear that Colorado’s childhood poverty rate is the fastest growing in the nation. About 180K kids statewide live in impoverished homes according to the Colorado Children’s Campaign.

Amazingly, the child poverty rate growth is not necessarily because government assistance is not available. In fact, counties are sitting on over $136 million, as explained by Allison Sherry in the Denver Post. Counties haven’t been creative enough in how to spend the moneys allotted and therefore reserves build up while people are not served. Knowing that there is $136 Million of unspent funds sitting in county coffers causes me to go insane. Crazy, right?

Knowing that there are numerous assistance programs that families qualify for but are not applying for due to difficult and redundant application processes adds additional frustration.

The primary application process is the much maligned CBMS. While officials claim that it is fixed, our sources at county and non-profit offices say differently.

At Efficient Forms we have been quietly working behind the scenes speaking with several counties, state officials, non-profits and local foundations discussing the Colorado Benefits Management System (CBMS) and applications to other need-based programs in the state. Many of the comments I have received from various government officials start out like this:

“Why in the #!&#@ would you want to get involved with fixing CBMS, what with all the bad press…”.

As a local company we care about our state and want to have the rest of the country think highly of Colorado (not just for the skiing). We also care about people and want to do our part to make the lives of children and others better. If we can use our Colorado-based SaaS solutions to do that even better. How many of the resources EDS or Deloitte use to pile up hours and dollars on the state tab actually live in Colorado?

Seamless Compassion

Check out past articles here regarding the CBMS solutions we could quickly deploy in a non-disruptive fashion. Rather then re-hash, I wanted to introduce a new phrase and concept we have been mulling over in the last two weeks, namely “Seamless Compassion.” I will craft another post articulating Seamless Compassion further as we are still roughing out how exactly to deploy and how far to go with the idea…

Seamless Compassion starts with a single citizen-facing portal which can be accessed from any number of state, county, city, non-profit, foundation or other web sites. Similar to the way Turbo Tax® has allowed nearly everyone to complete their own taxes, the Seamless Compassion site allows for citizens to quickly apply for assistance to all programs that an individual qualifies for regardless of whether it is a federal, state, county, local non-profit, or other program.

Bottom line: we want to make it much easier for people to get the assistance they qualify for regardless of the source of assistance, hence Seamless Compassion.

Stay tuned…

Before you even start reading this post, I want you to know that it is a lot of sizzle and not much steak. And, I am okay with that because I am excited. It’s that simple.

If you have read my blog in the past, you probably figured out I like what we do at Efficient Forms (if not feel free to contact me at 303.785.8638). One of the coolest parts of my job is getting to see the diverse ways the Transaction Origination Platform (TOP) is being deployed. Four years ago, I could not have imagined a fraction of the potential uses for TOP.

We regularly have various entities (that find us from typically unlikely connections) present new and exciting uses of TOP that I had no clue would be such an exact fit. The really fascinating thing for me is TOP-created Content Enabled Vertical Applications (CEVAs) will potentially save lives and may drastically improve the lives of families in need, along with helping students apply to college and other socially responsible things. This makes us feel good, even though these CEVA uses are typically not our ideas. We just enable them.

An excellent research report on Content Enabled Vertical Applications was conducted by Gartner.

“Gartner believes that CEVAs and line-of-business offerings are the future for most traditional ECM vendors. CEVAs are used when business processes are driven by documents, forms and other content (applying for a mortgage is one example). Although enterprises have asked for this for years, and vendors have responded with standard products and lots of professional services, a transformation has occurred with more demand and focus being placed on repeatable solutions. When well-thought-out policies, information architecture and process management are put in place beforehand, CEVAs can deliver process improvements not only in terms of speed but also in terms of accountability and rigor.”

Originally, our motives were purely capitalistic. And while that is still a focus, it still amazes me to realize that the social benefits we can help many entities attain with TOP. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, our goal was to create “Turbo Tax®” for everything else, and what evolved was TOP, a CEVA creation machine that can produce socially responsible solutions and still provide us with the margins we look for.

So, who will come up with the most creative and socially beneficial use of TOP over the next year? Check back for regular updates, and who knows, we might even come up with Dave’s TOP 10 CEVAs list.