Building a real-time state update pipeline for 370,000 SNAP recipients with AI

This is a crosspost of a write-up I did on the Propel blog about how we implemented a pipeline of monitoring the 50 state SNAP agencies’ websites for updates on the government shutdown, and piped it out to ~370,000 SNAP participants via the Propel app.

We used AI models quite tactically to manage the scale of reviewing page content changes to determine if they were substantive or not. And what I’d highlight with a bit of commentary up front here is that this, to me, is a solid concrete example of using AI capabilities readily available to any org today in a way that (a) made work feasible that would have been infeasible otherwise [given our small team and 50 states to monitor], (b) had a low harm risk profile [the AI was used only to determine if a web page diff was meaningful, and therefore worth human review, or not], and (c) enabled a degree of personalization at scale [50 states] that would have been much higher effort and even potentially infeasible absent such tooling.

When the government shutdown created mass uncertainty about November SNAP benefits, we quickly repurposed work we had been doing on real-time monitoring of state SNAP agency website updates to get official state messaging out to Propel app users, to get people the most up-to-date information, directly from their state agency.

Over about two weeks, more than 2.8 million people saw the official information button, and more than 370,000 people viewed information from their state agency directly in the Propel app.

This blog post will walk through what we did, how we made tactical use of AI to make it possible, and what we plan to do next.

The recent government shutdown had a massive impact on SNAP recipients. Most SNAP recipients rely on these benefits coming in the first few weeks of the month.

But because the government shutdown continued for so long, as November approached, people who rely on food assistance from SNAP did not know what to expect: Would they get benefits or not? When? Would it be their full amount, or just some part of it?

The Propel app makes it easier for people to manage their benefits: in this case, doing that meant giving people as high-quality information as we could, and keeping it as up-to-date as possible in a rapidly changing situation.

One of our AI residents, Keith Kurson, had work in progress on a system to monitor state SNAP agency websites for new information. This was originally intended to monitor new information that state SNAP agencies put out for clients given the ongoing implementation of major changes to SNAP from the OBBB law passed by Congress in July.

When the shutdown looked likely to go into the beginning of November, we quickly pivoted that work to focus on monitoring state SNAP agency websites for specifically information about how the shutdown would affect the state’s SNAP recipients.

At the same time, we were in progress on beta features to push out state agency communications directly to SNAP recipients inside the Propel app. Given our broad reach — we reach more than 1 in 4 SNAP households nationwide — we had been experimenting with amplifying existing state agency alerts and information inside the app.

We combined these distinct efforts during the shutdown to create a pipeline of near-real-time state agency updates directly to SNAP clients inside the Propel app.

We composed this system of official state agency information amplification by combining a few pieces of software together.

1. We inserted a clickable element inside the app in the area with shutdown information offering official state updates. We also embedded this inside the national-level information page we were regularly updating.

2. We used a website monitoring tool to check key state SNAP agency web pages for changes hourly

3. When a web page change was detected, the changed text (“diff”) was automatically sent to an AI model (Anthropic’s Claude) which then determined if it was

• (a) a meaningful change (e.g. an update on the expectation of when benefits would be deposited), or

• (b) a non-meaningful change (e.g. just a formatting change on that web page or a change in the menu items)

4. Meaningful page changes were then sent to a Slack channel, where a team member was notified

5. A team member would review the substance of the page change, and take verbatim text from the state agency website and insert it into the list of updates. Propel app users then could view that list of updates, and if they clicked one, they were taken directly to the state agency web page itself.

By using AI in this very tactical way on a task that current AI models excel at — determining if a page change is substantive or, say, just a formatting change — and also keeping a human reviewer as part of the process, we were able to make sure we were carrying forward high quality information while also doing more than our small team could possibly have done fully manually.

Over the course of about two weeks:

• More than 2.8 million Propel app users saw the button for viewing official state agency information

• More than 370,000 SNAP recipients clicked and read official state agency updates directly inside the Propel app

This was meaningful because at certain points of the shutdown — particularly when states took different actions or offered different timelines based on their constraints — the state agency information was more actionable than the national summary of the state of the shutdown.

Given the many changes to SNAP that are being implemented by state agencies now and in the coming months —expanded work requirements, changes in what verification/documentation may be required, etc. — we are looking at expanding this work.

We believe the Propel app can be a valuable tool for state agencies to reach their SNAP client base with the information they will need to keep their benefits through the coming changes.

We’ve already experimented with this beyond the shutdown. We worked with one state on an app notification to Propel users in that state to save the agency phone number to their phone’s contacts. This was to mitigate the problem of people’s phones sometimes marking an agency phone call as potential spam, leading to frustration for both agency staff and clients alike in the context of calls like recertification interviews.

If you are a state SNAP agency interested in pushing information to SNAP clients using the Propel app, we’d love to work with you to get the right information into people’s hands as implementation of these changes continues. You can reach out to us at gov@propel.app.